ABSTRACT
More than two decades after Agamben provocatively stated that the camp has replaced the city as the biopolitical paradigm of the West, the city and the camp are still considered as a spatial-political dichotomy. Empirical and theoretical investigations on the complex relations between camps and cities around the world, however, have already questioned the strict separation between cities and camps as spatial and political entities. By building on two very different types of city–camp entanglements in Israel–Palestine, both originally created following the 1948 Arab–Israeli war and exist until the present, the Israeli immigrant transit camps and development towns and the urbanizing Palestinian refugee camps, this chapter further destabilizes the city–camp dichotomy. Focusing on the relations between the political constructs and the material assemblages of these spaces in relation to configurations of control and the resistance to them, the chapter argues that considering some camps and cities as entanglements could enable to better understand the powers that create, operate, instrumentalize and resist them.
