The refugee camp as a space of multiple ambiguities and subjectivities

Analyses of refugee camps have criticised Agamben's conceptualisation of exception, understood as the juridical production of ‘bare life’ by the sovereign. They have emphasised the multiplicity of actors and exclusionary dynamics involved in the production of exception, as well as the politicisation of space. This scholarship has however stayed framed around an ‘exclusionary paradigm’. This article proposes a complementary way to move beyond Agamben's analysis of the camp by reconsidering the idea of a ‘zone of indistinction’ between exclusion and inclusion. It refers to Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, where many dwellers have a dual status of ‘refugee-citizen’. It analyses how the subject and citizenship are ambiguously constructed as simultaneously excluded and included – and not solely included through an exclusion. To explore these complex spatial dynamics of exclusion and inclusion, the analysis addresses the exercise of three forms of power – sovereignty, discipline and government – by focusing on the materiality of the camp and the practices of authorities managing space. These powers are ambiguously contributing to the inclusion of the camp and its dwellers in the territory of the Jordanian state, as well as in the neoliberal city of Amman, while maintaining the character of the camp as an excluded humanitarian and temporary space. Through this process, camp dwellers are recast not only as assisted subjects and beneficiaries, but also as autonomous and productive subjects, as well as entrepreneurs and consumers. This article therefore argues that the camp needs to be re-considered as a space of multiple ambiguities and subjectivities aimed at creating a differentiation in the city.     

Transnational abductions and transnational responsibilities? The politics of ‘protecting’ female Muslim refugees abducted from Spain

This article examines evolving gendered protection narratives surrounding four ‘abduction’ cases in which Sahrawi refugee girls and young women living in Spain were ‘abducted’ by their birth-families and forcibly returned to the Algerian-based Sahrawi refugee camps between 2002 and 2009. By exploring Spanish state and civil society responses to these girls' ‘abductions’, I argue that there has been a major shift in the ways in which legitimate responsibility and authority over Sahrawi refugee women as Muslim female forced migrants have been conceptualised and invoked by Spanish actors. I therefore assess the gendered nature of competing claims of responsibility to ‘protect’ Sahrawi refugee women both within and outside of the Algerian-based Sahrawi refugee camps, exploring the motivations and implications of different actors' in/actions towards these girls and women. With Polisario claiming to represent and act as a liberal ‘state’ committed to protecting the rights of its ‘refugee-citizens’ in some instances, while denying politico-legal responsibility in others, the question of ‘who’ or ‘what’ claims the legitimate authority to ‘protect’ Sahrawi refugee women and girls is thus accentuated by such cases. By exploring shifts in Spanish public and political discourses of responsibility over the past decade on the one hand, and the accentuation of competing discourses as presented by Spanish, Polisario and Algerian actors on the other, this article highlights the complex nature and implications of the ‘intimate’ Spanish civil society networks that ensure the physical and political survival of the Sahrawi refugee camps. Ultimately, I argue that Sahrawi girls and women have become hypervisible in Spain, being conceptualised as women who ‘belong’ to the Spanish nation that in turn has a responsibility to ‘protect’ ‘our’ Sahrawi women from ‘their’ culture.     

Negotiating Authority between UNHCR and ‘The People’

Refugee camps are exceptional places that are left to the benevolent governing of international humanitarian agencies, and offer unique opportunities to explore the making and un‐making of public authority. This article examines how certain groups of young men in a refugee camp in Tanzania manage to establish public authority by relating to ideas of a Burundian moral order, while at the same time relating to the ‘development‐speak’ of international relief operations. The refugees' attempts to establish public authority are highly contested and highly politicized, clashing with the relief agencies' vision of the camp as non‐political. Ironically, the young men who engage in politics in the camp are also closely linked to these relief agencies in their role as brokers between the agencies and the ‘small people’. Public authority is partly produced by the powers that are delegated to them by the agencies and partly formed in the ‘gaps' in the agencies’ system. Similarly, authority rests in part on the respect that these brokers gain from other refugees — a respect that is earned in numerous ways, including outwitting the international organizations — and in part on the recognition that they get from the very same organizations. In other words, public authority rests on complex relations between legitimacy and recognition and between sovereignty and governmentality.     

