ABSTRACT
Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West. 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: labour camps, concentration camps, extermination camps, death camps, reservations, immigration camps, and camps for seemingly more benign purposes such as school, health, or scout camps. 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. There also is some evidence that US concentration camps and the strategy of containment and internment were used extensively on Cherokee and other Native American Indian populations during the 1830s.
