Paper short abstract:

The paper deals with a comparative analysis of reception facilities between the south of Italy (especially Sicily) and the south of Germany (mostly Baden-Württemberg), showing the emergence of a specific reception regime aimed at the control of movements of people on the move.

Paper long abstract:

Since the early 80s and more pronouncedly since the beginning of the XXI century, reception facilities for asylum seekers have started dotting the landscape of the EU. These facilities are most of the time located outside the urban centers and are characterized by a detrimentally low level of services (such as means of transportation, sanitary provisions, and cooking facilities). The living conditions within often verge on the uninhabitable, rising critiques from both civil society and (non-)institutional actors. Moreover, scholars and other actors have pointed out to which extent the strategic placement of camps generates illegal labor and hinder the integration of newly arrived people. Despite the hard criticisms, both the EU and EU Member States have continued turning peripheral facilities into huge hubs for the reception of asylum seekers. In this paper, the author compares the camps located in two different regions of the EU (Sicily and Baden-Württemberg) which represent two entry points: one into the EU as a whole, and the other into Germany (one of the most preferred destination). In this way, the paper shows the logistification process undergoing in the EU, taking into account the spatio-temporal dimension created by the camps, and how asylum seekers navigate this forced condition, often in unexpected ways.

Paper short abstract:

Based on the ethnography of an asylum seekers’ reception centre, this proposal suggests that what defines the camp form is not its spatial features but the state of infrastructural uncertainty that characterizes everyday life in asylum.

Paper long abstract:

Starting from an ethnographic vignette where an atypical use of the term camp appears, this paper aims to reflect on what defines the “camp form” (Rahola, 2006, p. 20) beyond its obvious spatial characteristics and where else its metamorphoses (Agamben, 1998) can be found. Such metamorphoses may assume different shapes (a house, a squat, a boat), take on different institutional statuses and still carry the ultimate feature of the camp: an indefinite state of suspension or infrastructural uncertainty. Such uncertainty translates into legal (transient administrative labels with their correspondent differential access to services and rights), spatial (regimes of forced mobility/immobility), temporal (lack of perspectives, waiting, stuckedness) and material terms (provisions policies designed to create dependence). It permeates the regime of state hospitality for asylum seekers, being hospitality understood here as a practice of sovereignty and control over the stranger and an expression of the moral superiority of the host, to whom the guest holds a subordinate position and a deep indebtedness. Ethnography reveals that, even when state hospitality takes the more humane appearance of private shelter apartments, as in the case study presented here, it still works as a “technology of care and control” (Malkki, 1992, p. 34). Therefore, it confirms the notion that the camp is “more than a structure or a physical space; it constitutes a set of methods” (Rozakou, 2012, p. 568). This proposal hypothesises that the production and maintenance of a state of infrastructural uncertainty in aid recipients are pivotal to the camp as a method.

Paper short abstract:

The quarantine camp works as a mixed medical and military form of nationalizing borderwork against a threatening outside. In this paper focus is on how medical control was performed when former concentration camp prisoners were received in Sweden in 1945 at the end of World War II.

Paper long abstract:

During World War II Sweden, as a neutral country, hosted a great number of refugees. The country had more than one hundred refugee camps within its borders during this time. These camps were different in size and function. Some were relatively open and housed refugees from occupied neighborhood countries such as Denmark and Norway. Others were more closed and kept individuals who for different reasons were suspected to be a threat against society. A specific type of camp was the quarantines that in the end of the war were situated close to big harbors on the national border and operated as a security measurement against the possible spread of infectious diseases such as typhus, diphtheria, and tuberculosis. In spring and summer 1945 former concentration camp prisoners were e.g. placed in quarantine camps for a number of weeks in this way before they continued to more permanent camps in the inland of Sweden. Characteristic for these quarantines was the medical control of each step that the former prisoners took on Swedish soil, the testing of the individuals for different diseases and infections, and the spatial and social isolation of the refugees from the rest of society. In this paper I want to focus on the quarantine camps as a form of biopolitical management and health securitization of the national border.

Paper short abstract:

Tracing the spatio-temporal transformations of the EU Hotspot Approach, the contribution provides a comparative analysis of Hotspot camps in Greece and Italy as infrastructures of control underpinned by logics of racialisation.

Paper long abstract:

The Hotspot Approach, introduced in 2015 by the European Commission and implemented by Greece and Italy, is a flexible, yet powerful device for the classification, channelling and detention of migrants. As such, it forms a core element of the European Union's efforts to govern migration at its external border. Since its inception, however, the Hotspot Approach has been subject to a range of legal, political and practical transformations, resulting in widely diverging trajectories not only between the national contexts of Greece and Italy, but among the actual sites of Hotspot camps too.

Against this backdrop, our contribution traces the developments of the Hotspot Approach across space and time through the interplay of law and practice. For this, we understand the infrastructural manifestations of the Hotspot Approach in Greece and Italy as camps and analyse them in terms of different forms of spatial and temporal governance. The paper provides a comparative analysis of the differences and similarities between different Hotspot camps in Italy and Greece, highlighting their changing functions as infrastructures of (im)mobilisation, control and care. Since migrants' (assumed) nationalities are mobilised as a crucial element for the Hotspot procedures, our contribution furthermore interrogates the modes of racialisation at play here and how these are shaped by different legal and political frameworks.