In her recent study of social order and power relations in refugee camps along the Thai-Burmese border, sociologist Annett Bochmann draws from existing scholarship on the political theory and sociology of camp structures and her ethnographic fieldwork to show how camps are lived in practice. By reading Michel Foucault's (2012) monumental work on the discursive power of carceral institutions and Georgio Agamben's (2005) examination of the political order of camp systems in tension with Erving Goffman's (1961) schematic of social behavior within “total institutions,” Bochmann shows how each approach is strengthened by the other and by empirical study.1 In practice, political orders and discursive power are enacted within such camp institutions not simply from a top-down—perpetrator-to-victim—binary frame but, rather, in the subjective in-between of life in the camp and the structured, “capillary” spread of power relations (183).
Starting from a careful reading of the extensive German-language scholarship on the...
