Between Camps/Between Cities: Movement, Capture and Insurrectional Migrant Lives

Abstract

This essay examines insurrectional asylum-seeking and refugee practices that highlight and disturb the legal and spatial relationship between refugee camps, zones of capture, and cities. Through a critical consideration of the logic of the refugee camp and its intersection with the law, technology, security, and humanitarian discourses, we map a series of practices emerging from the proliferation of camps, the urbanization and normalization of refugee camps, and their virtualization and inscription on human bodies. The essay engages as well, insurrectional enactments and everyday movement(s) in Tel Aviv, Rome, and Nairobi that affirm today's refugees’ and asylum seekers’ right to the city. In doing so, we raise ethical and political questions about the equivalence of the rights of citizens and those of stateless persons and the entanglements between camps, cities, and camp-cities.

Keywords:

• Camp-villes
• right to the city
• insurrection
• isonomia

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Since 2002, Migreurop attempts to identify places of detention for migrants and asylum seekers, of which there is no official census, in order to make their existence in Europe visible. Retrieved from http://www.migreurop.org/IMG/jpg/map_18-1_L_Europe_des_camps_2011_v11_EN.jpg.

2 See Elizabetta Povoledo, NY Times article ‘Migrants in Rome try to recover after Ponte Mammolo camp is destroyed', May 15, 2015. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/world/europe/migrants-in-rome-try-to-recover-after-ponte-mammolo-camp-is-destroyed.html?_r=0.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sam Okoth Opondo

Sam Okoth Opondo is an Assistant Professor of Politcal Science at Vasar College, USA.

Lorenzo Rinelli

Lorenzo Rinelli, Ph.D. is teacher and researcher at the University of California in Rome, Italy. His recent book, African migrants and Europe (2015) has been published by Routledge.