Camps Revisited: Multifaceted Spatialities of a Modern Political Technology
318
Camps Revisited: Multifaceted Spatialities of a Modern Political Technology
318eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
This book focuses on past and present camp geographies and on the dispositifs that make them an ever-present spatial formation in the management of unwanted populations characterizing many authoritarian regimes as well as many contemporary democracies. It also offers and investigates possible ways to resist the present-day proliferating manifestations of camps and ‘camp thinking’, by calling for the incorporation of ‘camp studies’ into the broader field of political geography and to consider the geographies of the camp as constitutive of much broader modern geo-political economies.
By linking spatial theory to the geopolitical and biopolitical workings and practices of contemporary camps, the contributions in this collection argue that the camps seem to be here-to-stay, like a permanent/temporary presence giving shape to improvised, semi-structured and hyper-orderly structured spatialities in our cities and our countryside. Camps are also a specific response, for example, to the changing conditions of European borders due to the ‘refugee crisis’ and the rise of nationalism in many countries affected by such crisis.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786605825 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/23/2018 |
| Series: | Geopolitical Bodies, Material Worlds |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 318 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Irit Katz is an architect, Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, Bye-Fellow and Director of Studies in Architecture at Girton College Cambridge.
Diana Martin is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Portsmouth.
Claudio Minca is Professor and Head of the Department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Camp Reconsidered
Irit Katz, Diana Martin, and Claudio Minca
The Idomeni makeshift camp was dismantled on May 24, 2016. The 10,000–14,000 people dwelling in what was presumably the largest "spontaneous" refugee camp in Europe were displaced by the Greek police and taken by coaches to institutional camps around Salonika. At the end of the "move," the authorities would register only 2,800 refugees. What happened to the other 8,000–12,000? They disappeared into thin air, to re-emerge a few days later in new, smaller, improvised camps in other countries in the region. The fields in Idomeni have remained empty, and for a while, the train station was still showing the remnants of the makeshift dwellings of this desperate coalition of nameless subjects on the move. But what kind of camp was Idomeni? And how can we define a camp in today's turbulent global era of migration, displacement, and radical political change?
In recent years Europe and other places around the world have experienced a true proliferation of camps, many related to the so-called "refugee crisis." While the Idomeni camp has attracted much attention until its closure, to be quickly forgotten together with the majority of its inhabitants, the makeshift camp in Calais — dismantled in October 2016 — has represented the "capital of makeshift camps," "the Jungle" par excellence, the testimony of a new kind of spatial formation conceived as entirely temporary but de facto often becoming somewhat permanent, a new kind of unstable landscape, a new type of mobile and ephemeral spatiality popping up in, and partially disrupting, the presumed orderly geographies of the nation-state.
Yet other camps are constantly invented, reconfigured, and made operational by national and municipal authorities — refugee camps, hospitality centers for asylum seekers, identification and expulsion centers, and emergency welcoming facilities — while new "hubs" and "hotspots" are created to speed up the process of identification of the "irregular migrants" captured by the existing networks of assistance and management of their bodies and mobilities. Other camps are realized and supported by local charities and volunteers or international NGOs in order to provide first humanitarian aid and some relief to these mobile and often unidentified subjects who may then disappear after a few hours, days, or weeks along the new informal migration routes. Former barracks, prisons, and derelict sites are often used to temporarily accommodate these irregular migrants, and empty buildings are often squatted and transformed into temporary shelters under the complacent eye of the authorities who may prefer not to intervene until the local residents complain about these unwelcomed "alien" presences. Small, "Idomeni-like," makeshift camps appear and disappear in Rome, Berlin, Paris, Belgrade, and other cities in Europe and beyond, but also in rural areas near the borders of inhospitable countries around the world. Additional camps are simply hosting stranded, smuggled, or trafficked individuals — at times thousands of them — like the ones in the center of Belgrade or in Greece.
