Introduction: Refugee camps as carceral junctions

The recent ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe has demonstrated the widespread use of encampments in order to deal with influxes of migrants and asylum seekers. It also demonstrated the ways in which migrants and asylum seekers navigate this encampment terrain. These holding sites, temporary shelters, registration and accommodation centres are easily perceived as isolated and isolating spaces, distinct and disconnected from ordinary space. However, camps are also connected to spaces beyond them through flows of bodies, through social media and through the knowledge and practices of those who create and manage them. The key point is that camps are at once sites of confinement and junctions that connect and enable mobility. In order to understand this paradox of connectedness and incarceration, we propose the concept of carceral junctions.

Conceptualizing camps as carceral junctions means examining the double sense of ‘moving camps’: On the one hand, camps shape, detain, and enable particular forms of movement for asylum seekers, as they move between camps and cultivate networks in hopes of viable futures. On the other hand, camps themselves are also mobile in the sense that models of encampment travel and shift within and between states, just as individual camp staff careers may span multiple camps. Bringing these senses together, the contributions in the special issue develop the analytical concept of the carceral junction as a way of grasping the paradoxical work and consequences of refugee camps.

By proposing the concept of carceral junctions, we intend to draw on but also critique conceptualizations and theories that either reify the confining nature of camps as places of exception or overly celebrate the agency of migrant mobility. The term is coined to grasp the mobilities of knowledge, power and bodies that characterize refugee camps, as well as their interfaces and connectedness in a context where states adopt increasingly restrictive refugee policies.

The carceral junction is a place that at once confines and facilitates specific movements. In this special issue, we challenge common sense dichotomies of confinement/freedom, mobility/immobility and structure/agency, in a bid to understand the policies of the encampment and refugee mobility as more than opposing processes. We explore the tensions between confinement and mobility – so central to theorization on camps – through concrete empirical cases from different angles and from different disciplines thus contributing to empirically grounded theorization of the relationship between power, space and political agency.

Camps between confinement and mobility

Camps of all sorts are easily seen as spaces of confinement, restriction and carcerality. They bear resemblances to Erving Goffman's total institutions (Goffman, 1961), where inmates are regulated in all aspects of life. Goffman's approach focuses on the micro-sociology of encampment and how individuals navigate the ‘mortifications’ related to being enrolled in a total institution. We may also see resemblances with Michel Foucault's panoptic prisons (Foucault, 1977) that work to discipline inmates, often with the aim of transforming them. Giorgio Agamben (Agamben, 1998, 2000) in turn, places the camp as the nomos of our times; an effect of sovereign power that creates a state of exception by suspending the rule of law. Common to these conceptualizations is the idea that while these carceral spaces are exceptional, they also feed into the outside. While they appear to be exploring the inner workings of spaces for those deemed unfit for society, they are also reflections of society.

This fundamental point is central to much of what Claudio Minca has termed ‘camp studies’, which he describes as an expanding literature that ‘engages with the relationship between biopower and violence and, more generally, with questions of biopolitics and related spatial regimes of exception’ (2015: 77). In this useful genealogy of the camp, Minca reminds us of the colonial origins of the camp, but also of the centrality of the work of Foucault and Agamben in much of this literature (see also Martin et al., 2020). In particular, Agamben's thoughts about the camp have been a source of inspiration and contestation in studies of concrete refugee camps, detention centres and other sites of confinement in the last decade or so. A number of studies have emerged to counter Agamben's conceptualization of the camp, arguing – often from an empirically based/ethnographic point – that refugees do not become ‘bare life’, and that life goes on in the camp. Irit Katz calls it ‘Between Bare Life and Everyday Life’ (Katz, 2017). Nando Sigona has, for instance, introduced the concept ‘campzenship’ to illustrate that a form of citizenship takes place within the camps (Sigona, 2014), while Ramadan and Fregonese talk of ‘hybrid sovereignty’ (Ramadan and Fregonese, 2017). However, we must be careful not to make the false opposition of Agamben's philosophical conceptualization of the camp as the nomos of our time and the empirical evidence that shows that refugees have ‘agency’ despite the camp and that Agamben, therefore, is wrong (cf. Martin et al., 2020).

By seeing the camp as a carceral junction, we seek to expand upon this approach by engaging directly with the paradoxical nature of the camp, as we try to go beyond either/or understandings of its workings. Either confinement or mobility. Either structure or agency. Either Agamben's state of exception or a space of new political subjectivities. The key point is that camps are at once sites of confinement and junctions that connect and enable mobility; they are at once sites of state sovereignty and junctions where migrants navigate, evade and negotiate these enactments to reach other destinations. This paradoxicality is central because it heightens a sensitivity to the nuances and limits of both state power and migrant agency.

