The contentious sovereignties of the camp: Political contention among state and non-state actors in Italian Roma camps

The global proliferation of camps manifests an alarming phenomenon of burgeoning marginalization, and shows that the concept of ‘camp’ is today increasingly crucial to grapple with current changes in the world’s geographies of exclusion and inclusion. Specifically, this article focuses on ‘institutional camps’, i.e. created by government agencies in alleged emergency situations and aims to conceptualize sovereignty over this type of camp. After critically reviewing the ongoing scholarly debate on camp sovereignty, I situate my approach within the work of scholars who see political authority over the camp as comprising a multiplicity of both state and non-state actors. The article contributes to this perspective by drawing on the theory of ‘contentious politics’ advanced by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001). Through this analytical framework, I suggest construing camp sovereignties as contentious, i.e. inherently constituted by conflicting and ever-evolving power relations that change according to framing strategies, political opportunities, resources and repertoires of action. In order to show the benefits of such approach, the paper focuses on the empirical case of the Italian Roma camps in Rome, through which I show that camp sovereignty is not only fragmented into a multiplicity of actors but is also the result of conflict, compromise, negotiation, and co-optation among actors whose frames, opportunities, resources, and repertoires constantly change over time.     

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.     

Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese exploration of Sakhalin Island: cartography and empire

In 1808–1809, a Japanese cartographer named Mamiya Rinzō (1775–1844) traveled to Sakhalin Island, called Kita Ezo or Karafuto by the Japanese, to map the land and document its inhabitants and natural features. In the seventh month of 1809, according to the lunar calendar, Mamiya arrived at Deren, a Chinese outpost along the Amur River in the Heilongjiang region. When Mamiya mapped Sakhalin and central Heilongjiang, he employed Western cartographic sciences to guard Japanese sovereignty by delineating national borders between Russia, China, and Japan; but he also ‘anticipated empire’ in a manner reminiscent of European powers. His maps placed Sakhalin on a universally recognizable grid and emptied the land of its inhabitants, who were formally relegated to the pages of illustrated ethnographies. Mamiya's activities, as well as those of cartographer Inō Tadataka (1745–1818), suggest a global early modern experience with cartography and ethnography, one in which Japan emerged as a periphery of calculation and deployed cartographic tools to construct nation and empire.     

Trafficking borders

This article offers an empirically informed conceptualisation of trafficking borders as spaces of restriction and negotiation, contingently produced, encountered, and escaped along the mobility routes of the targets of trafficking discourse. The concept of trafficking borders advances critical literature that considers anti-trafficking measures a vehicle of state-authorised bordering practices by demonstrating social and political spaces where the trafficking discourse coalesces several discourses, institutions, and practices as borders. The article draws on participatory action research conducted in Nepal to demonstrate the presence of borders in spaces such as households, communities, government offices, Indo-Nepal state borders, emigration detention and deportation centres, and airports. These spaces contribute to the critical understanding of locations where anti-trafficking measures curtail the rights, mobility, and choices of prospective migrant workers. Prioritising research participants’ experiences of encounters with trafficking borders, the article underscores that borders are the central experience of migrant workers which they must escape to actualise their labour migration projects. The conceptualisation further attempts to position the emigration regime as an important site of theorisation and activism and demands a thorough consideration of the diverse struggles of the labour migrants before they arrive at their labour relations in the immigration regime.     

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.     

Social movements in an era of post-democracy: how the Israeli J14 tent protests of 2011 challenged neoliberal hegemony through the production of place

Abstract

Inspired by the Arab Spring, massive social movements have erupted since 2011 in many places around the world. Despite their differences, these movements have had at least two remarkable common features: all of them struggled for ‘real democracy’ and occupied prominent urban public spaces to erect temporary tent encampments. By focusing on the case study of the 2011 Israeli tent protests, this paper argues that the production of such places of resistance works as a crucial, albeit ambivalent, strategy to confront hegemonic power relations. On the basis of the literature on the spatialities of contentious politics, the article demonstrates that the establishment of more than 70 tent camps in public spaces all across Israel was of vital importance not only to challenging the post-democratic political system but also to overcoming an internal crisis of representation within the Israeli protest movement. However, the case of the Israeli J14 tent protests also underlines that while the production of place can be a powerful starting point for social movements, it is not a durable alternative to multi-scalar, networked forms of organisation, which are also able to confront state authorities in the long term.     

