Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-tj2md Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-15T14:35:45.078Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Biopolitics, borders, and refugee camps: exercising sovereign power over nonmembers of the state†

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Olga Zeveleva
Olga Zeveleva*
Affiliation:
National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia
*
∗Email: ozeveleva@hse.ru
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article addresses the relationship between the concepts of national identity and biopolitics by examining a border-transit camp for repatriates, refugees, and asylum seekers in Germany. Current studies of detention spaces for migrants have drawn heavily on Agamben's reflection on the “camp” and “homo sacer,” where the camp is analyzed as a space in a permanent state of exception, in which the government exercises sovereign power over the refugee as the ultimate biopolitical subject. But what groups of people can end up at a camp, and does the government treat all groups in the same way? This article examines the German camp for repatriates, refugees, and asylum seekers as a space where the state's borders are demarcated and controlled through practices of bureaucratic and narrative differentiation among various groups of people. The author uses the concept of detention space to draw a theoretical link between national identity and biopolitics, and demonstrates how the sovereign's practices of control and differentiation at the camp construct German national identity through defining “nonmembers” of the state. The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork at the Friedland border transit camp and on a discourse analysis of texts produced at the camp or for the camp.

Keywords

refugeesrefugee campbiopoliticsspaces of detentionborders
Type
Special Section: Biopolitics and National Identities
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 41 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

The study was implemented in the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in 2015.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Agnew, John. 1994. “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory.” Review of International Political Economy 1 (1): 53–80.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland: Meridian Books.Google Scholar
Blue, Ethan. 2015. “Strange Passages: Carceral Mobility and the Liminal in the Catastrophic History of American Deportation.” National Identities 17 (2): 175–194.Google Scholar
Brenner, Neil, and Elden, Stuart. 2009. “Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory.” International Political Sociology 3 (4): 353–377.Google Scholar
Charmaz, Kathy. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis. New York: Sage.Google Scholar
De Genova, Nicholas, and Peutz, Nathalie. 2010. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Diken, Bülent, and Laustsen, Carsten B. 2005. The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Diken, Bülent, and Bagge Laustsen, Carsten. 2006. “The Camp.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88 (4): 443–452.Google Scholar
Ek, Richard. 2006. “Giorgio Agamben and the Spatialities of the Camp: An Introduction.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88 (4): 363–386.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 2006. Language and Globalization. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” [Des Espace Autres.] Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27.Google Scholar
Gregory, Derek. 2006. “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88 (4): 405–427.Google Scholar
Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Herb, Guntram Henrik. 1999. Nested Identities: Nationalism, Territory, and Scale. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Horner, Jed, and Rule, John. 2013. “The Politics of Space and the Spatialisation of Politics: New Directions for Examining the Connections Between Immigration and Contagion.” New Political Science 35 (3): 463–478.Google Scholar
Hussain, Nasser, and Ptacek, Melissa. 2000. “Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred.” Law & Society Review 34 (2): 495–515.Google Scholar
Jäger, Siegfried. 2012. Kritische Diskursanalyse: eine Einführung [Critical Discourse Analysis: An Introduction]. 6th ed. Münster: Unrast-Verlag.Google Scholar
Jäger, Siegfried, and Maier, Florentine. 2009. “Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Foucaldian Critical Discourse Analysis and Dispositive Analysis.” In Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Wodak, Ruth and Meyer, Michael, 34–61. 2nd ed. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Kaplan, David H., and Herb, Guntram H. 2011. “How Geography Shapes National Identities.” National Identities 13 (4): 349–360.Google Scholar
Landzelius, Michael. 2006. “‘Homo Sacer’ Out of Left Field: Communist ‘Slime’ as Bare Life in 1930s and Second World War Sweden.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88 (4): 453–475.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lowenthal, David, Claval, Paul, Robic, Marie-Claire, Sandner, Gerhard, Rossler, Mechtild, Takeuchi, Keiichi, Bassin, Mark, Hooson, David, Hussman, Lisa E., and Buttimer, Anne. 1994. Geography and National Identity. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Martin, Diana. 2015. “From Spaces of Exception to ‘Campscapes': Palestinian Refugee Camps and Informal Settlements in Beirut.” Political Geography 44 (January): 9–18.Google Scholar
Millner, Naomi. 2013. “Routing the Camp: Experiential Authority in a Politics of Irregular Migration.” Journal of Political Power 6 (1): 87–105.Google Scholar
Minca, Claudio. 2015. “Geographies of the Camp.” Political Geography 49 (January): 74–83.Google Scholar
Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2006. “The Invasion Complex: The Abject Other and Spaces of Violence.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88 (4): 429–442.Google Scholar
Peters, Bernhard. 2002. “A New Look at ‘National Identity.’ How Should We Think of ‘Collective’ or ‘National Identities?’ Are There Two Types of National Identities? Does Germany Have an Ethnic Identity, and Is It Different?” European Journal of Sociology 43 (1): 3–32.Google Scholar
Rembold, Elfie, and Carrier, Peter. 2011. “Space and Identity: Constructions of National Identities in an Age of Globalisation.” National Identities 13 (4): 361–377.Google Scholar
Schlögel, Karl. 2003. Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik [In Space We Read Time: On Civilization History and Geopolitics]. 3rd ed. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag.Google Scholar
Schmitt, Carl. 2003. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. New York: Telos Press.Google Scholar
Seshadri, Kalpana Rahita. 2008. “When Home Is a Camp Global Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and Internally Displaced Persons.” Social Text 26 (194): 29–58.Google Scholar
Shah, Nisha. 2012. “The Territorial Trap of the Territorial Trap: Global Transformation and the Problem of the State's Two Territories 1.” International Political Sociology 6 (1): 57–76.Google Scholar
Shewly, Hosna J. 2013. “Abandoned Spaces and Bare Life in the Enclaves of the India–Bangladesh Border.” Political Geography 32 (January): 23–31.Google Scholar
Shields, Rob. 2013. Spatial Questions: Cultural Topologies and Social Spatialisations. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Simmel, Georg. 1958. Soziologie: Untersuchungen Über die Formen Der Vergesellschaftung [Sociology: Studies on the Forms of Socialization]. Berlin: Dunckert und Humboldt.Google Scholar
Warf, Barney, and Arias, Santa, eds. 2008. The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Withers, Charles W. J. 2009. “Place and the ‘Spatial Turn’ in Geography and in History.” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (4): 637–658.Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, ed. 1989. Language, Power and Ideology: Studies in Political Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.Google Scholar