Abstract
Camp space becomes the paradigmatic of the stratification and diversification of membership prevalent in contemporary society. By first segregating and later confining the outcasts of the body politic to a demarcated space, the camp emerges as a zone in a state of suspension (Agamben 1996). It is at once both inside the ambit of normal spatial organisation of the nation-state and yet outside it. Being physically located inside the borders of the state, the camp is ‘inside’. But by challenging the hyphenation between territory of a state and population it embodies, refugee camps fall outside the normal spatial organisation of the state. The chapter will engage theoretically with camps as loci within forced migration studies while critically addressing the place of exceptionality. The camps in South Asia exhibit a situation of ‘exception’ within the space of exception that camps are generally tethered to. The blurred cultural boundaries that were not analogous to the borders established by the modern nation-states of South Asia occasioned the emergence of a common sense of belonging among the people. In the absence of a legal framework for refugee protection, the ‘exceptionality’ of refugee camps in South Asia is constituted by a sense of belonging that the refugees develop towards their host state and society.
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Notes
- 1.
This is not to claim that refugee camps do not exist in the Global North, but rather highlights the distinctive nature of refugee accommodation of the Global North in contrast with hose in the Global South.
- 2.
The adherence to 1951 Refugee convention and other regional protection frameworks such as European convention on Human Rights, EU directives etc. has caused the affiliated countries to develop standardised and institutionalise collective accommodation practices referred to as ‘European Accommodation Centers for Asylum Seekers’ (See Szczepanikova 2013; Morville and Erlandsson 2013; Kreichauf 2018).
- 3.
Within the same category of containment camps, McConnachie includes the internment camps that began to emerge in the late 1890s. If prisoner of war camps were used to contain soldiers or enemies caught in conflict, internment camps largely housed civilian populations for variety of reasons such as ‘medical quarantine or national security’ (McConnachie 2016: 402). Beginning with the Spanish siege of Cuba in the 1890s that consequently instigated the encampment of civilians, McConnachie (ibid.) explains how such internment camps were espoused by the imperial powers in their conquests such as ‘British in South Africa (1899–1902), United States in the Philippines (1899–1902), Germany in Deutsche Sud-West Afrika (1904–7), and Italy in Libya (1928–32)’.
- 4.
After reprimanding Hermann Goering for Germany’s burgeoning network of concentration camps on the eve of World War II, the British Ambassador to Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, received a sharp rebuke. Walking to his bookshelf, the Nazi leader pulled out the ‘K’ volume of a German encyclopaedia and read ‘Konzentrationslager: first used by Britain in the South African War [of 1899–1902].’- Nevile Henderson, Failure of a Mission: Berlin 1937–1939 (New York: G.P. Puntnam’s Sons, 1940), 21 as quoted in Aidan Forth (2012).
- 5.
The main argument in the case of camps instituted during South African Boer war (1899–1902) was to protect the civilians from the conflict. This pattern can be seen in the later camps instituted by Spanish government during the military invasion of Cuba, Germany’s attempt to create camps in erstwhile Deutsche Sud-West Africa (Namibia) or yet again establishment of ‘concentration zones’ in Philippines by United States.
- 6.
It was considered to be the basic humanitarian protection that was ‘benevolently’ provided by the imperial masters to the colonial subjects as in the case of aforementioned Famine in British India in 1870s and 1890s or during the plague conditions prevalent in Africa and India in 1896–1901.
- 7.
These camps were created for the Armenians fleeing the genocide orchestrated by then Turkish government in 1915–1923 (Kaprielian-Churchill 1993).
- 8.
Dust bowl camps in California were created for the American labour migrants from the Great Plains and Midwest fleeing the environmental cataclysm in the drought struck “Dust bowl region in 1930s. Roughly 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl states – Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma – during the 1930s. It was the largest migration in American history’-See https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/dust-bowl
- 9.
The defeat of German forces by Allied powers simultaneously precipitated the voluntary return of 7 million people to their homeland who had earlier fled the totalitarian Nazi regime (Cohen 2008).
- 10.
Most of the people residing in these camps were reluctant to be repatriated to their homelands in countries such as Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Yugoslavia etc. along with the ‘Soviet prisoners of war and French civilian soldiers’ (Slatt 2002).
- 11.
- 12.
Despite its conceptualisation as temporary establishments for protection of displaced populations, most of them went on to last for longer duration ‘providing accommodation, employment, education, medical care, recreation and transit’ for the vulnerable (Shephard 2011). The attempt by the camp administrations to the rearrange the disorganised camp structure according to the identity and national affiliations of the inmates did not effectively materialise.
- 13.
A usage made by Lord Curzon as quoted in Gatrell (2013) in The Making of a Modern Refugee.
- 14.
- 15.
Certeau in turn builds on the distinction made by Merleau-Ponty on geometric space and anthropological space. If ‘space’ is where the individual is situated, the individual’s experience of ‘seeing’ and ‘doing’ transforms the space. While ‘seeing’ focuses on observing the ‘inventories’ constituted by the geometric space, it is the ‘doing’ of an individual that shapes his/her ‘relational, historical and identical’ underpinnings that constitutes an ‘anthropological space’ (Auge 1995).
- 16.
‘Super modernity’ simulates conditions of excess and superfluity that creates spaces that are in perpetual transition. The extravagant indulgence created by super modernity opens up ‘non-places’ like airports, supermarkets, highways etc. where mostly one’s collective identity is irrelevant. The only time it is warranted (if at all) is during the entry and exit to such spaces, where one’s documented identity becomes relevant. In these ‘non-places’ only a shared identity such as that of a co-passenger in airport, co-traveller in a parking lot or co-pedestrian in a shopping street is created and all relations are conditioned by formulated rules such as the code of conduct/rules that a passenger in the airport has to adhere to. (see Augé 1995: 102–11 Non-Places as accessed from https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/43032477.pdf).
- 17.
This mentioning of refugee villages, welfare villages and protected villages were made in the chapter Hybrid Spaces by Maja Janmyr and Are J. Knudsen.
- 18.
Apart from the existing six detention camps, the state of Assam is building more massive camps each with a capacity of 30,000 people at places like Goalpara in order to shelter those individuals who are excluded from NRC and who would effectively become ‘non-citizens’ of the country and stateless. See https://www.businesstoday.in/current/economy-politics/assam-nrc-final-list-out-what-will-happen-to-the-19-lakh-excluded-people/story/376476.html
- 19.
Bangladesh state authorities transported 1642 Rohingya refugees from Chittagong port to Bhashan Char, an isolated island which was once perpetually submerged in monsoons. See https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/bangladesh-starts-rohingya-refugee-relocation-sends-1-500-to-remote-island-120120400257_1.html
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Chowdhory, N., Poyil, S.T. (2022). Interrogating Camps in Forced Migration Studies: The Exceptionality of South Asia. In: Chowdhory, N., Banerjee, P. (eds) Gender, Identity and Migration in India. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5598-2_4
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