CHATTING ABOUT MARRIAGE WITH FEMALE MIGRANTS TO SYRIA

The increasing number of women migrating to Syria from Europe has not only drawn the attention of the media and the security forces but also of researchers. Publications often either undervalue or overvalue women's agency, presenting them as victims of unscrupulous men or foregrounding their militant activism. As many authors work in the field of radicalisation and terrorism studies and use public online posts, they focus on the more radical, activist women who are keen to present themselves to the world at large. In our research project we work with a different focus and employ a different method. Our interest in how these women arrange their marriages and our use of private chatting produces other kinds of knowledge. In contrast to what labels such as ‘jihadi brides’ suggest, the women themselves desire to live under IS rule, while IS increasingly regulates these marriages. Rather than desiring to become female fighters or recruiting others, they see themselves as responsible for domestic life and attempt to normalize life under IS rule.     

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.     

Have tropical Africa's nationalisms continued imperialism's world revolution by other means?

Many scholars argue that European imperialism shaped today's tropical Africa, for better or worse. Some imperial historians see the British empire as a fertile capitalist pioneer, kindling class‐conscious, national, politics overseas. Economists of differing persuasions can see it, to the contrary, as the engineer of an underdevelopment that strangles popular sovereignty. Together with most Africanist historians, this article doubts that Europe had such creative or destructive power; British rule, among others, had to respond as much to African history as to metropolitan will. Anti‐colonial nationalisms, in turn, were neither class not ideological vanguards but regional coalitions. Nation‐building thereafter was an elusive aim, steered by minority visions imperfectly seen and widely disputed, from capitalism to socialism. All these complexities rest, it is widely argued, on the historic difficulty of exercising power in what was until recently an underpopulated continent with openly available resources.     

Democracy and the rights of women in the thinking of Giuseppe Mazzini

Addressing Italian workers in his Doveri dell’uomo of 1860, Mazzini unequivocally laid out his thoughts on women's rights. The thinker from Genoa, all the more after his encounters with other political philosophers from different national environments such as Britain and France, saw the principle of equality between men and women as fundamental to his project of constructing first the nation, and second a democratic republic. In his ideas regarding emancipation Mazzini, who spent a good 40 years of his life in exile, was one of a small group of European thinkers who in challenging the established customs and prevailing laws not only hoped for the end of women's social and judicial subordination, but also held that changes to the position of women were essential to the realisation of their political projects. Thanks to this respected group of intellectuals, the issue of female emancipation found a place in the nineteenth-century European debate regarding democracy and the formation of national states. The closeness of the positions of these thinkers, and their commitment in practice as well as theory, mean that it can legitimately be argued that in the course of the nineteenth century a current of feminist thinking took shape. This was born of the encounters between and reflections of various intellectuals who met first in France and then in England, and who came to see women's rights not just as a discrete issue for resolution but as fundamental to their projects for the regeneration of nations, or, as in the Italian case, for the construction and rebirth of a nation.     

Articulated sovereignty: Extending Mozambican state power through the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park

Since its inception in 2001 and subsequent integration into the tri-national Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP), Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP) has been progressively transformed into a functioning wildlife park. Standing behind this transformation has been a profound expansion of Mozambican state power over and through the park. While this reinforces predictions in the early transfrontier conservation literature, it stands in tension with observations that these projects threaten state power. I address this tension by developing the concept of articulated sovereignty, which understands sovereignty as a heterogenous set of powers that are produced through often unequal interactions with other actors, including foreign or extra-territorial actors. In short, sovereignty is articulated through these interactions. I draw from this to show that the same partnerships that seem to threaten sovereignty in some respects in fact shore up the power of the Mozambican state in other respects. I focus in particular on the foreign-assistance-enabled extension of state power through the development of legal and technical capacity, park administration and infrastructure, a ranger force, and the relocation of communities beyond park borders. I additionally draw on articulated sovereignty to show that the state and territory, like sovereignty, are built through various articulations with extra-territorial partners, thus drawing into question the sovereignty-state-territory triad. I close by reflecting on the utility of articulated sovereignty beyond the realm of conservation. In short, articulated sovereignty sheds light on both the sovereignty complexities of transfrontier conservation projects like the LNP/GLTP and how sovereignty actually plays out in the world.     