Geographies of the camp

Facing the current growing global archipelago of encampments – including concentration, detention, transit, identification, refugee, military and training camps, this article is a geographical reflection on ‘the camp’, as a modern institution and as a spatial bio-political technology. In particular, it is about the past and present camp geographies and the apparatus of dispositifs that make them an ever-present spatial formation in the management of custody and care characterizing many authoritarian regimes as well as many contemporary democracies. I especially focus on the works of Paul Gilroy, Giorgio Agamben and Reviel Netz to discuss camp spatialities, the normalization of camp geographies, and related biopolitics. In doing so, I advance the argument to resist on present-day proliferating manifestations of camp and ‘camp thinking’, calling for the incorporation of ‘camp studies’ into the broader field of political geography to considering the geographies of the camp as constitutive hubs of much broader, modern geo-political economies.     

Analyzing frenemies: An Arctic repertoire of cooperation and rivalry

Intensive transnational cooperation and manifestations of the NATO-Russia security rivalry have endured for over 30 years in the post-Cold War Arctic. Drawing upon the concept of repertoires from the social movement literature, this article seeks to make a conceptual contribution as to how we might better analyse and articulate the simultaneity of these practices and narratives of cooperation and rivalry in the circumpolar region. Repertoires are typically defined as bundles of semi-structured/semi-improvisational practices making up a context-contingent performance (for example, by civil society towards the ‘state’). These repertoires are argued to be created and performed in ‘contentious episodes’, rather than structured by long-term trends or evidenced in single events. Translated to global politics, a repertoires-inspired approach holds promise for privileging an analysis of the tools and performance (and audience) of statecraft in ‘contentious episodes’ above considerations of how different forms of global order or geopolitical narratives structure options for state actors. The emphasis on the performance of statecraft in key episodes, in turn, allows us to consider whether the interplay between the practices of cooperation and rivalry is usefully understood as a collective repertoire of statecraft, as opposed to a messy output of disparate long-term trends ultimately directing actors in the region towards a more cooperative or more competitive form of Arctic regional order. The article opens with two key moments in Arctic politics – the breakup of the Soviet Union and the 2007 Arctic sea ice low. The strong scholarly baseline that these complex moments have garnered illustrates how scholars of Arctic regional politics are already employing an episodic perspective that can be usefully expanded upon and anchored with insights and methods loaned from social movement literature on repertoires. The 18-month period following Russia's annexation of Crimea is then examined in detail as a ‘contentious episode’ with an attending effort to operationalize a repertoires-inspired approach to global politics. The article concludes that a repertoire-inspired approach facilitates systematic consideration of the mixed practices of amity and enmity in circumpolar statecraft over time and comparison to other regions, as well as offers one promising answer to the growing interest in translating the insights of constructivist scholarship into foreign policy strategy.     

Arendt in the refugee camp: The political agency of world-building

Refugee camps are frequently conceived as spaces in which social and political life is reduced to biological concerns of survival or ‘bare’ life. Yet, for researchers who focus on life in the camp as it is lived, through material adaption, social negotiation and resistance, this Agambenian perspective is unsatisfactory. Instead, a relation is made apparent between practises of everyday life and the manifestation of a politics. This paper argues for the importance of Hannah Arendt's writings for a new understanding of how refugee camp inhabitants can develop and sustain political agency. First, it will highlight the relation by observations and analysis of ‘the jungle’ in Calais, France. This unofficial camp, although short-lived, has influenced a broad spectrum of research including examination of spatial political practice. Second, applying a phenomenological reading of Arendt's work, I argue that political agency emerges through the concept of world-building. World-building results from the conjunction of human activities – from the quotidian, like labour and work, to the exceptional cases of action – and their orientation towards a specific type of visibility. World-building manifests as camp inhabitants erect spaces of meaning that engage a plurality of persons, transforming them into political agents.     

