ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the basic conceptual frame by social excesses, imaginaries and surplus populations to appreciate what is happening sociologically in treating certain people as ‘surplus populations’. It examines how dissensus is at the core of the questions of ‘deviance’, ‘normalisation’ and defiance in the context of treating migrant and displaced populations as well as considering how the legacy of historical categorisations of surplus population is projected onto surplus migrant populations. Sociologically and politically, the operation of refugee camps around the globe, outside the borders and within the borders of the European Union is categorising, sorting and interpellating these populations within populations, as surplus populations. In the modern era, the categorisation of people who are defined as surplus and expendable people, using different justification stretches back to the 17th-century story of the Black slave but then was extended to the ‘first peoples’ in the colonial context.