‘Living Liminality’: everyday experiences of asylum seekers in the ‘Direct Provision’ system in Ireland

Mechanisms to exclude people seen as ‘other’ which were once considered exceptional have now become normal. Global patterns of increased state security lead to people on the move or seeking protection being detained, dispersed and deported, their lives treated as ‘waste’ or ‘reject’. The Irish ‘Direct Provision’ system is part of an increasing network of liminal, or threshold, spaces, situated between and within borders, in which such people are detained or forced to wait in often inhumane conditions and often for years at a time. Based on ethnographic participatory photographic research, this article explores the ways in which imposed liminality plays out in people’s everyday lives in ‘Direct Provision’. The article looks at how liminality is lived in spatial and temporal terms and develops the idea of ‘ontological liminality’, a means of expressing the ways in which a chronic sense of fear, insecurity, invisibility and a highly controlled existence are lived and internalized; it also shows the ways in which people negotiate this imposed liminality through everyday practices, creating various forms of attachment, engagement and belonging. Exploring the concept of liminality in this context holds broader implications not only for understanding experiences of people waiting or held in the increasing number of refugee camps, border zones and detention centres in and beyond Europe, but also provides insight into the architectures of exclusion created by states to contain or exclude the ‘other’.     

Material Footprints: The Struggle for Borders by Bedouin‐Palestinians in Israel

In the following article, borders become an epistemology for reading the social and political history of settler geographies, and their particular manifestation in the southern Naqab region of Israel. It takes as its starting point the idea that borders are activated in an assemblage of encounters; and that they act as markers, not only of the power of the settler state to rupture and control indigenous life and mobility, but of the multiple resistances that divert, disrupt and unsettle settler movements and spaces. Based on more than three years of fieldwork with the Unrecognised Bedouin‐Palestinian communities of the Naqab, the article investigates the significance of borders in spaces the state has conceived and structured as empty and dead. In exploring the multiple modes of resistance and resilience that constitute Bedouin struggles for recognition in Israel, it finds relevance in the lines they carve out, and the living spaces that persist and evolve in their shadows.     

The Diffusion of Sovereignty

Summary

The transmission of ideas about sovereignty and its related practices from one time, place, or intellectual context to another is sometimes characterised as a process of ‘diffusion’ or even ‘contagion’. Intellectual historians may use such metaphors but the explanations they provide are historical, not scientific. Sovereignty was transmitted when European states brought their forms of government to other peoples and when those peoples embraced such forms in declaring their independence from imperial rule. It was also transmitted when the idea of sovereignty was itself transformed in the course of these and other historical passages. In Foundations of Modern International Thought, David Armitage explores some of these historical passages, the outcome of which he sees as the world of sovereign states that defines the modern period and the disappearance of which would signal its end. In doing so, he illuminates the larger enterprise of writing the history of international thought or, as he prefers to call it, international intellectual history, inviting reflection on its relationship to other kinds of historical inquiry and the opportunities and dangers it poses.     

The evacuation camp as paradoxical space for women

In recent years, so-called natural disasters have devastated areas around the world. Survivors must leave their homes and reside temporarily in evacuation camps run by state, religious and humanitarian actors. These official post-disaster spaces are intended to provide safety to survivors while they repair damaged homes, rebuild livelihoods, or await new lodging. Not all people, however, experience or perceive these spaces as safe. Through the interventions of institutional actors and the actions of evacuees, these spaces can become sites of repression, violence and family separation. This study of women survivors' experiences in evacuation camps reveals that gendered social relations and norms, often invisible or incomprehensible to the organizations running the camps, shape these sites into paradoxical spaces. The paper draws from interviews and participatory videos made by urban poor survivors of Typhoon Sendong in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines. Gillian Rose's concept of paradoxical space is used to study women's access to, use of and experiences within official post-disaster spaces. Distinct outcomes for survivors based on gender, ethnic and class differences highlight the failure of official post-disaster spaces to protect survivors from harm and the need for women survivors to adopt conflictual strategies that simultaneously exposed them to harms and resisted ideal survivor subject norms.     

