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.     

Destroying Nahr el-Bared: Sovereignty and urbicide in the space of exception

During the summer of 2007, Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon was the scene of a fierce battle between the Lebanese Armed Forces and a militant Islamist group called Fateh al-Islam. When Palestinian evacuees returned after the conflict, they found Nahr el-Bared utterly destroyed, houses smashed first by shells and bombs, then by vandalism and arson, possessions stolen and broken, offensive graffiti daubed on walls. I argue in this paper that the battle of Nahr el-Bared, and particularly the month of looting and arson that followed the battle, was a case of urbicide in a space of exception. The seemingly unrestricted destruction of homes, the theft of possessions and arson, went beyond any possible military necessity and became the deliberate and systematic erasure of the camp. This urbicide was made more possible by the very nature of the political spaces of the camp, which are in Lebanon but not of Lebanon, in which Lebanese sovereignty and law are not fully enforced, in which a whole range of non-Lebanese actors exercise political power outside the control of the Lebanese state. In these spaces of exception in which the rule of law is suspended, the looting, arson and vandalism took place without sanction. Palestinian homes and lives had become sacred in the sense that they could be destroyed without sanction, without recourse to legal redress, because there was no law.     

Between religion and nationalism in the Palestinian diaspora

This article examines Palestinian refugee articulations of the Palestinian homeland and struggle in relation to religion and nationalism. My contention is that the impact of Hamas's electoral victory in Palestine is visible within the discourse of Palestinians in Jordan. This discourse suggests a transformation of the meaning of Palestinian nationalism in which religion is taking an important albeit complex role in nationalism. Using the concept of intertwining, this article considers how Islam has been intertwined with Palestinian nationalism in ways that have privileged particular ideas about the national homeland and fight for liberation. While many suggest that Islamist politics is incompatible with nationalism, this article takes the local discourse of refugees and argues that Hamas and its supporters have yet to abandon the framework of nationalism, although certain tensions exist.     

The camp

Walter Benjamin has famously pointed out that we are living in a society in which the exception has become a norm. Giorgio Agamben adds to this claim another one, that the spatial ordering principle for this new order is the camp. This article focuses on this diagnosis. We do not, however, discuss its validity but rather unpack what is meant when the concept of camp is used. The camp is, we argue, given by three structuring principles that might contradict and overlap in various ways: a disciplinary disposit if according to which a distinction between inside and outside is established; a logic of transgression according to which the inside‐outside distinction is deliberately blurred; and finally a biopolitical rationale according to which the distinction between inside and outside is re‐established on each side so that the included are included as excluded (as bodies to be governed) and the excluded are excluded as included (within the realm of power). Finally, we claim that it is the combination of these three principles — discipline, transgression and biopolitics — that leads to a society in which the exception has become the norm. Such ‘society’ is, we show, given by a strange and paradoxical overlapping of bonding and un‐bonding, of distinction and indistinction.     

Being Canadian: Dual Citizenship in Historical Perspective

Why do states configure their citizenship laws in certain ways? Why do they allow or prohibit dual citizenship? Why was it only in 1946 that Canada decided to enact its first citizenship law which prohibited multiple national allegiances? Why was a similar proposal abandoned in 1931? And why was this citizenship law changed in 1977 to allow dual citizenship? A common answer is that citizenship reflects the national “identity” of each nation-state. Through a perusal of the debates regarding citizenship laws in Canada, I locate the particular motivation for introducing those laws. I argue that although the symbolic element of citizenship laws is significant, citizenship laws are enacted as a political instrument to achieve immediate and specific goals. In particular, accepting dual citizenship in Canada should be seen as a one of the strategies political elites tried in order to incorporate English and French speakers under the same flag.     

Giorgio Agamben and the new biopolitical nomos

In this paper I reflect on the progressive normalization of a series of geographies of exception within Western democracies and, in particular, the relation of these to the new biopolitical power that is progressively affirming itself in our everyday lives — and that appears to be imposing itself as the new, secret, ontology of the political. I do so by engaging with the work of Giorgio Agamben and, specifically, interrogating the spatial architecture that underpins his theory of sovereign power. Starting from Agamben's spatial conceptualizations, I explore his attempt to trace the contours and the secret coordinates of the contemporary biopolitical nomos, a nomos rooted firmly in the crisis and progressive demolition of that which Carl Schmitt described as the ius publicum Europaeum. I note, moreover, how the definitive dissolution of the geographical nomos that had dominated the two centuries preceding the First World War, and the lack of a new, alternative, geographical nomos in the century which followed, can also be grasped by critically rereading some key episodes in the history of European geography; in particular, the contested legacy of the work of Friedrich Ratzel's grand geographical project and the Geopolitik experiment. What I suggest is that to understand the deep nature of the geographies of exception that arm the global war on terror, it is vital that we think in terms of a theory of space in order to try to unveil the Arcanum, the secret enigma of the empty centre around which turn the wheels of a new, macabre, geo‐biopolitical machine.     

1911-1937年灾民移境就食问题初探

抗战前的民国时期,灾民逃荒现象极为普遍。灾发地政府因无力赈济自己的民众,或者出于推卸责任,放任其灾民四处流离,移境就食。流入地政府救济自己辖区灾民尚且不暇,自然不愿再为别区承担救济重任。再者,行政区划与经费的分配也限制了这种救抚他省灾民的欲望。因此,流入地对来境灾民无不驱逐出境或资遣回籍,而灾民在自己家乡确实又无以为生,迫不得已时只好重又外出。总起来看,整个灾发期间,灾民便是在灾发地与流入地的推来搡去之中艰难苟活。这一问题不是一地一隅所能解决,也远非一年一月所能一蹴而就,它需要各级政府的大力合作,需要对产生灾民的各种原因予以根治。然而,受时代条件所限,灾民的移境就食问题不能得到较好的解决,灾民的流离悲苦也就只能依然如故。     

Language of political socialization: language of resistance

This paper discusses the notion of language as resistance for Palestinian children living in the West Bank. Drawing from the global/local language discourse, children constructed meaning of language that echoed the Palestinian political environment. The study examines the Palestinian children's language usage and language meaning as a method of political resistance, resilience and reworking. Children's conceptualization of language meaning emerged from discussion of the diversity of naming and strategies of resistance. Data for the study was drawn from the interviews of 12 Palestinian children (six females and six males) 11–13 years of age from cities, villages, and refugee camps in the West Bank.     

Russian-occupied Crimea and the state of exception: repression,persecution, and human rights violations

ABSTRACT

Since annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, Russian authorities there have introduced harsh repressive measures to silence opposition to the ongoing occupation, chiefly targeting the indigenous Crimean Tatars and others pro-Ukrainian individuals. From the legally subversive methods it employed to orchestrate the annexation to the rhetoric of anti-extremism with which it has continually justified its occupation, the Kremlin has inaugurated a new “state of exception” in Crimea, invoking the prerogative to circumvent normative legal and juridical procedures in response to a perceived emergency. While Crimea’s state of exception resembles those initiated elsewhere by some Western states and Russia itself as part of the global War on Terror, the state of exception has provided the pretext for a particularly severe degree of repression, persecution, and human rights violations in occupied Crimea. In conjunction with the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, this article discusses the theoretical groundings of the state of exception, its broader applications within the Russian Federation, and its troubling repercussions for residents of Crimea. Casting the Kremlin’s actions as belonging to a state of exception helps draw attention to its alarming human rights violations, and may bolster resistance to the creeping normalization of the Russian occupation of Crimea.