Geographies of the camp

Facing the current growing global archipelago of encampments – including concentration, detention, transit, identification, refugee, military and training camps, this article is a geographical reflection on ‘the camp’, as a modern institution and as a spatial bio-political technology. In particular, it is about the past and present camp geographies and the apparatus of dispositifs that make them an ever-present spatial formation in the management of custody and care characterizing many authoritarian regimes as well as many contemporary democracies. I especially focus on the works of Paul Gilroy, Giorgio Agamben and Reviel Netz to discuss camp spatialities, the normalization of camp geographies, and related biopolitics. In doing so, I advance the argument to resist on present-day proliferating manifestations of camp and ‘camp thinking’, calling for the incorporation of ‘camp studies’ into the broader field of political geography to considering the geographies of the camp as constitutive hubs of much broader, modern geo-political economies.