Our conceptualization draws on recent developments in thinking through the carceral. Sociologists, criminologists and ‘carceral geographers’ have been arguing that we should understand prisons as part of larger ‘carceral landscapes’ (Moran, 2015). According to Gill, Moran and Conlon (Gill et al., 2013), we are witnessing the enrolment of increasingly diverse places such as immigration detention centres, hospitals, ghettos and camps, into carceral landscapes. These authors apply the Marxist notion of circuitry to explore the ‘real, material and lived circuits that compose carceral systems’, and the movements of people, objects and practices that make up these circuits. In a similar vein, Angela Davis calls this the ‘prison industrial complex’ (Davis, 1998), claiming that carceral systems work and connect with wider capitalist systems. We see these circuits at several levels. First, at the individual level, bodies circulate between prisons as prisoners are transferred from one prison to another (Moran 2015). Second, certain ‘marked’ – often poor, racialized and gendered – bodies also circulate these landscapes of carcerality between the ghetto, the prison and other institutions (Wacquant, 2001, 2008; Jefferson et al., 2019). The central point here is that these spaces are so tightly entangled that they shape each other through these connections, meaning that some people remain stuck in the same carceral landscape. Third, some scholars argue that the connections across space make up part of a system.

Without necessarily asserting the idea of a conspiring system, we take inspiration from the fact that prisons and other carceral spaces are not islands onto themselves and are connected in various ways. The consequences of the concept of carceral landscapes are twofold and point in opposing directions. On the one hand, it gives the impression of a claustrophobic system that sends its tentacles of control far beyond the prison walls. Once inside the carceral landscape or the prison industrial complex, there is no way out. On the other hand, it also shows the fluidity and mobility between carceral spaces such as prisons. It is this tension that we try to explore with the concept of carceral junctions. Without any normative evaluation of whether it is good or bad, we explore the dynamics of stuckness and mobility at the junctions. Furthermore, while carceral geographers – and others like Loïc Wacquant – have explored how bodies circulate between and within carceral spaces, we explore how camps themselves move as blueprints to be copied and modified.

In this special issue, we use the concept of the carceral beyond prisons, to explore asylum centres, deportation centres, holding sites and similar camp like situations for migrants and refugees. Here we draw on a new literature on ‘carceral mobilities’ and their questioning of the dichotomous ‘appearance of immobility within carceral estates vis-à-vis an appearance of hyper-mobility beyond them’ (Turner and Peters, 2017). Although the carceral may refer to a prison-like institution or situation rather than a prison per se, asylum camps are often described as ‘quasi-carceral’ (Moran et al., 2013; Minca and Ong, 2016; Moran et al., 2018). Scholars have pointed to increasingly blurred boundaries between the criminal justice system and the immigration enforcement systems, a trend known as crimmigration (Armenta, 2017; Stumpf, 2010; Bosworth and Guild, 2008; Drotbohm and Hasselberg, 2015). While we may discuss how camps differ from or resemble prisons or ghettos (Jefferson et al., 2019) or even cities (Jansen, 2011; Agier et al., 2002; Herz, 2013) at a conceptual level, there are often concrete, empirical overlaps, as when prison services are responsible for the deportation centres for rejected asylum seekers (Kohl, this issue).

Finally, if we take an emic point of view, we see how the terms ghetto, camp and prison are used interchangeably or used to demonstrate the character of a place that is officially termed something else. It is noteworthy that people of Palestinian descent in Denmark, refer to the social housing estates where they live, as mukhayyam (camps) and compare them to the camps in Lebanon (Kublitz, 2016). Likewise, the migrants, living in the camps surrounding the Spanish enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla, refer to the camps as ghettos (Richter, 2016: 80). In other cases, asylum seekers refer to the camps as prisons (Jakobsen, this issue). At the same time, as Martin et al. (2020) have argued, the term ‘camp’ itself encompasses multiple spatial formations, including both formal or institutional camps and informal or makeshift camps, which are often fundamentally connected.

The second part of the phrase ‘carceral junctions’ implies an orientation towards openings, interfaces and materiality. Road junctions are places where two or more streams of traffic meet. And these interfaces can be productive of new subjectivities and new trajectories. In the case of camps, people from different backgrounds converge and negotiate the common space of the camp (Agier, 2014), creating something new in the process.

Applying this thinking to refugee camps implies a shift from thinking primarily in terms of walls and fences to thinking more broadly about modes of access and interface. This does not mean ignoring camp boundaries. As Turner has argued, even though ‘the limits of the camp are porous, allowing goods, people and ideas to move in and out of the camp’, at the same time, ‘the perimeter remains an important defining characteristic [of the camp] and shapes the lives of those who remain inside’ (2016: 141–142). But it does mean maintaining an awareness of the shaping of movement, not simply its impediment.

