Abstract
Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on the ‘camp’ and on the figure of the ‘refugee’ belong to the central issues of her theory of total domination. Both terms are inextricably linked to each other. For her, the production of stateless, rightless, and superfluous people was the central precondition for the establishment of concentration camps in the years before, during, and in the first years after National Socialism. The first section of this chapter presents Arendt’s typology of camps. The second section shows how Arendt understood the figure of the refugee and that of the concentration camp. The third section presents thoughts on descriptions of the situation of present-day refugees and the differences between these more recent arguments and Arendt’s analysis.
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Schulze Wessel, J., Razum, O. (2022). Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Encampment. In: Razum, O., Dawson, A., Eckenwiler, L., Wild, V. (eds) Refugee Camps in Europe and Australia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12877-6_3
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