Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 11/2009

The Offshore Camps of the European Union: At the Border of Humanity

Miriam Ticktin

March 2009

The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs

Abstract

Immigrant and asylum-seeker camps like those in Libya and Morocco are the creation, manifestation, and part of the new, borderless Europe. They consist of a new post-colonial, new-liberal border-zone, a space continuously negotiated by the movement of people, new forms of surveillance technology, and new processes of supranational government. The camps are a response to both a “security” and “humanitarian” crisis, brought into reality through two governing regimes: one of policing and one of protection. The precise mechanisms produce spaces which not only divide people into citizens of one nation-state or another, but produce certain populations as surplus humans. Miriam