Abstract
How, by whom and to what effects are camps governed today? Despite persistent critiques, camp institutions remain a resilient and versatile apparatus of power globally. Yet there is only limited conceptualization of camps and the multi-scalar governance they operate within from a comparative perspective. This special issue remedies this by looking at governance of five different types of camps: prison camps, detention camps, (re)education camps, refugee camps, and relocation camps. In all these seemingly contrasting iterations, we argue that contemporary camp institutions (from Guantanamo to refugee camps) are deployed ultimately as an order-making apparatus. Camps deploy plural governing techniques for this purpose, ranging from material, spatial, and high-tech to ideological and experiential. Nevertheless, it is argued that these institutions represent a self-contained reality and an autonomous order that is distinct from the broader objectives and planning that initially established them. Part of this order demonstrates a diverse range of resistance mechanisms to dominant governing logics. Overall, we argue contra to the prevailing Agambenian theorization of the camp: Camps are not spaces of exception that reveal the norm but have become an expected norm in contemporary governance, and they are not a priori or ultimately spaces of exclusion, but instead apparatus of desired forms of incorporation into the dominant socio-political order, whether state or non-state.
Introduction
This special issue addresses a well-established political apparatus and machinery of power in the modern world—the camp institution—and asks how do we capture, analyze, and theorize camp governance across the multiplicity of camp forms in evidence today? Camps are part of a transnational institutional history and shape not only the political landscape of the 20th century, as Zygmunt Bauman (1998) pointed out, but are part of global politics of the present and the future. As demonstrated by the collection of this special issue, camps represent a resilient and versatile global technology of power. Camps are a political instrument used in the context of dictatorships and democracies alike (Minca, 2015) for a variety of purposes, including segregation, punishment, (re-) education, preventive isolation and/or social control (Bochmann and Von Weikersthal, 2022). Their use has become normalized and their governance is evolving with new innovations.
With its interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, the focus on very different contemporary camp forms and the topic of governance, the edited volume aims to fill a research gap in camp studies while simultaneously contributing to the emerging, comparative field of critical camp studies. The focus of the special issue lies on contemporary camp governance and governing orders and draws on five cases of the phenomenon—prison camps in Guantanamo Bay (Nungesser, 2024), detention camps in China (Byler, 2024), (re)education camps in Rwanda (Purdeková, 2024), refugee camps at the Myanmar-Thai border (Bochmann, 2024), and relocation camps in Philippines and Japan (Gibb et al., 2025). 1 In all these cases, an analysis of governance is fundamental to understanding encampment as a phenomenon. Indeed, and in some cases, such as in one of the contributions to this special issue on enforced post-disaster relocation camps, the examination of governance enables us to theorize certain spaces as camps in the first place.
It goes without saying that we cannot claim completeness in this collection of articles. Camps created and run by non-state actors such as the FARC camps in Colombia (Maher and Thomson, 2018), protest camps such as those in Egypt (Ramadan and Pascucci, 2018), or migrant labor camps such as those in Bahrain (Gardner, 2010, 2012) are not represented in this volume and yet are certainly highly relevant for a comparative perspective on camps. Our analysis also does not encompass the extensive research on contemporary child/youth (Henderson, 2018) and military camps (Valtonen et al., 2020). Nevertheless, we think that we can shed light on many aspects of camp governance with this collection and that the insights may be useful in understanding other camp contexts.
In this introduction to the Special Issue, we want to make two main arguments that will serve to further theorize the institution of camp in a productive and empirically based way. First, in all these seemingly contrasting iterations, we argue that camp institutions are ultimately about order-making. The fundamental purpose of camp institutions is to establish and maintain order. Camps are supposed to govern people perceived as “matter out of place” for their better incorporation into the polity and the prevailing socio-political order. Though exclusion and separation of people are inherent aspects of encampment as an order-making mechanism, and are manifest in various aspects of the camp population’s everyday life (Bochmann, 2023b), these processes serve the ultimate purpose of future inclusion. Those designated as “refugees,” “terrorists,” or “former combatants” and perpetrators are all perceived as a threat to the internal or international state order and stability and as a result are construed as requiring separation, containment, transformation, and education with the aim of future re-integration.
