Between Camps/Between Cities: Movement, Capture and Insurrectional Migrant Lives

Abstract

This essay examines insurrectional asylum-seeking and refugee practices that highlight and disturb the legal and spatial relationship between refugee camps, zones of capture, and cities. Through a critical consideration of the logic of the refugee camp and its intersection with the law, technology, security, and humanitarian discourses, we map a series of practices emerging from the proliferation of camps, the urbanization and normalization of refugee camps, and their virtualization and inscription on human bodies. The essay engages as well, insurrectional enactments and everyday movement(s) in Tel Aviv, Rome, and Nairobi that affirm today's refugees’ and asylum seekers’ right to the city. In doing so, we raise ethical and political questions about the equivalence of the rights of citizens and those of stateless persons and the entanglements between camps, cities, and camp-cities.