La forme-camp.
Pour une généalogie des lieux de transit et
d’internement du présent
Federico RAHOLA
Abstract
The paper addresses the current global proliferation of detention and/or protection and shelter facilities adopted in order to seek to govern and territorialize the different experiences and practices of mobility enacted by “displaced” subjects (from internally displaced to international refugees, to asylum seekers and forced or economic migrants). By recapitulating the multifarious actualizations and official definitions of contemporary camps (ETL, CARA, CIE, TPC, etc.), the article suggests an underlying continuity, referring it to a specific and productive matrix, or “form”. Under this perspective, contemporary transit, identification and detention centres assume the Foucauldian meaning of governmental apparatuses (or dispositif), whose specific productivity, rather than in distinguishing between exclusion and inclusion, an inside and outside, mainly consists in defining and ratifying the very existence of internable and deportable subjects. By drawing a genealogy of civilian detention, whose introduction dates back to the colonial realm and finds in the colonial subject the first internable and deportable subject, the paper ends up questioning the specific political “quality” of the space of camps, as places that, instead of making exception, seem to exceed any fixed and given political order.
Keywords: international migrations, refugees, asylum seekers, border studies, administrative detention, exception, postcolonial critiqu