Thus, we conceptualize camps as conservative technologies which are designed to consolidate order, even if they operate at moments and in geographies of its most acute disruption—amid or following mass violence, in the wake of natural disasters, or in geographies and among populations deemed “threatening” to the prevailing ideological or political status quo. As a political instrument then, camps are first and foremost mostly a product of state action meant to restore and assure control, legibility, and order. We are aware that there are also camps that are not set up by states and that are explicitly designed to challenge a prevailing state order, such as camps set up by rebel groups (such as the FARC camps in Colombia, that now partly turned into demobilizing and (re)integration camps) or protest camps (Ramadan and Pascucci, 2018). Essentially though, these camps too are intended to serve a similar function—the ultimate goal of establishing a desired socio-political order, just not in line with the prevailing one.
This leads us to our second argument, and namely that the dynamics by which camps are governed are not solely in the hands of their creators. Camps constitute a reality sui generis (Durkheim, 1976), an autonomous, unique, and dynamic governance order. The obstinacy of the camp is difficult to control and camp institutions develop a distinct life of their own, their own institutional logics (Bochmann, 2023b). These unique logics are the focus of the individual articles in this Special Issue. Ultimately, camps present merely the illusion of order, which does not make their attempts at order any less real. A momentum of its own develops—the production of heterotopia where temporalities, materialities and the prevailing social order are negotiated. The concept of heterotopia is borrowed from Foucault (1986), who uses it to describe spaces that are somehow “other”—worlds within worlds that may mirror but also alter what is outside. With the concept we want to point out that we are dealing with an ordering instrument in the case of the camp, but one that it is not governed in an orderly way and one that is not suitable for creating the desired order.
In line of the findings of interdisciplinary camp research, we argue that there is neither one camp governance system nor one camp order (Bochmann and Von Weikersthal, 2022). It is not only the state or state organizations that determine the conditions of coexistence and the distribution of power, hierarchies, and violence within a given camp but a range of other actors as well. Camp residents or inmates, camp guards, local authorities overseeing everyday camp practices and other actors such as international organizations and non-governmental organizations are involved in the negotiation of power relations and in the formation of camp hierarchies (Katz et al., 2018; Ramadan and Fregonese, 2017).
Similarly, camp governance is not merely an expression of crude forms of sovereign power but, as the collection of articles will show, it operates through a variety of mechanisms, including responsibilization, self-government and governmentality (Ilcan and Rygiel, 2015). The special issue will also demonstrate how circulating forms of knowledge and the shaping of people’s practices through material, spatial, and intangible aspects of the encampment experience are also an important part of camp governance. In addition, camp logics and governance are contravened, contested and challenged on the ground. People enter camp environments with a unique set of experiences, biographies, knowledge, abilities, and expertise. Although the camp regime creates an apparent collective body, this dissolves in camp life or is redefined through people’s interaction with each other, including residents, state officials or further camp actors on the ground. Despite the aforementioned complexity, we observe that there are three key governing mechanisms, namely, those of inclusion, exclusion and liminality, which are ultimately meant to facilitate the reintegration of individuals into society. This reintegration is achieved through the simultaneous and observable application of these three mechanisms.
In light of the current state of research in camp studies, the articles of our special issue, and our own research of re-education camps in Rwanda (Purdekova, 2018) and refugee camps at the Burmese-Thai and Nepalese-Indian borderland (Bochmann, 2021), we argue that although camp governance is dominated by the logic of order making, camp institutions ultimately struggle to establish order—whether through the desired temporary exclusions of refugee camps or the desired inclusions of re-education camps. What we observe empirically is that camps always develop autonomous dynamics—both externally and internally—which are difficult to anticipate those who are the creators of the camps also because of its often-long-term temporary character. On the inside of the camp, we in turn see the danger of creating zones of violence and injustice of different degrees. Altogether, camps are a crude technology of order maintenance, which most likely not only fail to achieve their goals but might sow seeds of further unpredictable challenges to prevailing socio-political orders.
