Abstract

The UNHCR (2006) has expressed concern about “the securitization of migration,” especially the fortification of borders, long periods of detention in camps, and the “off-shore” processing of refugees. Anthropologists are attending to how nation-states control migrants and, indeed, categorize them as refugees and asylum seekers. Research has also explored detention centres as assemblages of humanitarian care and state security, often drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben to disclose the operations of power and an “anthropology of suffering.” But asylum seekers have too often been represented as voiceless victims, capable only of accommodating power or occasionally resisting it. Alternative research frames are possible, and alternative visions are available within and beyond “the camp” as the political space of modernity. Ireland offers interesting insights in this regard.