Micro-Politics of a Makeshift Refugee Camp: The Grafosrem Factory in Šid,Serbia

With the EU's increasingly militarised and violent external borders, makeshift refugee camps have developed into crucial nodes along the “Balkan Route” where refugees reside between their clandestine border-crossing attempts. Though a rich body of scholarship has recently emerged on the makeshift camp, there remains limited engagement on the complex and dynamic social and political lives produced within these spaces. Building upon ethnographic fieldwork in the makeshift camp of the abandoned Grafosrem factory in the border town of Šid, Serbia, this paper examines, in particular, the micro-politics produced by the camp's different actors (leaders, residents, outcasts, volunteers). This paper also emphasises how aspects such as race, gender, age, class, and language are at play in dictating the differential access, power, privileges, violence, and exclusion taking place among Grafosrem's diverse subjects, and in generating a multiplicity of lived experiences of the makeshift camp and the corridor more generally.     

Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa

This article, which forms the introduction to a collection of studies, focuses on processes of state construction and deconstruction in contemporary Africa. Its objective is to better understand how local, national and transnational actors forge and remake the state through processes of negotiation, contestation and bricolage. Following a critique of the predominant state failure literature and its normative and analytical shortcomings, the authors identify four key arguments of the scholarly literature on the state in Africa, which concern the historicity of the state in Africa, the embeddedness of bureaucratic organizations in society, the symbolic and material dimensions of statehood and the importance of legitimacy. A heuristic framework entitled ‘negotiating statehood’ is proposed, referring to the dynamic and partly undetermined processes of state formation and failure by a multitude of social actors who compete over the institutionalization of power relations. The article then operationalizes this framework in three sections that partly conceptualize, partly illustrate who negotiates statehood in contemporary Africa (actors, resources and repertoires); where these negotiation processes occur (negotiation arenas and tables); and what these processes are all about (objects of negotiation). Empirical examples drawn from a variety of political contexts across the African continent illustrate these propositions.     

In the camp but not of the camp. The forced incorporation of Bangladeshi host communities in Rohingya refugee camps

This paper is an investigation of an arguably unique manifestation of camp geography: the forced incorporation, since 2017, of existing Bangladeshi communities within Rohingya refugee camps in Cox's Bazar. The repercussions of refugee policies that have shaped these camp spatialities have spurred socio-economic and environmental impacts for Bangladeshis not recognized as full residents of the camp and therefore not receiving humanitarian aid. We argue that this unique situation deserves scrutiny, since exploring impacts of camp spatialities in relation to local host communities is urgent as campscapes are expanding their effects globally, and particularly in the Global South. Here we analyze three Rohingya camps that have surrounded Bangladeshi households by privileging the view of host(ed) community members and reflecting on how they articulate and react to the consequences of these campscapes in their lives – especially when already confronted by social, economic, and environmental challenges. The article concludes by suggesting that these camps may be seen as powerful spatial political technologies producing new forms of marginalization which have lasting impacts for the forcibly ‘incorporated’ Bangladeshi communities whose presence seems to have been omitted from the statistics, policies, and operations of the organizations involved in camp management.     

