Custodianship in Camps and Necropolitics
March 2023, Belgrade, Serbia, Words by: Charlotte Hutton
The camp systems carefully balance 'care' and 'control.'
Camps designed to accommodate refugees ultimately exercise containment and control over camp populations, who are effectively excluded from society and rendered as bodies that must be governed and regulated. In Serbia, camps often allow for the relative freedom of movement. However, most camps are isolated and often inaccessible by public transport.
Furthermore, people on the move can only access official or state-sponsored services if registered in the camps. EU funding to Serbia is also contingent on people residing in official camps. This selectivity erodes people's agency on the move, rendering them invisible through the erasure of their presence in public spaces. Researchers found that in Krnjaca, located on the outskirts of Belgrade, custodianship of camp residents is exercised through regulations managing their mobility, everyday conduct, possessions and activities whilst simultaneously exerting a degree of leniency, for example, by allowing people to go on 'game' and return to the camp.
This arbitrariness represents the spatial control that the Serbian state operates over PoM, whereby camps represent a crucial component of Serbia's (and the EU's) migration regime, which purposefully executes an equilibrium of hospitality and detention.
Informal settlements emerged - such as the Belgrade barracks and the old brick factory in Subotica - as a direct consequence of the state's attempt to control and regulate people's movements and the tightening of restrictions on asylum legislation and aid provision.
In makeshift camps and squats near Serbia's northern border, the state operates an interplay of intervention and non-intervention. Scholars have identified this as a 'continuum of violent inaction' based on a form of governance that effectively abandons people to everyday existence where they can live in harmful spatial environments.
With the rise of evictions in the north, local NGOs have observed the detrimental effect that the destruction of living sites and personal belongings has on people on the move residing in informal settlements. Unfortunately, in Serbia, the state has operated control and power by deliberately withholding care and 'turning a blind eye' to the conditions in informal settlements.
Along the Western Balkan migratory route and across Europe more broadly, refugees and people on the move are forced to exist on the margins of society, frequently in uninhabitable conditions without access to necessities and limited human rights protections.
The militarisation of EU external borders represents a form of colonial violence underpinned by racialised logic of inclusion and exclusion. Through concealing the brutality of the border regime, Europe attempts to project a liberal image of itself to obscure its very contradictions.
‘Biopower’ refers to the Foucauldian (1978, 1997) idea that power is exercised primarily over people’s bodies and lives. Mbembe (2003) introduced the concept of ‘necropolitics’ to refer to the deliberately abject conditions and the ‘state of exception’ created when states govern through biopower in specifically racialisedracialised ways. Through maintaining specific populations in a state of ‘permanent injury and suffering’, Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics refers to how violence is administered through form (in)action.
Although fortified border walls, fences, and biometric border processes represent a prominent component of EU migration policy, necropolitics suggests that migration management also includes violent inaction towards human suffering. In effect, this means leaving people to live in conditions unsustainable for human life. In northern Serbia and Calais, people on the move have been ‘abandoned to informal existence’ in a state of temporal permanence, where authorities intentionally turn a blind eye to uninhabitable living conditions (Davies et al., 2017).
Through a framework of necropolitics, power is exercised as a means of control through deliberate inaction towards the violent situations in which people on the move have been forced to exist. In cities, too, the biopolitical surveillance and regulation of refugee bodies take the form of restricting the use of public space and forcibly displacing people into camps or informal makeshift settlements, as evidenced in the evictions of Belgrade’s city parks. The interplay between intervention and non-intervention, visibility and invisibility, is essential to the EU’s migration management regime. This effective form of ‘non-existence’ is legitimised through racialised rhetorics that keep people in a state of injury and permanent wounding.
Collective Aid works to provide food, clothing, hygiene products, and warm showers, but especially to give solidarity to people on the move who the state has left to exist in inhumane conditions at Europe’s borders.
Resources: Davies, T., Isakjee, A., and Dhesi, S. (2017). ‘Violent Inaction: The Necropolitical Experience of Refugees in Europe’, Antipode, 49(5), pp.1263-1284. Collins, J., Minca, C., and Carter-White, R. (2022). ‘The camp as a custodian institution: the case of Krnjaca Asylum Centre, Belgrade, Serbia’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography. Obradovic-Wochnik, J. (2018). ‘Urban geographies of refugee journeys: Biopolitics, neoliberalism and contestation over public space in Belgrade’, Political Geography;
Further reading: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anti.12325 Necropolitics - https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-abstract/15/1/11/31714/Necropolitics?redirectedFrom=fulltext This article also ties the idea of biopolitics to a specific Belgrade context - https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/161258183.pdf