In the following sections, we provide an overview of the findings from two areas of research in which we wish to contribute and which have helped to develop our own arguments. These two areas are comparative studies of camps and camp governance. Based on this overview, the development of this Special Issue and our own research in different camp context in a next step we discuss our main arguments: Camps are to be understood as political instruments designed to maintain existing or desired socio-political structures. However, they have the potential to generate autonomous and unpredictable orders that are independent of their creators. We then turn to discuss the individual contributions of each article included in the special issue. Before we proceed, a final note on terminology: We are aware that the terms “camp inmates,” “camp residents,” and “camp inhabitants” are not uniformly applicable to the various camp institutions. Nevertheless, we suggest that when talking about camp institutions in comparison to use the term “camp inhabitants” for general explanations (but as sparingly as possible), as it emphasizes the compulsory and long-term nature of the camp institution into which people are placed. They also seem problematic considering that the term depicts a camp collective that does not exist as such. In particular, the term “inmate” is often not used in connection with refugee camps, evacuation camps or (re)education camps, but it is more used in connection with prisons and detention camps. But in the case of immigration and deportation camps, for example, we are certainly able to speak of detention camps and inmates. The utilization of the term is contingent upon the empirical context.
Camp studies: a growing interdisciplinary research field
The growing interdisciplinary research area of camp studies has been focused on producing a range of valuable camp typologies (Agier, 2011; Arendt, 1962; Kotek and Rigoulot, 2001; Möller, 2015; Van Pelt, 2010). The most referred to and modified typology is that by Hannah Arendt (1962) who justifies her ideal typification of camps first and foremost with the function of the institution as a field of experimentation for the exercise of total power and as a means of supporting the governing regime. Other scholars argue for a “continuum of camps” such as from an absolute biopolitical space where sovereigns exercise power directly over bodies to a space of freedom where alternative orders are created (Bochmann, 2021: 188). However, our aim here is not to propose another typification of camps within this continuum. Instead, our aim is to reach beyond analyzing the functions and types of camp institutions. We assume that both—an absolute biopolitical space and a space where alternative orders are created—can be part of a camp simultaneously. We also propose that a continuum and typification of camps may result in the underestimation of the complexity of camp orders (Kotek and Rigoulot, 2001).
Following Bochmann and Von Weikersthal’s (2022) comparative analysis of historical and global cases, we propose to focus on specific camp phenomena such as materiality, temporality, and governance rather than comparing camp systems per se. Therefore, we want to limit our perspective to camp governance and look at different camp systems specifically through the lens of this concept, to identify resemblances despite the great variations in camp type and context.
The edited volume “Camp Revisited” by Katz et al. (2018) is an important work and step toward a comprehensive exploration of historical and contemporary camp structures, their functions and purposes across continents and time presents. The strength of the book—which we share and incorporate into our own reflections—lies in its empirical illustration of how a combination of seemingly contradictory phenomena can comprise camp governance. The volume shows how opposing forces can operate side by side in this space, instead of being irreconcilable opposites or existing only in different types of camps: Care and control, agency and repression, movement and immobility, inclusivity and isolation are not necessarily mutually exclusive in camps.
The edited volume “Stuckness and Confinement” by Jefferson et al. (2019) is another important work in comparative camp studies, exploring the relationship between ghettos, camps, places of detention and prisons, focusing on the subjective experiences of the people who are imprisoned, warehoused, detained, held, or forcibly removed. The authors use the organizing concept of “stuckness” to explore the similarities in the spatial and temporal frameworks that structure life in different forms of confinement. They focus primarily on stuckness as it is experienced and lived. As a central finding, they argue that the experience of stuckness is not only an expression of physical confinement and spatial seclusion but expresses the way people make sense of the dynamics and practices of confinement.
What we take away from the above edited volumes—despite the different thematic focus—is that in the study camp institutions and to grasp their complexity we need to transcend easy oppositions and dualities between the temporary and the permanent; between exclusion and inclusion; and between boundaries and their transgression. Similarly, different forms of governing logics co-exist in camp spaces. For example, in the case of refugee camps, these reside at the confluence of humanitarian biopolitical governance and state governance of threats via policing and paramilitary control, and these two are implicated in each other. As Brankamp (2019) argues their governance can be seen through the lens of occupation, as the space world of those settled is shaped by “militarized policing in the camps [which] brings into sharper relief the everyday violence of humanitarian governance” (p. 67). The “benevolence” of humanitarian life-sustaining governance thus lies in space of indistinction form the militarization and securitization governance of host state as both sustain each other in the space of the camp.