Camp evolution and Israel's creation: Between ‘state of emergency’ and ‘emergence of state’

This paper examines the central role of the camp in the early Israeli state period and its spatial and geopolitical evolution. Unlike official Israeli history, which presents the immigrant camps as an inevitable improvised response to the unexpected problem of mass immigration, I examine the camp as a strategic modern biopolitical instrument that allowed for the state's profound geopolitical changes and was itself altered according to them. The paper analyses the ways in which the camp facilitated the creation of Israel as a state formed by two seemingly contradictory, but in fact complementary, conditions: on one hand, a product of a chaotic ‘state of emergency’ and a form of ‘ordered disorder’ created by mass immigration, and on the other hand, a product of a comprehensive, tightly controlled modernist project combining physical planning and social engineering. This duality reveals the role of these immigrant camps, which were created both in Israel and abroad, as spatial ‘black holes’ which swallowed the contradiction between the radical geopolitical transformation and the rational self-image of the Israeli state-building project. The evolving and hybrid typologies of the camp in Israel's pre-state and early-state periods expose it as a versatile instrument, highlighting the need for informed spatial and geographical genealogies of the camp in order to illuminate its various transformations.     

The Politics of Nature at the Former Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to develop a new approach in Holocaust studies, namely an environmental history of the Holocaust. A case study of the former concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau demonstrates the extent of the entanglement of the politics of memory and the politics of nature, or political ecology, to use Bruno Latour’s term. I suggest that memorials should be treated as an environment, and thus explored as an assemblage of human and nonhuman (f)actors. Analysing both the official preservation strategies adopted by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum as well as artistic projects (including ?ukasz Surowiec’s Berlin-Birkenau), I consider commemorative practices’ environmental impact. My investigation thus primarily focuses on the role of the figure of the tree-as-witness in preservation work and in the use of powerful herbicides (namely Roundup) in preserving traces of the camp. This study could open the way to further comparative studies of ecocide and genocide.     

Mobile sovereignty: The case of ‘boat people’ in Australia

State sovereignty, in terms of the organisation and expression of political authority by nation states, is traditionally interpreted as a political container that is being weakened by increasing human and non-human mobilities. However recent research indicates that states are themselves becoming more mobile as executive bodies move and sovereign spaces are tactically reduced and expanded to intercept and control global mobilities. While challenging dichotomous notions of mobility and sovereignty, such research frames the movements of governments, territory and sovereign agents as the tactics of already established states. This paper builds on extant research by drawing on both a mobile ontology and Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty to examine how mobilities constitute modern state sovereignty. To do so I examine Australian sovereignty and the related material and symbolic exclusion of asylum seekers arriving by boat. My analysis finds that mobilities, in terms of material movements and their representation, are essential to the construction of Australian sovereignty and the position of maritime asylum seekers as its outsider and limit identity. Through their mobile interception and management, and their representation as mobile ‘others’, maritime asylum seekers are used to create sovereign borders between specific types of movement; between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ (im)mobilities. I argue that this form of state sovereignty is disarticulated from space and follows populations who construct territories as being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of the Australian state as they move.     

De facto,displaced, tacit: The sovereign articulations of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile

Based on ethnographic research on exiled Tibetan political institutions and practices in India, this paper investigates sovereignty in exile. The Tibetan Government-in-Exile (TGiE) remains internationally unrecognised and lacks de jure sovereignty over territory in both Tibet and in exile. However, this exiled administration claims legitimacy as the official representative of the Tibetan population, performs a number of state-like functions in relation to its diasporic ‘citizenry’ and attempts to make its voice heard within the international community. Rejecting arguments that such entities should be viewed merely as discrepant forms of political practice, this paper asserts that the state, sovereignty, and territory can be conceptually disentangled, opening up the theoretical possibility of entities other than territorial states claiming sovereignty. In teasing apart and problematising constituent elements of sovereignty, this paper focuses on three aspects of the TGiE's articulations of sovereignty: its claims to and production of legitimacy, authority and de facto sovereignty; its displaced sovereignty and strategies of territorial governance over non-contiguous spaces in exile; and the mediation of its ambiguous relationship with the host state India through practices of tacit sovereignty.     

