Camps and Enclaves: Palestine in the Time of Closure

Abstract

Refugee camps and enclaves share a conceptual family resemblance. In Palestine, what endows these forms of confinement with specificity is their deployment in a modern and protracted colonial context. This article asks how each speaks to the other experientially and theoretically. Further, how are they entangled with historical processes, intent and experience? Each period in Palestinian displacement entails particular immobilizing physical structures and administrative procedures. Can we compare enclaves and camps, and what are the limitations of comparison? What sorts of subjectivities emerge in these spaces? Questions are proposed about temporality, bare life, mobility, discipline and bio-power, and subjectivities. Enclaves compel thinking beyond the ‘bare life’ sometimes associated with refugee camps to explore other ways of being simultaneously inside and outside a state. Enclaves exist if a grey zone of legal and political indeterminacy that renders life in them is precarious.