Another recent publication on camp methodology focuses on the questions on how the geography of a camp delimits research activities and how the choice of a methods and methodology (re)construct the camp conceptually in various ways (Weima and Brankamp, 2022). We are certainly aware that every discipline, methodology, method, and research object only ever offer findings from a very specific perspective (Bochmann, 2023a). But the Special Issue has made us realize once again that theoretical work too is always shaped by the perspective of certain camp “cases.” And it seems to us that theoretical and conceptual work on camps is very much dominated by the case of migration and refugee camps (Devlin, 2021; Hanafi and Long, 2010; Janmyr, 2016); other types of contemporary camps are less in focus or are less integrated into this theoretical work.
So even though the above-mentioned key scholarly works on camp claim the objective of addressing all forms of camps, conceptually and theoretically they ultimately focus primarily on refugee/migration camps and hence produce perspectives that are inevitably limited. We want to explicitly counter this tendency in camp studies with this volume—by including a carefully selected set of cases with a wide remit. We want to be able to work out what is special about this institution. In addition, these broad-scope edited collections do not focus on specific topics and phenomena such as governance. While the topic of camp governance has been widely discussed in the context of migrant/refugee camps (Bochmann, 2021; Hyndman, 2000; Janmyr, 2016; Maestri, 2017; McConnachie, 2014; Oesch, 2017; Ramadan and Fregonese, 2017) it has not been sufficiently considered from a comparative camp perspective.
Added to this, all of the above-reviewed collections agree that in order to understand camp institutions, we must face the empirical complexity, which does not allow us to hide behind specific types of camps, theoretical concepts, and considerations. Working on theoretically informed empiricism is particularly significant to understand camp systems. That is why, in contrast to the aforementioned inspiring volumes that take historical camps into consideration, we limit ourselves in this Special Issue to contemporary cases of the camp to highlight the plurality of today’s camps and their commonalities.
Hence this special issue aims to fill gaps in camp studies and encourage a theoretical and empirical exploration of emergent camp governance orders not limited to migrant camps. The aim of the volume is to bring together the various researchers working on the topic and to move toward a productive and empirically based analysis of contemporary camp institutions.
Camp governance
In our understanding of camp governance, we follow Foucault’s (1982) comprehensive conceptualization of governance as the “conduct of conduct.” To govern is to “control the possible field of action of others.” Power is not solely negative and restrictive but also creative and generative. Governance to us is not merely exercised by one “over” another through a set of apparatuses but includes the governance of the self through incorporation of beliefs, knowledges, and perceptions. Power is not a top-down mechanism but rather an emergent property in social interaction. Power is embedded in the micro processes of social life and emerges within the context of concrete local transactions (Foucault, 1972).
We argue that camps are not merely about sovereign power but they also exemplify governmentality and present the potential to showcase new facets of both sovereignty and governmentality as these get applied in the camp context. Just as many settings that Foucault studied, camps are total institutions (Goffman, 1961) and heterotopias (Foucault, 1986), but they are unique in highlighting additional forms of governance to those of discipline or surveillance—governance through transience and the liminal (Turner, 1995; Van Gennep, 1965), among others. Beyond more well-understood governance forms, as one author in this issue argues with reference to Rwanda’s re-education camps, there are other experiential aspects of encampment that govern—simulation and role-play, disruption, and unsettling.
Saliency of camp governance forms and techniques are inevitably contingent on political and historical context and the specific camp rationality. In our analysis, we thus need to consider the dynamic political environment where the camp is created, the different levels and scopes of governance (global-state-regional-local) as well as the actor plurality in governing camps. In contemporary China, for example, Xinjiang re-education and internment camps represent adaptation of Maoist approaches to thought reform and contemporary developments as evidenced by the emergence of “smart camps” with high-tech surveillance (Byler, 2024). With less high-tech surveillance but in terms of salient governance modalities, the refugee camps in this special issue for example demonstrate the ways in which socio-materiality governs. The camp materiality emerges as a machinery of power in its own right—in the governance of the space of the camp itself—the micro-politics of governance and governmentalities or people’s everyday life but also more widely, with governance implication for the state, region, and globally (Bochmann, 2024). What kind of scale and actors are specifically relevant and dominating depends on the camp situation. In terms of actors, Rwanda’s re-education camps are mostly governed by national actors and the participants themselves, without intervention of international humanitarian actors, in stark contrast to refugee camps (Purdeková, 2024).