Muslim Political Theology Before and After Empire: Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl’s Station of Leadership (Manṣab-i Imāmat)*

ABSTRACT

This essay examines an important yet hitherto unexplored early-nineteenth century Indo-Persian work of Muslim political theology Station of Leadership (Man?ab-i Imāmat; also known as Darājāt-i Imāmat), written by the towering and contentious Sunnī thinker and political theorist from Delhi Shāh Mu?ammad Ismā?īl (d. 1831). In this hugely critical though lesser known of Ismā?īl’s texts, he sought to detail a theory and framework of ideal forms of Muslim political orders and leaders. Man?ab-i Imāmat presents a fascinating example of a text of Muslim political theology composed during a moment marked by a crisis of sovereignty as South Asia gradually yet decisively transitioned from Mughal to British rule. In this essay, through a close reading of Man?ab-i Imāmat, I aim to bring into view a vision of Muslim political thought and understanding of sovereignty that exceed and subvert the modern privileging of a territorial conception of the nation-state as the centerpiece of politics. I show that while tethered to an imperial Muslim political theology that assumed Islam’s superiority over and subsumption of other religious identities and traditions, sovereign power for Ismā?īl indexed not territorial sovereignty but the maintenance of Muslim markers of distinction in the public performance of everyday religious life.     

The camp and the question of community

Recent literature in camp geographies has sought to emphasize the significance of political agency among camp residents, particularly in refugee camps, as part of a critical reaction against the highly influential Agambenian conceptual vocabulary of exception and bare life. The concept of community has been integral to this body of work, with diverse accounts of the camp implicitly or explicitly positioning community as the natural scale through which camp resident and inmate agency is formulated, and yet there has hitherto been little research reflecting directly on the meaning that community takes on in the specific context of the camp. In this article we adopt Roberto Esposito's critique of the concept of community to problematize the assumption that camp communities necessarily constitute a space of empowerment and agency for camp residents and inmates. Drawing on Esposito's genealogical account of communitas (2010), whereby community is encountered not in terms of a property shared among individuals but instead as the loss of individuality and other forms of ‘the proper’, we suggest that the implementation of community, while generative of agency, is also fundamental to camp authorities and related regimes of power. Furthermore, we argue that the operation of camp communities includes its own forms of politics that are specific to the exceptional space of the camp and that potentially expose individuals to violence. We develop this argument through an experimental reading of communitas in relation to the two empirical contexts that have been most influential on the trajectory of camp studies within geographical debates, the concentration camp and the refugee camp, represented in this paper by Auschwitz and the contemporary archipelago of Serbian refugee camps respectively. The ambivalent account of power relationships emerging from these readings suggests that Esposito's rendering of community may have important analytic value in investigating the complexity of camp spatialities and the distinctive co-articulation of power and agency therein.     

From spaces of exception to ‘campscapes’: Palestinian refugee camps and informal settlements in Beirut

The recent literature on the refugee condition and spaces has heavily drawn on Agamben's reflection on ‘bare life’ and the ‘camp’. As refugees are cast out the normal juridical order, their lives are confined to refugee camps, biopolitical spaces that allow for the separation of the alien from the nation. But is the camp the only spatial device that separates qualified and expendable lives? What happens when the space of the camp overlaps with the space of the city? Taking the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila in Beirut as a case, this study problematises the utilisation of legal prisms and clear-cut distinctions for the understanding of the production of bare life and spaces of exception. Isolated at the time of its establishment, Shatila is today part of the so-called ‘misery belt’. Physical continuities are also reflected by the distribution of the population as both Palestinians and non-Palestinians, including Lebanese, live in Shatila and the surrounding informal settlements. As physical and symbolic boundaries separating the refugee and the citizen blur, I argue that the exception is not only produced through law and its suspension. While legal exceptions place the Palestinians outside the juridical order, other exclusions run along sectarian and socio-economic lines cutting through the Lebanese body. As Shatila and the informal settlements are entangled, a new spatial model of analysis defined as the ‘campscape’ is proposed. Once the exception leaks out of the space of the camp, the campscape becomes the threshold where the refugee, the citizen and other outcasts meet.     

