No Camp is a “Good Camp”: The Closed Controlled Access Centre on Samos as a Torturing Environment and Necropolitical Space of Uncare

Abstract

In a crisis-shaken globalised world, migration-related sites of detention emerge as a harmful figure of attempts to contain human mobility. The new Closed Controlled Access Centre (CCAC) on Samos is a blueprint for the EU's future border practices. While openly dehumanising conditions contributed to the previous “old camp” amounting to a torturing environment, the new remote and securitised CCAC promised safety and humanitarian care. Psycho-geographical counter-mappings by people living in the camps and of human rights defenders allow the reading of the hotspot camps as a built environment and social space. They expose how the violent neglect of the old camp transforms into the surveilled and weaponised space of yet another torturing environment. This time, it operates a necropolitical space of uncare that distributes harm differentially. The findings emphasise the abolitionist argument that camps cannot be turned into “better” places.