The variety of camp governing systems is considerable, and they cannot be reduced to power struggles between states and people. It is not uncommon for states to be the instigators of camps, even if camp governance is not solely within their control. The case of refugee camps in Thailand illustrates this, where not only humanitarian and state actors but also camp inhabitants themselves expand their influence over new spaces (Bochmann, 2024). The involvement of multiple actors, both state and non-state (co-)operating on the camp governance order is also evidenced by the example of relocation camps in Japan and the Philippines (Gibbs et al., 2025).
In accordance with Foucault (1972), interdisciplinary research studies on camp governance agree that camps do not only comprise an institutionalized system that includes rules and norms established by the state and non-state actors. Camp residents and other local participants “on the ground” are seen as active participants in the process of camp governance as shown in the case of refugee camps in Thailand. Inhabitants resist and circumvent the given governance materiality (Bochmann, 2024). Acts of resistance are evident even in the most extreme forms of camps, such as the Guantanamo Bay detention camps. Here, a range of resistance strategies can be observed, including confrontational resistance, concealed resistance, disguised resistance and internal resistance (Nungesser, 2024).
Even though scholars seem to agree that camp governance are not solely in the hands of states, to us states remain on of the most powerful sovereigns especially in the first step of establishing and setting up camps. States matter but they do not have the power to rule from the top down. Therefore, for us simple oppositions between top-down governance of camp and bottom-up resistances must be also nuanced and viewed from a relational perspective. For example, camp residents are increasingly involved in self-governance via responsibilization under the recent “resilient humanitarianism” governance approach (Ilcan and Rygiel, 2015). In contemporary re-education camps, as will be shown on the case of Rwanda and China, responsibilization too governs.
Camp governance is not only multilayered but also ever evolving, as we see for example in the embrace of high tech in Chinese re-education “smart” camps, with automated “super-panoptic” surveillance (Byler, 2024) and screened education as unprecedented innovations in re-education (Purdeková, 2024), or in the latest embrace of “resiliency humanitarianism” in refugee camps (Ilcan and Rygiel, 2015). The latter signals the global travel of neoliberal governance whereby refugees cease to be imagined purely as passive recipients and instead become construed as active resilient subjects, even as this struggles to become the reality on the ground against stubbornly-persisting humanitarian practices (Krause and Schmidt, 2020). The question of the camps’ governance can therefore only be answered empirically and must be seen in the context of the respective governmental system into which the camp is integrated. Obviously, camps do not exist in social and political vacuum but have a particular context that requires considerations because it shapes camp orders. Moreover, camp governance in practice on the ground takes unique and autonomous forms, and sees these broader logics given by its context often challenged (Bochmann, 2024).
Despite these complexities, we ask what are the overarching rationalities of camp governance and how do they translate into “real governance” on the ground? In line with one of the most discussed questions in the camp context—Are camps a governance of exclusion or inclusion, or both? The seminal and influential Agambenian perspective on the camp as a space of exception and bare life has been widely critiqued (Wahab, 2022). The first wave of critique pushed against the paradigm of exclusion by focusing on forms of agency and politics on the inside of the refugee camp. These critiques were followed by works questioning the binary of exclusion and inclusion, such as Oesch’s (2017) work arguing for refugee camps as spaces of indistinction between exclusion and inclusion. Aradau and Tazzioli’s (2020) conception of “biopolitics multiple” has problematized typical understanding of the biopolitics of the migrant camp as direct handling of “bare life” by highlighting the diverse ways of governing migration by “taking hold” of migrants’ lives, beyond their simple “sustenance” (letting live/letting die). Most of this evolving critique has again stayed singularly focused on refugee camps. The findings presented in this volume lead us to argue that the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, along with liminality, which involves temporarily placing individuals “on hold” for humanitarian, (re)educational or security purposes, are ultimately intended to facilitate their reintegration. This reintegration is achieved through the simultaneous and observable application of these three mechanisms. It is evident that all three mechanisms serve as a governing technique of camp institutions, which aims to enable the reinsertion of individuals into the social order of society.