Whether in its institutional form — set up by the authorities to manage the unprecedented number of people (or so it is often described by the media) informally crossing international borders — or in its improvised and makeshift shape, the "camp" remains the most immediate and impactful intervention of the receiving countries to the current flows of irregular migrants and their "management." As a result, displaced people and irregular migrants are either contained in enclavic, militarized structures or inhabit informal and abandoned sites. The establishment of camps, whether formal or informal, represents a specific political reaction and resilience strategy as those on the move face the fortification of borders and the rise of nationalism (Cresswell 2006; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2008; Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012; De Genova 2013; Lebuhn 2013; Ribas-Mateos 2016; Zhang 2017). From temporary detention camps to refugee camps, from camps for terrorist suspects to Roma and homeless camps, these sites are today spaces of exception that control, order, segregate, and exclude, but also protect, train, and host human beings who, according to the state authorities, cannot be qualified and spatialized otherwise. Some of these camps are designated sites of control, custody, and care by state and international authorities, while others are created as spontaneous makeshift spaces by their own residents, as part of their attempts to challenge and struggle against existing migration practices and politics.
Camps Revisited thus investigates the diverse workings of the camp as a site of political repression, separation, containment, abandonment, and custody, but also a site of agency, resistance, solidarity, care, identity, and perpetual movement of bodies, materialities, complex and entwined management practices, political imperatives, and human networks. Importantly, the camp appears in this volume as a site of active political negotiations between forces that aim to maintain control over human life and the forces of human life with their own specific needs, desires, and political demands. These negotiations materialize in different camp spaces and formations, creating ephemeral environments that may become either places of enduring temporariness evolving for decades and generations, such as the case of the Palestinian refugee camps, or hyper-temporary spaces created, developed, and demolished within a few weeks or months, such as the Idomeni camp, or the urban migrant camps and protest camps discussed in this volume. The camp therefore reemerges here as a spatial strategic "end-point" where these "populations in excess" (Rahola 2003) are located and contained, and also as a tactical space used for political contestations and where specific camp identities may take shape. As such, the camp appears not only as a hidden space where modern politics deals with its oppressed and outcasts — like in the case of concentration camps — but also, in some specific cases described in this volume, as a space of high political visibility used as an instrument of protest and political mobilization.
In their rural or urban locations, these spaces greatly differ in the ways they are constructed and managed. Yet, despite these differences, not only are they defined as specific sites of biopolitical experimentation, but they have also become constitutive "hubs" of much broader geopolitical economies. Increasingly part of our everyday lives, the camp has become a perspective and a way of thinking that normalizes extraordinary measures and spatialities (see Gilroy 2004); at the same time, its material manifestations of sovereign exception are coupled with and complemented by less visible, but equally invasive and potentially violent, camp spatialities produced by biometrics, surveillance, racial profiling, and people's classification and management.
The current proliferation of camps has been met by a growing academic interest on the effects that these camps have on their "guests" and, more in general, on how camps relate to different conceptualizations of sovereignty (Minca 2007; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2008; Ramadan and Fregonese 2017), biopolitics (Edkins 2000; Rahola 2003; Zimmerer 2005, 2016; Diken and Laustsen 2005; Giaccaria and Minca 2011, 2016; Minca 2005, 2015; Martin 2015; Wolf 2015), resistance (Isin and Rygiel 2007; Rygiel 2012; Katz 2015), humanitarian aid (Hyndman 2000; Agier 2011), or identity (Malkki 1995; Peteet 2005). Camps Revisited aims at responding to this growing literature — only partially recalled here — with a comprehensive investigation of the emergent formal and informal camp spatialities and their implications for those who are hosted in these unique facilities, and also for the cities and the regions affected by the presence of a camp.
This book thus analyzes the camp as a multifaceted spatial formation taking different forms and functions in the management and control, but sometimes also in the development of new identities and new forms of political agency, of the populations that it contains. It also intends to theorize the camp in light of the abovementioned unruly mobilities while reflecting on its different manifestations and their impacts. On the one hand, the book takes into consideration institutional camps established by the authorities and looks at them as modern institutions and spatial biopolitical technologies, while also analyzing makeshift camps realized "on the spot" by the refugees themselves and how these different forms of camp are related to each other. On the other hand, it reflects on specific cases of camp identities and on the different camp forms and functions in the contemporary political landscape, with their multifaceted spatialities: from Romani camps to protest camps, from former refugee camps converted into tourist attractions to post-disaster camps, to the relationship between the camp and the bunker.
