Deconstructing the concept of camp governance toward practice-based theory building on post-disaster relocation

This article posits a simple, yet provocative, argument: post-disaster relocation sites are camps characterized by “incompleteness” where multiple actors seek to govern. The discursive framing of relocation sites as long-term solutions where residents are safe from natural hazards and integrate into their new communities suggests that relocation sites are not camps. Within these camp spaces, diverse actors attempt sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, forms of governance. Conceptualizing post-disaster relocation sites as camps allows us to scrutinize the governing practices that shape socio-spatial relations and subjectivities of disaster-affected people long after a “solution” to their initial displacement has supposedly been attained. By privileging the notion of “incompleteness” over “finishedness,” we better understand the tangible and invisible forces that inflect disaster recovery efforts, on one hand, and the regulations, negotiations, and resistances that transpire within these post-disaster spaces, on the other. Drawing on empirical studies of relocation sites in the Philippines and Japan, we examine camp governance. We deploy three conceptual filters—politics of loss, spatial forms and practices, and resistance—to study the assemblages of rules that shape life in resettlement sites, the unrecognized modes of meaning-making, the affects entangled in socio-spatial practices and encounters with material forms, and the resistances to prescribed “ways to live.” Such analyses explain why relocation sites are camps, and what are the implications of obscuring this conceptualization.