All articles in this special collection similarly call to question Agamben’s focus on camp as a space of exclusion and bare life, such as Nungesser’s exploration of resistances to detention governance in Guantanamo (2024)—often considered a paradigmatic space of exception due to the uses of torture—or Byler’s exploration of counter-conducts in the highly controlled and surveilled spaces of China’s re-education camps (2024). Far from being “bare life,” we learn how Guantanamo detainees used their bodies in myriad ways of subtle and overt resistance. Byler shows how Maoist ideas of thought control are matched with high-tech surveillance in contemporary camps for Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang province, and how paradoxically this juxtaposition offers avenues for unique forms of resistance. A resistant practice is also evident in the way people respond to the materiality of exclusion in the context of refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border. People move outside the camp territory; in fact, they must do so in order to maintain the order of the camp and to survive (Bochmann, 2024).
Finally, and crucially, the focus on “bare life” and governing bodies in camp obscures more intangible modes of governance, such as the governance of disaster loss in enforced relocation camps in the Philippines (Gibb et al., 2025). Relocation camps are not simply responses to loss, but really define and produce forms of loss through their very constitution and operation. These and other forms of governance—not focused on bodies but rather intangible aspects of life—governing what is to be lost, regained, and how—is powerfully eschewed in Agambenian and Foucauldian conceptions of camp.
But more broadly, the exclusionary paradigm especially falters when we try to include re-education, relocation and other forms of camp on the “inside of the state”—here the exclusionary paradigm simply does not apply and instead the camps are spaces of (often enforced) incorporation through the re-alignment and remaking of citizens—whether it is “de-extremification” in China, de-radicalization in Guantanamo Bay, or indeed reorienting away from “ethnic divisionism” and genocide ideology in Rwanda. And even for migration and refugee camps, the political overall aim is to overcome the exclusion and to reintegrate those encamped into the prevailing socio-political order by resettlement, reintegration, or repatriation/deportation.
Thus, we argue contra to Agamben—camps are not spaces of exception that reveal the norm but have become an expected norm in contemporary governance, and they are not a priori spaces of exception, but instead are spaces of managed (whether successfully or not) form of inclusion. In their basic outlook, camps are order-making and order consolidating technology of power where specific population segments are placed and/or worked on to reinsert them into the prevailing social and political order. The refugee and migrant camps govern the national order of things on the “outside” of the state, whereas reintegration and re-education camps or indeed relocation camps govern the political order on the “inside.” Here governance of separation, space and liminality are key in assuring the alignment. Separation is what governs, which is not necessarily about exclusion. Camps are thus about the governance of temporary separation aiming to uphold the prevailing order and to neutralize the perceived threats to that order. Even though the exact governance modalities vary across camps, we argue that this meta-rationality applies to all contemporary camps.
This means the need to abandon the two archetypes that drive the theorization of camp to this day—the extremes of the Nazi concentration and especially extermination camps as indeed a unique form of camp-as-exception, and refugee camps as the dominant spaces that propel camp theorization to this day. This special issue takes a wider stock of encampment in its multiple contemporary forms to challenge some of the core claims about camps and governance.
Grand designs naturally do not guarantee desired outcomes. As we already highlighted, we do not assume that camps always lead to the desired governance of order. For example, we know that despite the depoliticizing governance of global humanitarianism, camps can become hyperpolitical places. They become stages of political organizing, establishment of new political parties in exile, and spaces of military mobilization, even the staging of desired stateness and consolidation or ethnonationalism. Similarly, camps aimed at detention and maximum control such as in Guantanamo or Xinjiang, with ever evolving technological innovations aimed to achieve this outcome, are too seeped with politics and varied forms of resistance. Camps, as we know from empirical research, are not easy to control due to their governance being subject to unpredictable, autonomous, and dynamic institutional logics. A high degree of legal autonomy for example has been shown in the case of refugee camps (Bochmann, 2021). The governance of camps is multi-scalar and operating against multiple, at times clashing aims. In the end, we are not just dealing with a machinery of power, but with a highly politicized social institution. This only underlies the importance of paying attention to how logics that drive construction of camps translate to the contingent materiality on the ground.