Can direct democracy deliver an alternative to extractivism? An essay on popular consultations

Between 2013 and 2018, ten different municipalities in Colombia held popular consultations in which people were asked to decide whether they wanted or not extractive industries in their territory. Promoted and articulated by environmental movements for the defence of water resources and local livelihoods, popular consultations led to surprising alliances of traditionally opposed actors, that found their interests temporarily aligned in opposition to resource extraction. In all of the ten popular consultations people voted massively against allowing the industry to enter. Through the defunding of the popular consultations and through a series of legal challenges, the government rushed to stop an additional 54 votes from happening that threatened to derail its finances and model of development. In this essay, I identify three main boundaries in the literature concerning popular consultations: between what counts as legal and legitimate, between the centre and the periphery as loci of political power, and between people and nature as bearers of rights. By providing an analysis of the absent elements of the political and academic discourse, I argue that popular consultations as spaces of experimental autonomous activity have the potential to engender alternatives to extractivist development. Hence, building on the notion of ‘resource sovereignty’ and contemporary discussions on autonomy as a prefigurative force, I reconfigure the three boundaries into a theoretical framework to guide research and political action for alternative post-extractivist futures.     

Temporal bordering in the space of the camp: Producing and contesting abandonment in Skaramagas and Elaionas camps in Athens

This paper focuses on the temporalities of camps and the ways in which abandonment is produced within them through the deployment of temporal bordering practices. It presents empirical ethnographic evidence, gathered between January and June 2017, from Skaramagas and Elaionas camps in Athens. Although intended as temporary humanitarian solutions, many migrants have remained in them for long periods, stuck in a state of temporariness. Camps have been studied extensively through the lens of biopolitics as spaces of abandonment and abjectification. More recently, a growing body of literature is highlighting the everyday micro-politics and tactics of belonging that take place within them. Drawing on the latter, I shed light on the temporal aspects of border control involved in camps, arguing that camps provide a temporal, rather than only spatial, technology that governs encamped migrants through the administration of their time. Thus, the camp governs the critical moment between reception and in/exclusion from the polity. Yet, as I show, within this condition of semi-permanence and semi-presence, camp residents, through the practice of everyday life, being present and visible, create places and give new meanings to existing ones. If the border is enacted through the imposed temporalities of the camp, then its subversion can be found in these everyday place-making tactics. Looking into these micro-practices, this paper contributes to the above debates by exploring camps as temporal technologies of control.     

‘Frack off’: Towards an anarchist political ecology critique of corporate and state responses to anti-fracking resistance in the UK

This paper puts forward an anarchist political ecology critique of extreme energy extractivism by examining corporate and state responses (or ‘political reactions from above’) to anti-fracking resistance in the UK. The planned drilling for unconventional gas and oil through hydraulic fracturing has triggered unprecedented opposition, with protest camps, direct actions, and legal challenges disrupting operations and slowing down planning and exploration development. Drawing on green anarchist thought, critiques of extractivism, statism, and industrialism, and a (corporate) counterinsurgency framework, I examine the strategies adopted by drilling companies and state actors to manage resistance and win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the population, deploying tactics from greenwashing in local schools to harsh policing of dissent. The latter has included the criminalisation and stigmatisation of land defenders, targeting campaigners as ‘domestic extremists’, physical abuse, targeting protesters with disabilities, and entering public-private security partnerships with local police forces which involve the ‘outsourcing’ of police communication to drilling companies. Such actions are complimented by the contracting of PR firms, lobbying, sponsorships of sports clubs and school competitions, ‘astroturfing’, and influencing local so-called democratic procedures. This has gone hand in hand with political efforts to classify operation sites as ‘Nationally Significant Infrastructure projects’ to facilitate the suppression of protest. These strategies are embedded in a recently well-documented history of police infiltration and corporate spying, laying bare an unapologetic commitment to sacrifice human and nonhuman wellbeing for industrial growth, commitment to extractivist ideology and centralisation of power at the cost of further eroding local autonomy and control.