We believe, in particular, that this volume can contribute to existing debates on the geopolitical, biopolitical, and spatial entanglements of the camp in two distinct ways. First, by providing an unprecedented transdisciplinary collection of chapters engaging with the relationship between critical social and political theory and the camp's spatial practices. The second objective is more inherently theoretical, as it responds to the increasing need to conceptualize the spatialities of the camp: the central ambition of this collection is to show what broader debates in camp studies may learn from a deeper analysis of the related camp geographies and, more specifically, how a spatial approach can contribute to such an analysis. The growing interest on the part of geographers, architects, sociologists, and anthropologists, to name but a few, for the spatialities of the camp supports such argument and the need for more interdisciplinary work on this dimension.
Accordingly, this book brings together a set of different perspectives and locations worldwide: from the Gaza Strip and Cairo to Bologna, Rome, Paris, Berlin, and Calais; from Serbia, Italy, and France to Burma, Indonesia and Ecuador; from Auschwitz to the postwar German bunkers. However, this collection was not conceived with the intention to cover comprehensively the "world regions" where camps have been and continue to operate, nor was it conceived to study the "regional" differentiation of camp geographies. The cases presented here have instead been selected with three conceptual perspectives in mind, that tentatively correspond to the three sections according to which the book is organized: first, the relationship between institutional camps and makeshift camps; second, the formation of specific camp's identities; third, the exploration of the camp in relation to the multifaceted, exceptional realities it enables to sustain as a spatial, political technology. These three perspectives, we argue, are key to understand the workings of past and present camps as geographical formations that, while being temporary and exceptional in nature, have become a permanent and constitutive presence in the contemporary spaces of the political.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
Camps Revisited collects fourteen essays, mostly written by geographers, but also with important contributions authored by scholars from other disciplines such as architecture, social anthropology, law, and cultural studies. By linking spatial theory to the geopolitical and biopolitical workings and practices of contemporary camps, this book argues that camps are also a specific response to certain social and political realities and processes, such as the changing conditions of European borders due to the "refugee crisis" and the rise of nationalism in many countries affected by it. Containing people in enclavic, militarized spaces is often presented today as the most immediate and impactful response of the state authorities engaged with the arrival, rescue, hospitality, and identification of thousands of individuals crossing seas, continents, and national borders. For this reason, most chapters in this volume focus on "what camps do" as spatial formations with certain strategic and tactical roles.
Camps, in our perspective, emerge as manifestations of complex networks that do not include only institutional spaces such as refugee camps and detention centers, but comprise noninstitutional and makeshift spaces as well, which are sometimes not less organized, and temporarily provide alternative spaces of care and of social and political solidarity and support. Here people who are informally "on the move" and inhabit series of dots-on-a-map are offered assistance by nonprofit organizations, but also run the risk of being evacuated and sometimes forcedly relocated into administrative detention.
These manifestations show how both care and custody form part of these institutional and informal networks. And yet, camps are differently utilized in different contexts. While protest camps are used to resist certain political orders by creating autonomous spaces in which different forms of order are visibly enacted in the public realm, Romani camps are created to contain and exclude specific identities; bunkers are designed to preserve and protect certain lives; and the post-disaster camps are established to manage the life of displaced citizens while often reproducing existing inequalities and vulnerabilities. As temporary and exceptional spaces existing outside ordinary, dominant, spatial, and political orders, the life span of these camps and their spatial developments are often surprising and unpredictable. While some camps exist only for a few days and weeks and disappear as quickly as they emerged, others last for years and sometimes develop into sites with other meanings, with their haunted spaces only carrying the memory of the original reason for their creation. Our aim is thus to theoretically examine these multifaceted camp geographies in ways that may help reading them as a constitutive and somewhat permanent presence of the contemporary global geopolitical space.