In sum, the article contributions and case studies included in this special issue provide substantial support for our two core arguments about the conceptualization of camps that were introduced at the outset. Camps are to be understood as instruments of politics designed to maintain existing or desired socio-political structures. However, they possess the potential to generate autonomous and unpredictable orders that are independent of their creators. With our carefully selected and empirically rich cases of camp governance across the globe, we aim to encourage further comparative research into camps. This will facilitate the further development of our theoretical understanding and re-conceptualization of one of the most pervasive and entrenched technologies of power.
Summary of the article contributions
The order of the articles is not the only possible one. The contributions have been arranged on a continuum ranging from forms of encampment characterized by extreme restrictions imposed on camp residents and asymmetrical power relations to more open and liberal forms of encampment, for example in terms of mobility and governance (Bochmann, 2021: 188). We acknowledge that restrictive and liberal spaces can be found in camps concurrently.
The first article of the Special issue studies resistance practices in the prison camp Guantánamo and with that offers novel insights for the comparative study of resistance in camp institutions.
Frithjof Nungesser (2024) conducts an analysis of resistance in contexts characterized by detention and extreme asymmetrical violence. Drawing on autobiographical accounts from former Guantánamo prisoners, the study examines coping mechanisms employed in the face of indefinite detention and torture. He identifies various forms of resistance, including confrontational, concealed, and internal resistance. In addition, the article explores the situational dynamics of resistance acts, distinguishing between different degrees of radicalness. Nungesser argues that the mitigating effects of circular acts of resistance on specific violations make it valuable to identify the dimensions of vulnerability these acts primarily address, such as corporeality, sociality, and meaning.
Darren Byler’s (2024) article examines two different governance models for controlling Uyghurs and other Muslim populations in detention camps in China. He shows how modern, smart technology is applied in the camps and how this, in combination with the traditional Chinese model of camp governance, influences the camp detainees’ ability to act. For the latter, he argues that this model of camp governance emerges from the history of the Maoist education system in China. However, this traditional model of education is then complemented by a new control model of automated surveillance. Following this argument, however, the article then describes empirically based on interviews, how these two models are experienced by detainees, how the prisoners are arranged in the cell order and what digital, acoustic, and textual content the lessons in the camp have. This model of camp administration and compulsory education does offer the prisoners some partial forms of autonomy. Darren argues that paradoxically, human agency is not completely lost amid intense forms of prisoner trauma. He attributes this back to the contradiction of the two models of control.
Andrea Purdekova’s (2024) contribution looks at governance through spatial aspects unique to the camps—instead of space being incidental to governance, she argues it takes a key role. Purdekova’s article uses post-genocide Rwanda’s uniquely widespread system of ingando “solidarity” camps as its case study, showing how three aspects of spatial governance in particular—separation, (hyper)structure and staging—are central to the way re-education camp function as a technology of transformative power. The camps are not only about learning together but their remoteness is meant to unsettle, their meticulous structuring of time, space and role is meant to foster discipline, their staging and experiential aspects are meant to simulate values of unity as cohesion and submission to a broader goal. Altogether, and in contrast to refugee or transit camps, re-education camps harness separation, concentration and structuring of time-space for an intense process of particular inclusion into the new socio-political order, in the case of Rwanda a post-genocide order focused on national unity and state reconstruction sifted through ideals of glorified militarism promoted by the ruling party.
The article by Annett Bochmann (2024) looks at camp governance through the lens of sociomateriality, using refugee camps on the Thai-Burmese border as a case study. The article shows that the relationship between materiality and governance on a global and local level is complex and multi-layered. Not only social life and local governance are informed, produced, and shaped by materiality. Global governance is also made visible through materiality. The author uses ethnographic observations to describe local forms of dealing with the materiality of exclusion. Through these locally refined forms of materiality, we also see that local social orders can look different from global governance and the materiality of exclusion/inclusion in such places. And despite the local and obvious circumvention practices in relation to the materiality of exclusion and immobilization, she argues that the construction of a collective body that is excluded persists—primarily through this very space and its materiality. In this way, the author shows that materiality nonetheless largely co-determines life on the ground. Through the materiality of exclusion, the people living in the camp are supposed to be controlled and their mobility and interaction with the rest of society prevented, even if this is only possible to a limited extent in practice. Through the infrastructure and the materiality of the camp, a “camp collective” is nevertheless constructed and made visible to “others” who did not or would not exist before and who therefore only belong through this view from the outside. Still, we can see here again how a local quite autonomous dynamic is developed on the ground, which is certainly not intended via the materiality of exclusion.