Underground exploration beyond state reach: Alternative volumetric territorial projects in Venezuela,Cuba, and Mexico

Geographic analyses have centered on how state and capitalist enterprises—often in collaboration with each other—deploy volumetric territorial strategies and processes to achieve their ends, i.e., control in the form of securitization or resource extraction. We invite an exploration of different ways voluminous environments, their flows, and ecosystems can be experienced and represented with analyses of diverse activities of cave explorers in Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico. These activities call attention to the heterogeneity of volumetric territorial projects. By exploring and mapping subterranean spaces, cavers co-opt some of the techniques of the state and/or capitalist territorialization and commodification. But the experiences of underground exploration and even mapping exceed and sometimes contradict the motivations and effects rightfully associated with these volumetric practices. Not only are these activities deeply affective and embodied, they typically happen beyond state reach. Moreover, following cavers' explorations requires more open conceptions of both territory and voluminous spaces, and the ecological rhythms and flows that constitute them. Doing so leads to the recognition of how cavers experience and enact alternative volumetric territorial projects. In the process, some of these projects forge defiant national imaginaries, literally from below. The possibility and potential of these imaginaries come from the unique quality of subterranean exploration: only those who explore and survey passages underground know their location, extent, and at times, their content. Yet, there are dangers as well: not only are most of these projects far from emancipatory or inclusionary, they can be co-opted by state and/or capitalist enterprises. The implications of this last point are complex and potentially contradictory: while state knowledge and control of caves and karst environments may limit caver access and activities, lack of state knowledge and control may also result in these environments and their contents’ lack of protection.     

Against the wind – new factories of Russian manufacturing subsidiaries of Western multinational corporations

Using a series of interviews with the heads of Russian subsidiaries of Western multinational corporations and a unique database registering the openings of their new manufacturing plants in Russia during 2014–2015, we trace the changing demography, geography, and economics of foreign direct investments in industrial assets in Russia. We demonstrate that foreign companies in general were capable of overcoming the adverse economic conditions of 2015 and were able to complete their projects of installation of new factories that were launched in 2012–2013. More importantly, economic sanctions caused accelerated completion of previously started industrial works. Such new and upgraded factories not only target current opportunities and market niches in consumer markets but also aim at exploring possibilities in core industrial markets, including mining equipment, transportation equipment, and other types of industrial equipment. We also highlight the emergence of a new type of industrial project known as “fenced field projects,” which are new manufacturing facilities within the existing industrial sites of successful Russian firms. This new type is particularly attractive for companies in the machine-building and chemical industries. Fenced field projects can be either wholly owned subsidiaries or joint ventures, but the main feature of such projects is the active use of the developed physical and business infrastructure of the “hosting” Russian company. We demonstrate not only the changes in the geographic distribution of foreign direct investments in Russia but also the impact on medium-sized industrial towns (200,000–400,000 inhabitants), the most frequent location for industrial projects by foreign multinationals.     

An intra-imperial conflict: the mapping of the border between Algeria and Tunisia, 1881-1914

This paper explores the issue of colonial borders through a case study of the intra-imperial boundary between Tunisia and Algeria, two territories under French rule between 1881 and the first decade of the twentieth century. The aim here is to understand what was at stake when it came to separating two territories holding different legal status but both administered by the French: Algeria which had officially become a French colony in 1830 and Tunisia which was given Protectorate status in 1880. The paper considers some of the many disputes over the border that took place both in the field and in colonial administrative offices. It also raises the question of the scope of colonial rule by exploring the way the border was never fully determined and was constantly redrawn by the inhabitants of the border regions themselves, who were presented first as tribes, and later, as either Algerian or Tunisian by the French civil and military administrations, and by the political authorities in Algiers, Tunis or Paris. As they all had their own interests in the matter, disputes were common but were also sometimes resolved in unexpected ways. Finally, the paper raises a further issue concerning the question of national identity in the context of the definition of national territories, which reveals the full ambiguity of the concept of identity in the colonial situation.     

Geographies of unease: Witchcraft and boundary construction in an African borderland

African borderlands – such as those between South Sudan, Uganda and Congo – are often presented by analysts as places of agency and economic opportunity, in contrast to hardened, securitized borders elsewhere. We emphasize, however, that even such relatively porous international borders can nevertheless be the focus of significant unease for borderland communities. Crossing borders can enable safety for those fleeing conflict or trading prospects for businesspeople, but it can also engender anxieties around the unchecked spread of insecurity, disease and economic exploitation.Understanding this ambiguous construction of borders in the minds of their inhabitants requires us, we argue, to look beyond statist or globalizing discourses and to appreciate the moral economies of borderlands, and how they have been discursively and epistemologically negotiated over time. Narratives around witchcraft and the occult represent, we argue, a novel and revealing lens through which to do so and our study draws on years of fieldwork and archival research to underline how cartographies of witchcraft in this region are, and have long been, entangled with the construction of state political geographies, internal as well as international.