Junctions are places where the traveller stops up, ponders, and takes their bearings, before making the next move. They are structures, where people wait for some amount of time before moving on. Camps can be thought of as junctions in this sense, but their carcerality inflects this in various ways. It shapes the design of the spaces, the modalities of waiting, and the pressures and possibilities to move on. Carceral junctions are confining structures, where people wait in situations of pressure and possibility before they move or are moved elsewhere. They are sites of interface and contestation.

Drawing these lines of thinking together, we want not so much to resolve the tension between closure and openness, as to maintain it as a source of productive thinking. Doing so, we believe, keeps at least two perspectives front of mind. First, the inflection of the carceral with junctions focuses our analytical attention on cracks and possibilities. The carceral is seldom so confining that there are no fissures in it. In some cases, as Elbek (Elbek, 2021) describes on Lampedusa, this can involve literal holes in the fences surrounding a refugee camp, which opens for small-scale interactions between migrants and locals. Second, and conversely, the inflection of junctions with the carceral, reminds us that the possibilities on offer at a carceral junction are circumscribed and limited. For migrants, this may involve what Dunn and Cons (2014) call burdened agency, meaning that ‘they work within the enormous constraints they face – including incarceration in camps and enclaves, material limitations of living in tents or without running water, legal barriers to their full citizenship in the country where they reside, and so on – to creatively reassemble some semblance of a regular existence’ (Dunn and Cons, 2014: 99).

The articles in this special issue engage with these questions in a variety of ways. In the remainder of this introductory article, we outline three characteristics of the carceral junction and relate them to the contributions of the volume. Katz and Scott-Smith explore questions of structure and design. Jakobsen and Vanyoro examine the various forms of waiting that take place there. And Kohl and Lindberg consider the ways in which pressure is brought to bear on asylum seekers but also staff as attempts are made to coerce the onward movement of migrants.

Camp structures: Designs, materiality, infrastructure

As much as we try to understand the meanings attached to camps, the effects on those who inhabit them and the broader societies within which they are lodged, they are first and foremost material infrastructures. They are made up of shelters and paths. Often there are fences and other infrastructures such as water and sanitation, burial grounds, NGO offices, police posts and places of worship. Even the most basic camps, like the camps on mount Gurugu in Morocco outside Melilla, have places of trade and entertainment; a spot where the different nationalities play football matches and a place where a resident sells tea and cigarettes. So, what is particular about the infrastructure of camps? And what does it do to carceral junctions?

In a fascinating account of the birth of the camp, Benjamin Meiches argues that camps are characterized by elasticity (Meiches, 2015). They are ephemeral and fluid and can easily be repurposed. It is due to the mobile nature of the camps themselves that they are able to capture and control populations that are constantly in flux. Scott-Smith's contribution to this special issue explores the ephemeral character of the camps near Calais, constantly moving and leaving only a few traces in the sand. The camps outside Calais were the result of the massive fences that were erected outside the entrance to the tunnel under the Channel. The camps emerged where the flow of people was blocked, and people aggregated around the blockage. However, while the tunnel and its fences were solid and unmovable, the camps were easily erased by the French authorities, and all that the author encountered after the bulldozers was human debris of a kind that would not last for long.

In their study of the trajectories of the refugee villages that were purpose built for Bosnian refugees in Denmark in the 1990s, Whyte and Ulfstjerne (Whyte and Ulfstjerne, 2020) found that although the shelters were repurposed and used as mountain huts, kindergartens and private homes, they brought traces of the camp with them.

This begs questions about the relationships between intention, materiality and effect of the camp. Are the intentions of the camp – as intended by the planners – reflected in the design? Can the intentions change? Can different actors, the state, the city council, the NGOs in charge of the architect have different intentions with the same camp? And if so, how does that affect the design? Finally, camps are ‘hacked’ and repurposed by those who inhabit them. In her study of the design process of two camps – one in the Negev desert and another in Paris – Katz (this volume) shows how camps can have several and conflicting purposes. The architect behind the camp in Israel made use of his experience in designing hotels to design a camp that could accommodate all the needs of a population that would be cut off from the outside world, including recreation. Meanwhile, the Israeli authorities found his design useful to keep a population contained and controlled out of sight of the public eye. The person who designed the camp in Paris had experience in designing festivals, and was therefore used to designing that could be assembled and disassembled rapidly. The camp was designed to celebrate mobility and diversity in the city, in line with the image that the city's socialist mayor wanted to portray of the city. Rather than hiding the migrants away, it was colourful, large and playful. This did not, however, prevent the authorities from registering the migrants and relocating them to the official sites for asylum seekers across France. Katz’ contribution reveals the genealogies of the camps beyond prisons and barracks to hotels and festivals, with which they have much in common. It also reveals that intentions may change as may uses of camps, and the materiality/infrastructure may be repurposed in unintended ways.

