Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
these days when it comes to camps, Agamben, these camps are dislocated localisations
(Agamben 1997). In these camps the category of “citizen” is not, not yet, or no longer
operative for the figure of the refugee (Perera 2002). If, usually after considerable wait-
ing time, the outcome of the asylum procedure is not a yes (which would mean the road
to national integration of the migrant) but a no, then the purification machinery orders
the migrant to go back to the future outside the EU. Over the years this has led to the
creationofalandscapeofexpelapparatusesanddeportationcentresasasemipermanent
state of emergency, what could be called, to use Zygmunt Bauman's linguistic metaphor
of waste, a form of social dumping via waste sites. Although the word
prison
is care-
fully being avoided in the bureaucratic jargon of the border machine, it is difficult to
perceive the bodily registration and locking up of migrants—who have committed no
other crime than not having the right documents—in detention centres or expel centres
differently. These camps, these spatial para-sites, which famously Agamben identified
as “the fundamental bio political paradigm of the West'' (1998, 181), are for those who
have to go but have refused to do so. This is neither the time nor the place to analyse in
all its absorbing details the ontological function or sociology of the camp. Others have
done that in a compelling way already (see e.g., Diken and Laustsen 2005; Fassin 2001;
Minca 2006, 2007; Schinkel 2009; Ticktin 2005). The point that I wish to make is that
over the years, as a result of the tightening border regime of the EU, we have witnessed
an exponential growth in the number and size not only of asylum centres, the beginning
of the border machine, but also of detention or expel centres, the end of the production
chain of migrants. For people without papers the constant monitoring and spatial con-
trol of their whereabouts have become a practice of daily life. For the EU, then, the in-
stallation ofcampsisaformofconcentration andcontainment, of“stocking”thepeople
without papers in order to facilitate and manage more efficiently the daily biopolitical
control of their whereabouts. (Interestingly enough, apart from these formal camps oth-
er more informal anti-camps are increasingly being constructed in and at the borders of
the EU in the form of migrant camps made by migrants themselves often in the woods
or other sites out of sight and in the form of temporary No Border Camps, made by act-
ivists protesting against the border control and camps for undocumented migrants.) For
the EU the camp has become a way of managing the legality of the labour market as
well as preventing the misuse of the channel of asylum of political refugees. More con-
crete, politically then a camp represents chronopolitics, the politics of time, represented
bywaitingtimethatisusedtocontrol,manage,andsloworevenimmobilisealltogether
thetravellingspeedofthemobileyetunwelcomeothers,aswellgeopolitics,thepolitics
of space, morphologically represented in terms of walls and gates of a constructed dis-
place(seealsoPapadopoulosetal.2008).Hence,timeandspaceareusedastoolsinthe
camp machinery to refabricate the illegalised “input” into politically acceptable codes,
