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...