The refugee camp as the biopolitical paradigm of the west

Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.

– Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, ‘Threshold’ p. 181

The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life.

–Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 150.

Living in the early twenty-first century, it is impossible to avoid the fact and moral significance of ‘the camp’ in its pervasiveness and diversity: labor camps, concentration camps, extermination camps, death camps, reservations, immigration camps, and camps for seemingly more benign purposes such as school, health or scout camps. Above all, at this time we cannot fail to notice the prominence of the refugee camp. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) indicate there are 65.3 million displaced people worldwide, 23.1 million refugees, and 10 million stateless people.¹ The US Committee for refugees and Immigrants statistics show 4.2 million refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) in the Middle East with Palestinians, Afghans, and Iraqis comprising the majority, 3.2 million refugees and IDPs in Africa with the majority coming from Sudan, 2 million refugees and IDPs in south and central Asia, with over one million Afghanis living in Pakistan alone.²

These camps are the result of civil wars and zones of conflict that like the Syrian and Afghan wars increasingly seem to be directed as much against civilians as against ‘rebels’ or state forces. Nearly 50 million children currently are refugees with few opportunities for any kind of education or schooling, although this would be the least of their survival problems.³ Half this number come from Syria and Afghanistan. It might be argued that some of these children become the source of terrorism tomorrow. Benjamin R. Barber (Barber, 2003, p. xxvii) put the argument some time ago:

Children have been soldiers and victims in the raging ethnic and religious wars; children are the majority of the global cohort that suffers poverty, disease and starvation. Children are our terrorists-to-be because they are so obviously not our citizens to come.

In basic agreement with Barber I argued:

The fundamental challenge for the west and for western education is in promoting a form of political education … But this would have to be a form of political education that is not based on the logic of conversion or crass assimilation to American or western values but to as-yet unformulated ethos of a world civic space and concept of world citizenship. Such a vision may not be based on a simple projection of Kant’s “perpetual peace” although it might invoke a kind of cosmopolitanism that can still be shaped through participation, dialog and exchange of world cultures. (Peters, 2004)

In regard to this possibility western agencies might begin with questioning its ruling myths, as Gray (2003) argues in Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern:

Western societies are ruled by the myth that, as the rest of the world absorbs science and becomes modern, it is bound to become secular, enlightened and peaceful—as contrary to all evidence, they imagine themselves to be. (p. 118)

The ‘European immigration crisis’ that culminated in 2015 with the worst crisis in immigration, and massive increase of displaced persons seeking asylum in Europe since the end of World War II seems to have intensified and the right to political asylum has been abrogated as European states reached the limits of liberal tolerance with strong blow back from local populations and the rise of anti-immigrations politics (Peters & Besley, 2015). If anything the refugee camp is the creation and symbol of the age of failed western globalization policies that point to free trade and liberal international global politics on the one hand and yet on the other involve ‘globalization as war’ and ongoing conflicts over oil, oil pipeline, and strategic territories (for ‘globalization as war’ see Peters, 2005). One can only surmise how much worse the refugee problem will be under the oil geopolitics of Trump’s national populism and protectionism.

The history of the camp in the modern era dates from the Boer War when the British under Kitchener pursued a ‘Scorched Earth’ policy forcing mostly civilian populations of women and children into internment or concentration camps, some 45 tent camps for Boer and 64 for 107,000 Black Africans. It is reported that because the conditions in these camps were so severe with poor hygiene and food shortages some 28000 people, mostly children perished (22074 children under 16, 4177 women, and 1676 men).⁴ Most of the prisoners of war were sent overseas. Ferguson (2004, p. 250) argues that the concentration camps was not part of a deliberate genocidal policy. The British used internment as part of their counterinsurgency strategy during the so-called Malayan Emergency.

Under German colonial rule in Namibia five concentration camps were established during the Herero and Nama genocide program during 1904–1908. Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, the Oberbefehlshaber (Supreme Commander) of the protection force in German Southwest Africa is on record as saying that he believed the Herero nation should be annihilated. Herero males were executed and women and children were driven into the dessert. Survivors of a planned massacre ended up in Shark Island concentration camp where they worked as slave labor. Prisoners were used for medical experiments and some 300 skulls were sent back to Germany for scientific racism-related investigations.

Jeremy Sarkin’s (2009) Colonial Genocide and Reparations Claims in the twenty-first Century: The Socio-Legal Context of Claims under International Law by the Herero against Germany for Genocide in Namibia, 1904–1908 details the Herero genocide that is recognized by the United Nations as the first organized state genocide in world history.

The Herero genocide, conducted in German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia) between 1904 and 1908, is recognized by the UN as the first organized state genocide in world history. The Herero became the first ethnic group to seek reparations from the German government and Deutsche Bank that financed German companies in Southern Africa in US various federal courts. On the 100th Anniversary of the genocide the German Minister for Economic Development and Cooperation accepted German moral responsibility but rule out reparations. The Herero genocide set a historical precedent in Germany later to be followed by the Nazi death camps (Madley, 2005). It seems both the concept of the camp and medical experiments were sources for the Nazi Holocaust.

There also is some evidence that US concentration camps and the strategy of containment and internment were used extensively on Cherokee and other American Indian populations during the 1830s. Andrew Jackson authored and championed the Indian Removal Act.

