What is fema camp

Rodgers, Ann. Zarend-Kubatko, Jill. Military Commissions Act of Scott, Peter Dale. Remember Me. Username or Email. Backgrounders October 24, Backgrounders April 11, Backgrounder: Boko Haram. Backgrounders January 24, But the latest crackdown has new features. What else could tempt states to open camps? In her book Expulsions, the sociologist Saskia Sassen argues that the particular form of globalisation the world has experienced in recent decades — driven by a new form of laissez-faire economics — has unleashed a dangerous new dynamic that excludes large numbers of people from economic and social life.

In poorer parts of the world, this means mass displacement and the warehousing of migrants as they try to move elsewhere. One result of these global pressures has been the rise of political movements that promise to shore up national, religious or ethnic identities.

But identities are ambiguous, and when governments start using the tools of state power to reinforce the line between insider and outsider, there are always large numbers of people who get caught in between.

In India, the government of Narendra Modi has been trying to reshape the country along Hindu nationalist lines, undermining the secular and pluralist principles that have held sway since independence. The emerging camps in Assam, a north-eastern state on the border with Bangladesh, are a result: they target thousands of mainly Muslim residents who may have lived in India for decades, but because they originally came from across the border in Bangladesh — a legacy of partition — have never been registered as citizens.

The understandable response when confronted with injustice is to look for someone to blame. But particularly in liberal democracies, the chains of responsibility can be complex.

Who, for instance, is responsible for the arbitrary imprisonment, torture and slave-labour conditions that migrants and refugees in Libya are subjected to? The immediate answer seems fairly simple: the state officials and local militias, some linked to trafficking networks, who run the detention centres. Thousands of people, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, are imprisoned in a network of these centres where they are regularly subjected to starvation, disease, torture, rape, and forced labour.

But the reason those detention centres exist is because a range of European governments have been trying to get Libya to act as a block on unwanted migration across the Mediterranean for almost 20 years. The system was built with European support, both from national governments and at EU level — first through agreements with the government of Muammar Gaddafi, then, as the country collapsed after he was overthrown by a Nato-backed uprising , a patchwork of arrangements with state officials and local militias.

There is no shortage of information about what happens in Libyan detention centres — and European governments frequently profess their horror at the atrocities committed there. The political consensus in most European countries, including the UK, is that limiting unwanted migration is a reasonable and desirable aim, and large numbers of their citizens have voted in support of it.

When Zygmunt Bauman turned his attention to camps in the 90s, he argued that what characterises violence in our age is distance — not just the physical or geographical distance that technology allows, but the social and psychological distance produced by complex systems in which it seems everybody and nobody is complicit. This, for Bauman, works on three levels. Second, everybody involved has a specific, focused job to perform.

And third, the people affected hardly ever appear fully human to those within the system. W hen something today is described as a concentration camp, it almost always provokes an angry dispute.

But condemnation can be a way for governments to shield themselves from criticism of their decisions, and from criticism of the legitimacy of state power itself. Reports of overcrowding, filthy conditions and the denial of due process for asylum claims soon followed, accompanied by measures that seemed intended to make a symbolic display of cruelty, such as the separation of young children from their parents. Some pointed out, for instance, that Trump was only making modifications to a system built by his predecessors: deportations of undocumented immigrants, for instance, reached their peak under Barack Obama.

In , when the British empire went to war against two breakaway Afrikaner republics in South Africa, it set up a network of camps that quickly expanded to detain several hundred thousand people.

Due to poor sanitation, meagre food rations and overcrowding, diseases such as typhoid and measles frequently ripped through the camps; at least 28, white people and 20, black people were killed by this system in just a few years. But the grounds on which they did so were radically different, as the author Vron Ware has recently argued.

But for Hobhouse, who was the first prominent activist to visit South Africa and expose conditions in the camps, British military values and the nationalism that underpinned them were the fundamental problem. She was challenging the legitimacy of state power itself.

The point of historical comparisons should not be to find identical situations — no two events in history are identical — but to alert us to potential dangers in the way states exercise power.

The movement calls itself Never Again Action , explicitly drawing on a collective memory of persecution. In his final book, The Drowned and the Saved, the Auschwitz survivor and author Primo Levi reflected on the conditions that had made the Nazi camps possible, and wondered what lessons, if any, could be applied to a world that had moved on.

The unique combination of factors that had unleashed the horror of Nazism was unlikely to return, he thought, but that should not obscure the danger of violence in our own time, or the politicians who seek to wield it. I f the state as we know it is here to stay, then what can people do when governments start building camps?

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