The space of camps

Abstract The essay focuses on the particular spatiality and the political significance assumed by current detention and/or confinement facilities for “displaced” subject (refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, etc.). By detecting a common matrix, or form, within the different manifestations of camps (as transit places looming over subjects "in transit"), the author interprets it in terms of a Foucauldian governamental apparatus/dispositif, whose origins date back to the colonial order and whose specific “productivity” consists in defining the very existence of internable and deportable subjects. Stressing the crucial role played by camps as flexible border devices to govern different experiences of movement and displacement, the article suggests to conceive them as places that, instead of reflecting a direct sovereign decision an thus a politics of exception, seem rather to exceed any fixed political order by reproducing the deterritorialized geography of current security politics. In a specific postcolonial perspective, current detention centers become the material symptoms of a spatiality that transcends either the nation states’ scale and its territorial logics of sovereignty. - Keywords: administrative detention, security politics, exceptionalism, migrations, asylum policies, colonial history, postcolonial critique