Paper details

Paper authors	Simon Campbell
In panel on	“Humanitarian borders” between care and control
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Camps are important nodes within systems of humanitarian governance. By recognising camps as an extension of the border, and sites which constrict and control mobility, this paper discusses their role as humanitarian borders (Walters, Petrović) in dialogue with immigration detention. Following from abolitionist approaches towards incarceration (Davis), we look at the way practices by people in and around camps counter containment, and subvert the notion that camps are an acceptable alternative to detention. Beyond immediate conceptions of mobility, such as transit across a national border, practices of "everyday movement" represents a contestation of the very carceral/humanitarian model embodied by camps (Brankamp). Practices such as community building, bearing witness or the organising of political campaigns, evidence how activism can foreground mobility/everyday movement--as opposed to reform of camps--and in doing so forge communities and spaces which exceed “placement” (as a means of “humanitarian incarceration”). Through the examination of news accounts, secondary literature, interviews and testimonies with activists and people with lived experience of camps, this paper examines activist practices that take place inside and around the camp. In this way, we look at the protracted role of camps within the lives of people as spaces of physical, administrative and social ordering, propelling the argument that they are less a suture to the impacts of violent bordering, and rather a constitutive part.

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