The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, authorizing the president to grant unsettled lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders. A few tribes went peacefully, but many resisted the relocation policy. During the fall and winter of 1838 and 1839, the Cherokees were forcibly moved west by the United States government. Approximately 4,000 Cherokees died on this forced march, which became known as the “Trail of Tears.”⁵

There is no doubt that the concentration camp, a term first coined by the British to describe events in the Anglo-Boer war, was used extensively during western colonial administrations as a tool of colonial policy but it rose to prominence with the Nazi Holocaust. It was used extensively in the early twentieth century in the 1920s, in the USSR in the system of Gulags (forced labor camps) to incarcerate millions who opposed Soviet collectivization. The camp was also employed by the Japanese and the Americans (‘relocation camps’) during world war II, the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution retitled ‘reeducation camps,’ the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia during the 1970s, North Korea, and more recently in Bosnia to inter Muslim, Croat, and Serb male civilians.

When I visited Dachau, the first of the Nazi camps established on 22 March 1933, near Munich, I read a facsimile of an original SS order that prohibited music and poetry on the pain of instant execution.⁶ There is another side to Adorno’s dictum the full version of which reads:

The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today.

While it is important to question the role of the poet and the artist ‘after Auschwitz’—and even to question artistic representations of torture, pain, and death—it is also necessary to recognize the significance of poetry and music, however risky, as a source of solidarity and hope for prisoners within Dachau.

Dachau became the pilot and prototype for a national system of concentration camps. It began as a labor camp for political prisoners. Himmler, The Munich Chief of Police, declared in the newspaper Münchner Neueste Nachrichten:

On Wednesday [March 21, 1933] the first concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5000 persons. All Communists and – where necessary – Reichsbanner and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here, as in the long run it is not possible to keep individual functionaries in the state prisons without overburdening these prisons, and on the other hand these people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organize as soon as they are released.

In the 12 years of its existence Dachau housed some 200,000 prisoners from other 30 countries, one-third of who were Jewish. Over 25600 people died in the camp, most in the last year before liberation on 29 April 1945. After 1942, the camp became a complex network of 150 subsidiary camps that forced over 30000 prisoners to work in the German armaments industry.

The SS under National Socialism established a variety of detention camps to confine those whom they defined as political, ideological, or racial prisoners. The camp system came to include concentration camps, labor camps, prisoner of war camps, transit camps; and extermination or death camps. By 1939, six large camps had been established including Dachau (1933), Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenenwald (1937), Flossenbërg (1938), Mauthausen (1939), and Ravensbrück (1939). Other major camps within German included Bergin-Belsen, Börgermoor, Dieburg, Esterwegen, Flossenburg, Gundelsheim, Neuengamme, Papenburg, and Sachsenburg. This national system was further extended through an elaborate system of 565 subcamps. Camps were also setup in Austria (including Mauthausen with 49 subcamps), Belgium, Czechoslovakia (Theresienstadt with nine external kommandos), Estonia, Finland, France (13 camps), and Algeria (11 camps) by the Vichy government, Great Britain (Alderney in the Channel Islands), Holland, Italy, Latvia (six camps including Riga), Lithuania, Norway (six camps), Poland (28 camps), Russia (20 camps), Yugoslavia (22 camps).⁷

Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2000), following Foucault’s theoretical instincts, has described the Camp as ‘nomos’ of the modern defining his sense of biopolitics in the concept of ‘bare life,’ which was defined in the intro as ‘that which may be killed yet not sacrificed.’ The camp is founded on this state of exception that is associated with bare life. ‘The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule’ (pp. 168, 169).⁸

Looking at the contemporary world picture—the appalling ongoing wars and armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Mexico (drug wars), Somali, Nigeria, Yemen, Libya, South Sudan, Kashmir, Palestine—to name some obvious examples, it is clear that refugee camps have become a permanent feature of the political landscape. With 5 millions refuges and over 400,000 dead in Syria alone, the costs of war are almost incalculable.⁹ With 22 million refugees, 65.6 million permanently displaced person worldwide and some 10 million stateless people ‘We are now witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record.’¹⁰

Michael A. Peters
[email protected]

Notes

1. https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html

2. Cited in https://millionsoulsaware.org/ and see also fifty most populaous refugee camps https://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2013/refugee-camps/

3. See the UNICEF (2016) report Uprooted: The growing crisis for refugee and migrant children at https://www.unicef.org/publications/files/Uprooted_growing_crisis_for_refugee_and_migrant_children.pdf

4. https://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/women-children-white-concentration-camps-during-anglo-boer-war-1900-1902

5. https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Indian.html

6. By contrast, famously Adorno (1949) in ‘An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society’ writes ‘Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch,’ [It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz].

See the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial site at https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/english.html.

7. See the list of concentration camps by Chuck Ferree (Holocaust Witness and Liberator) on the Jewish Virtual Library site where it is estimated that the Nazis established some 15000 camps in occupied territories, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/cclist.html.

8. See the special EPAT issue on ‘Agamben’s Philosophy and Pedagogy’ Vol 46, Issue 4, 2014.

9. See https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/syria

10. See https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html.