This Introduction to the special issue develops a theoretical argument around the interrelations of space and time in sites of confinement by exploring the relationships between ghettos, camps, places of detention, prisons and the like with a focus on those people who are confined, encamped, imprisoned, detained, stuck, or forcibly removed and who are doing their utmost to cope or escape. We explore how life is lived in and across these sites of confinement by focusing on the tactics of everyday life and hope while being mindful of how ever-present forms of abjection, even death are constitutive elements of these sites. Stuckness, from this inter-disciplinary perspective, is not simply a function of the spatial form it takes. Crucially, the argument goes, we need to understand how temporality animates stuckness as an important dimension of confinement. KEYWORDS Stuckness; confinement; mobility; temporality; prison; camp; ghetto Loic Wacquant has observed that there are 'striking similarities and intriguing parallels' between prisons and ghettos (Wacquant 2001). Wacquant explores how prisons and ghettos constitute a single, unified system and investigates the structural similarities between them. Others, often historians, have similarly considered different sites of confinement (ghettos, townships, camps, leper colonies, etc.) under a single frame (Brown & Dikkoter 2007). In this special issue we pursue a novel argument about the relationship between ghettos, camps, places of detention, prisons and so on with a focus on those people who are confined, encamped, imprisoned, detained, stuck, or forcibly removed and who are doing their utmost to cope or escape. Collectively, the articles gathered here contribute to a theoretical argument about the interrelations of space and time in sites of confinement, while illuminating the subjective experience of confinement across different sites. 1 From a point of departure in anthropology and anthropological studies with important contributions from criminology, geography and philosophy, the contributions explore how life is lived in and across these sites of confinement by focusing on the tactics of everyday life and hope while being mindful of how ever-present forms of abjection, even death are constitutive elements of these sites.
This article develops an expansive notion of confinement as a lens through which to think about the lives of former prisoners, former fighters and slum dwellers in a post-conflict setting characterized by political volatility, exorbitant poverty and limited opportunities. The theoretical purpose of the article is to explore whether an expansive notion of confinement might help us make sense of the lives of people whose possibilities are limited materially, spatially and discursively. The intention-inspired by Loïc Wacquant, Zygmunt Bauman and archaeologist Eleanor Casella-is 'to move beyond the prison as the dominant optic for thinking about confinement'. The concept of confinement under development is illustrated with empirical examples culled from fieldwork in prisons and a poor urban neighbourhood in Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa. The orientation is towards confinement as site, practice and state of mind. The argument is that an expansive notion of confinement that attends to space, time, practices, meanings and states of mind is a useful way of thinking about the situated struggles of people living in prison and relative poverty.
Resisting 'The' PrisonThis chapter confronts the idea of 'the' prison, that is, prison as a fixed entity.However hard we, that is, prison scholars including ourselves, seek to deconstruct and critique specific aspects of confinement there is a tendency to slip into a default position that envisions the prison as something given and pre-understood. When it comes to prison our imagination seems to clog up. It is the political solution to its own failure, and the preferred metaphor for its own re-presentation. In this chapter we reflect on this state of affairs, and argue in light of this for a disavowal of 'the' prison.We attempt also to practice this disavowal by developing new angles of critical engagement. We hope the chapter might create space through which to dissolve the hegemonic and universalizing idea of 'the' prison. We aim to illustrate some of the problems of representing the prison, in which taken-for-granted aspects of its description pre-empt and co-opt critique, trapping us in the conundrum that Stan Cohen lamented: "Every attempt I ever made to distance myself from the subject, to criticize it, even to question its very right to exist, has only got me more involved in its inner life" (Cohen 1988, quoted in Rhodes 2001. The chapter is framed around two main questions. First, what holds the prison in place? What conceptual, material, representational and political practices constitute and entrench a particular prison-as-we-know-it? And second, what moves the prison out of place? That is, what alternative conceptualisations, political moves and
The COVID-19 pandemic has reconfigured personal, organisational and political landscapes in quite radical ways. This paper reflects on the differentiated impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and responses to it. We unpack some of the effects of the crisis on populations already subject to harassment, persecution and deprivation due to their marginal position in society or their resistance to state power. We illuminate how the current crisis is much more than a health crisis; the ways it exacerbates already existing deprivations; and how it might reveal hitherto unrecognised opportunities through which to make the world a more, rather than less, just and equitable place. Focus is on the way the crisis calls forth amplified forms of repression and consonantly amplified forms of vulnerability as well as reconfigured spaces for the operation of civil society organisations. We forward one key proposition, namely that while securitised responses to the crisis reveal an inherent conservatism, civil society responses reveal an agility and a capacity to innovate. While the inherent conservatism of securitised responses gives cause for serious concern, there is some hope to be found in the potential for innovation of civil society organisations. The revelation of humankind's shared vulnerability that is a feature of the crisis may serve as a springboard for the propagation of progressive change if we keep in mind the fundamentally human, and thus relational, nature of human rights and anti-torture work.
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