A Spatial Theory of the Camp: Geopolitics, Biopolitics and the Immunitarian State
Book Title: A Spatial Theory of the Camp: Geopolitics, Biopolitics and the Immunitarian State
Book Series: Counter-Geographies of the Refugee Balkan Route series https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/book-series/geography/counter-geographies-of-the-refugee-balkan-route-series.html
Date of Publication: 11 February 2025
Author: Richard Carter-White, Senior Lecturer, School of Communication, Society and Culture, Housing and Urban Research Centre, Macquarie University, richard.carter-white@mq.edu.au; Claudio Minca, Professor, Department of History and Cultures, University of Bologna, claudio.minca@unibo.it
About this book: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com and can be found here.
From concentration camps to refugee settlements, there is little consensus about what exactly defines ‘the camp’. This timely and comprehensive book adopts a geographical perspective to develop a spatial theory of the camp, advancing the interdisciplinary field of camp studies. Richard Carter-White and Claudio Minca explore the spatial logics and practices that unite different camps, demonstrating why the camp has become such an integral tool of contemporary governance and what this reveals about the geopolitics and biopolitics of the modern nation-state.
From the beginning of Part III, Exception:
As noted in previous chapters, Agamben’s notion of the camp as a space of exception is one of the conceptual foundations on which Camp Studies and camp geographies have developed. The broad features of this idea are accordingly well-known: drawing on Agamben’s (1998) interpretation of Carl Schmitt and his analysis of the pivotal role of exception in the determination of political sovereignty, material spaces of exception are often characterized in geographical literature as sites that are isolated, spatially delimited and operative outside the normal state of law (Carter-White and Minca 2020b). Commensurate with its prominence in Agamben’s philosophy, this concept has subsequently been critiqued as part of the broader argument in postAgambenian camp geographies that a purely biopolitical analysis, and one that was developed specifically in relation to concentration camps, is incapable of grasping the complex social realities of refugee camps. Of particular concern here is the perceived inability of a framework of exceptionality to do justice to the political agency of camp residents, given that the premise of exception seems to imply that those subjected to such a regime are powerless in the face of a sovereignty acting without restraint.
Considering our own proposition that Esposito’s philosophy provides a conceptual framework that can allow us to theorize both concentration and refugee camps, a key question is what place, if any, the concept of exception assumes within the immunitary paradigm. The theory developed over the course of Part III is that exception indeed remains a sufficiently significant element of the camp as to constitute a useful and revealing articulation of camp custodianship, but it is a conceptualization of exceptionality that is quite different from that conventionally associated with Agamben’s work. Our Esposito-inspired argument is that camps, by definition, retain the potential to impose exceptional conditions on those dwelling within since this is what enables the biopolitical transformation of targeted groups into ‘alien’ populations whose radically defined alterity can serve to immunize the nation and its territorial declinations. However, as discussed in the previous chapters, these alien populations must in some controlled way be released into the body of the national political community, if they are to carry out their immunitarian function.
We thus contend that while all camps must be traversed by the possibility of exception, they cannot only be a space of exception, since this would preclude the spatial dynamics of exclusionary inclusion that are integral to the state’s politics of immunization. There must be holes, breaks, gaps and suspensions in the camp’s implementation of exceptionality that permit the subpopulations produced therein to ‘vaccinate’ and therefore protect the broader society, understood here as the fundamental political community. As demonstrated in the following two chapters, this includes the possibility that camps refrain from implementing a space of exception at all, or that at certain moments they do so to a less severe degree, or – to trouble the presumed intentionality of this process – they do so in such a way that leads to chaos, contradiction and catastrophe, what we described in Chapter 1 as the ‘madness’ of the camp. In other words, we insist that while exception is a relevant aspect of camp power, it is relevant insofar as it is applied to different degrees of intensity – which is what makes it a revealing articulation of camp custodianship.