Drawing on extended field research of three different post-disaster relocation sites in the Philippines and Japan, Christine Gibb, Kairo Zoe, and Kanako Iuchi (2025) explore how different actors (state, religious, civil society, or humanitarian, as well as the residents themselves) develop competing and complementary forms of governance. They argue that different actors govern the camp and they do so in terms of a traditional understanding of governance but also in terms of the Foucauldian understanding of governance. The authors identify and examine post-disaster relocation sites as camps in the first place. Based on the discursive framing of these places, which are considered long-term solutions where residents are safe from natural hazards and are supposed to integrate into their new communities, resettlement sites cannot be conceptualized as camps. However, the authors argue that based on socio-spatial regulations imposed on residents, the way these places are governed and the use of these spaces by residents refute this claim. The authors therefore argue that the conceptualization of resettlement sites as camps makes it possible to study governance practices to a particularly high degree. It allows for a perspective that shapes the socio-spatial relations and subjectivities of disaster-affected people long after a “solution” to their initial displacement through resettlement has been achieved. The authors use the concept of “incompleteness” (rather than completion) to better understand tangible as well as invisible forces. This concerns, on the one hand, the influence of reconstruction measures after a disaster. On the other hand, they look at the arrangements, negotiations and resistances that take place in these spaces after a disaster. To examine camp governance in those three cases of post-disaster camps, they look at the three dimensions of politics of loss, spatial forms and practices, and resistance. This allows them to reveal the assemblage of rules that shape life in relocation camps, forms of sense-making, the effects that are interwoven in socio-spatial practices and encounters with material forms, as well as the resistance to prescribed “ways of living.” They also emphasize the importance of studying camps under consideration of human environment and ecological relations and include them more systematically.
The aim of this special issue was to analyses the camp institution as a significant apparatus of political governance in the modern world and to theorize camp governance as a dynamic and multifaceted phenomenon, contributing to broader discussions of political instruments of power and control. Moreover, we wanted to contribute to a research gap in camp studies by taking an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective on contemporary camp governance and advance the emerging field of critical camp studies.
Drawing on a range of contemporary camp case studies from different regions of the world, the collection highlights the evolving governance of camps and their role in maintaining socio-political order in times of crisis or disruption. The articles explore different systems of governance that operate within camps and shape their function as mechanisms of order-making. They explore the complexities of camp governance in different contexts, ranging from highly restrictive environments to more liberal forms of encampment. They examine camps as instruments of power, used across political systems for purposes such as segregation, punishment, re-education and control. We would like to thank all the contributors for being with us and making this learning journey possible. Together, we have gained valuable insights, and we hope this work inspires others to examine camps through a comparative lens, fostering the growth of critical camp studies.
Collectively, the articles highlight how camps in different contexts serve as spaces of negotiation, resistance and adaptation, with governance practices that go beyond traditional forms of state control. Camps are sites of contestation where residents and other actors challenge-imposed hierarchies and regulations, leading to the emergence of autonomous dynamics. Despite their intended purpose as mechanisms of control, camps often fail to achieve their goals, generating unintended or intended consequences and problems. Camps develop autonomous dynamics and plural institutional logics that challenge the ability of their creators to fully control them. These dynamics highlight the complexity of camp governance, which involves multiple actors and mechanisms, including responsibility, self-governance and governmentality. Ultimately, camps often fail to achieve their intended goals and can foster zones of violence and injustice, sowing the seeds of further socio-political instability.
In conclusion, we would like to reiterate that camps are designed to maintain or restore socio-political order, often targeting populations perceived as threatening. As instruments of order, camps are often designed to segregate, control and ultimately reintegrate people into dominant socio-political systems. We believe that this crude form of enforced governance must be fundamentally challenged.
