Different concepts abound of what a refugee camp is or is not. We come across descriptions of specific camps when reading about the hundred thousands of refugees that have fled from Darfur into eastern Chad. We see images from the camps of Dadaab in Kenya close to the Somalian border, described to be the largest in the world when reporting on the conflicts in war torn Somalia. Refugee camps are referenced when reporting on natural catastrophes and the attempts of the victims to establish new livelihoods. They are often used in comparison with slums and the vast shantytowns that are located on the fringes of many African or South American cities. The image of refugee camps are evoked when describing authoritarian spaces of control such as prison camps, Guantanamo Bay, foreign worker camps or sometimes even gated communities. While all these different typologies of spaces share certain characteristics that could be summarized under the notions of control and exception the difference between them remains unclear. Many authors even play with the seeming openness of the term ‘camp’. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, writes in his book Homo Sacer: “Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.”  A little bit further on he continues: “The camp is the space that is opened, when the state of exception begins to become the rule. In the camp, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law […] is now given a permanent spatial arrangement […]” With this he means to say that the camp is the spatial manifestation and the central mechanism of the state of exception, which has come to define the political structure of our Western world. He goes on to write: “The camp as dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living, and it is this structure of the camp which we must learn to recognize in all its metamorphoses into the zones d‘attentes of our airports and certain outskirts of our cities.”  The same rules and logics of the camp can therefore be identified within holding areas of our airports or the banlieus of our cities. Agamben here comes dangerously close to a generalization. Even if it is true that biopolitical operations of our society are active in refugee camps as well as in slums or detention centers, the individual problems that are triggered by each of those cases remain unrecognized and the specific nature of a refugee camp seems more opaque as ever. It seems that refugee camps are rarely considered as an independent category. Instead, even though central, they seem to be conditioned by, and referenced through, other seemingly similar categories of spaces.

Nevertheless if we do try to look at how refugee camps for themselves are understood we can identify three different predominant notions in the contemporary discourse and in today’s media landscape: They are seen as humanitarian spaces where lives are saved. They are conceived of as spaces of control where all aspects of the refugee’s lives are supervised by other institutions. Lastly they are depicted as spaces of destitution and misery. These three ways of representing and describing refugee camps do not exclude each other, but often coexist or complement each other.