As mentioned above, the chapters are organized into three sections, each focused on different aspects of the broader geographies of the camp. The grouping of the chapters into these three "movements" intends to emphasize the links between the development of a specific set of spatial theories and the analysis of a set of geopolitical, biopolitical, experimental, and everyday spatial practices related to the camp and to their broader corresponding urban, national, and transnational geographies. We claim that the spatialities of the camp are precisely the outcome of these entanglements between theory and practice at different levels and scales, and between different actors — entanglements that also rapidly change over time.
The first section, titled "Institutional and Makeshift Camps" is focused on contemporary refugee camps and in particular on the complementary relationship between institutional camps and makeshift camps. The aim of this section, organized as a journey among the camps created recently in Europe as spaces of arrival and departure of people "on the move," is to show how, in practice, the two categories of camps are not necessarily in opposition, as it is often claimed by the authorities and the media; on the contrary, they are often created in a symbiotic relationship. In other words, in the four empirical cases examined in this section both the makeshift and the institutional camps contribute, at different scales, to the consolidation of a specific set of camp geographies that have become a constitutive and permanent presence in their respective region or city or indeed connect different camps across transnational routes. Chapter 2, "Networks of Encampments and 'Traveling' Emergencies: The Bologna Hub between Carceral Geographies and Spaces of Transition," written by Loris Bacchetta and Diana Martin, describes a refugee hospitality center in Bologna, Italy, that has been converted into a new "hub" for the fast identification of irregular migrants. Italy has been at the forefront of Europe's so-called migration crisis for years. According to EU legislation, the country is obliged to register and process asylum applications upon arrival, but it has struggled logistically and politically with the task — while most migrants do not regard Italy as their final destination and wish to travel north, to join relatives or friends elsewhere in Europe. In this context, the chapter shows that the Bologna Hub and its functions are tightly connected to the management of the broader geographies of irregular migrations in Italy and the EU, at the most diverse scales, and plays an ambivalent role as a pivot of irregular mobilities on the part of many who are simply allowed to "go north" after having been identified.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Camps Revisited"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Irit Katz, Diana Martin, and Claudio Minca.
Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1. The Camp Reconsidered, Irit Katz, Diana Martin & Claudio Minca / Part 1: Institutional and Makeshift Camps / 2. Networks of Encampments and “Travelling” Emergencies: The Bologna Hub between Carceral Geographies and Spaces of Transition, Loris Bacchetta and Diana Martin / 3. Walking the Balkan Route: The Archipelago of Refugee Camps in Serbia, Claudio Minca, Danica Santic and Dragan Umek / 4. The Bubble, the Airport, and the Jungle: Europe’s Urban Migrant Camps, Irit Katz, Toby Parsloe, Zoey Poll and Akil Scafe-Smith / 5. On the Meaning of Shelter: Living in Calais’ Camps de la Lande, Cannelle Gueguen-Teil and Irit Katz / Part 2: Camp identities / 6. Indefinite Imprisonment, Infinite Punishment: Materializing Australia’s Pacific Black Sites, Suvendrini Perera / 7. Protracted Encampment and its Consequences: Gender Identities and Historical Memory, Kirsten McConnachie / 8. De-Camping through Development: The Palestinian Refugee Camps in the Gaza Strip under the Israeli Occupation, Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat and Alona Nitzan-Shiftan / 9. Grassroots Solidarity and Political Protest in Rome’s Migrant Camps, Jan-Jonathan Bock / 10. Communities of Violence in the Nazi Death Camps, Richard Carter-White / Part 3: The Camp as a Political Technology / 11. Urban protest camps in Egypt: the occupation, (re)creation and destruction of alternative political worlds, Adam Ramadan and Elisa Pascucci / 12. The Post-Disaster Camps in Ecuador: Between Emergency Measures and Political Objectives, Camillo Boano, Ricardo Martén and Andrea Sierra / 13. Touring the Camp. Ghostly Presences and Silent Geographies of Remnants at Galang Camp, Indonesia, Chin Ee Ong and Claudio Minca / 14. Camps, Civil Society Organizations, and the Reproduction of Marginalisation: Italian and French “Solidarity/Inclusion” Villages for Romani People, Riccardo Armillei and Gaja Maestri / 15. The Bunker and the Camp, Ian Klinke