Camps Revisited

Facing the current growing global archipelago of encampments, this book project intends to develop a geographical reflection on ';the camp', as a modern institution and as a spatial bio-political technology. This book focuses on past and present camp geographies and on the dispositifs that make them an ever-present spatial formation in the management of unwanted populations characterizing many authoritarian regimes as well as many contemporary democracies. It also offers and investigates possible ways to resist the present-day proliferating manifestations of camps and ';camp thinking', by calling for the incorporation of ';camp studies' into the broader field of political geography and to consider the geographies of the camp as constitutive of much broader modern geo-political economies.By linking spatial theory to the geopolitical and biopolitical workings and practices of contemporary camps, the contributions in this collection argue that the camps seem to be here-to-stay, like a permanent/temporary presence giving shape to improvised, semi-structured and hyper-orderly structured spatialities in our cities and our countryside. Camps are also a specific response, for example, to the changing conditions of European borders due to the ';refugee crisis' and the rise of nationalism in many countries affected by such crisis.