Camps as steppingstones and waiting rooms

Scott-Smith's study from Calais demonstrates how camps may emerge where movement slows down due to a blockage – in this case, the Channel. Official camps also slow down movement, as when asylum seekers are put into camps where they wait for a decision before they may move on (Jakobsen, this volume) or rejected asylum seekers are put in camps while they await deportation (Kohl, this volume). Between the officially enforced camps of the state and the spontaneous camps, created by migrants, are a range of other camp-like situations such as the shelter for Zimbabwean migrant men who enter South Africa but have neither money nor papers to move on to Johannesburg or Cape Town (Vanyoro, this issue). What is interesting about all these places is that they also function as junctions, as steppingstones, towards onward movement. They temporarily impede movement and might feel more like waiting rooms than steppingstones. However, despite the boredom and dead time (Jeffrey, 2010) in a waiting room, there is a future. One is waiting for something else – somewhere else.

Vanyoro explores this relationship between waiting and moving in his study of the shelter for migrant men on the Zimbabwe-South Africa border (this volume). He warns against the idea that physically immobility is equal to existential immobility and shows how the men at the shelter actively use the time at the shelter to move forward and realize their dreams of a better life elsewhere. In her study of male asylum seekers waiting for decisions on the case at an asylum centre in Denmark, Jakobsen follows the men's trajectories retrospectively to the camps they stopped at in their journey along the Balkan corridor and through Europe. Each of these steps was a stop and a subjection to confinement of one kind or another. But they also enabled the onward journey to Denmark. Likewise, the waiting in Denmark is almost unbearable and they regularly check their mail to see whether there is news from the authorities about their asylum claim. But it is this waiting that might move them forward in the future.

Jakobsen shows how new socialities emerge in the Danish asylum centres among men from different countries and with different trajectories. The socialities are precarious because none of them are keen on investing in this temporary space of waiting but nevertheless they must co-exist Similarly, Vanyoro shows how social relationships and new hierarchies emerge at the migrant shelter on the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. Despite the Zimbabwean migrants being en route to an imagined future elsewhere, they take on different positions and relations among themselves. Vanyoro also finds that the migrants have different relations to the South Africans in charge of the shelter, giving some privileges and others not. This highlights another productive junction-as-crossroads in the camp; namely between those who inhabit the camp and those who are in charge of the camp.

Camps as sites of pressure and opportunity

Junctions can be sites to stop up and ponder and take one's bearings before moving onward. Junctions can also be crossroads where different actors and rationalities cross. As mentioned earlier, with Agier, such crossroads may be productive. If we remain in the traffic metaphor, crossroads can also be hazardous places where clashes and crashes occur – often damaging the weaker part but also affecting the stronger. In their contributions, Kohl and Lindberg dig further into this kind of junction as crossroads, as they explore the meetings between police officers, camp staff and camp residents in the Danish centres for rejected asylum seekers. The pressures, or indeed violence, applied in these junctions can come through deliberate (often racialized) inattention (Davies and Isakjee, 2019) as well as policies that are aimed directly at migrants living there. This creates, according to Kohl and Lindberg, immense pressure both on the residents and on the staff implementing the measures. They show how not only the residents but also the staff are moved – emotionally and otherwise – by the meeting with the other.

The relationship between movement and the removal centres is complex and paradoxical. At one level, they are officially put in place to enhance movement out of Denmark: they are sites of removal. But as Kohl so clearly demonstrates, these camps often promote immobility rather than a movement for those migrants that cannot easily be deported, as migrants resist the attempts by state authorities to convince them to return to places they do not wish to go. Conceptualized as a junction, removal centres clog up, resulting in stuckness and unauthorized forms of movement but also violence, frustration, and suspicion among both residents and staff. Indeed, as Lindberg shows, these emotional dimensions of the relations between staff and residents shape an affective infrastructure, which helps maintain the matrices of racial differentiation that the mobility control regime is based on.

In sum, the camp is a junction in the sense of being a steppingstone or a waypoint but also a junction in the sense of being a crossroads. In the former case, stuckness can also be part of movement. And in the latter case, the junction may involve not only different bodies, crossing paths, but also different actors at different levels and different scales and rationalities, meeting and being moved one way or another.