Title: Rethinking spaces of exception: notes from a forced migrant camp in Jammu and Kashmir

Authors: Ankur Datta

Addresses: Department of Sociology, South Asian University, Akbar Bhavan, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi 110021, India

Abstract: In recent years, the camp has emerged as a paradigm of social and political phenomena. This article seeks to engage with the camp as a fact of life and as a framework in the South Asian context. I will first draw on perspectives that have emerged from studies on forced migration and camps in South Asia. I will then draw on anthropological fieldwork I have conducted among Kashmiri Pandits displaced by conflict in the Kashmir valley since 1990, who lived in a displaced persons camp colony in the city of Jammu, Jammu and Kashmir until its closure in 2011. I will try to compare the notion of the state of exception with perspectives from the everyday lives of displaced Kashmiri Pandits, focusing on space and place. I argue that a theoretical framework for studying camps will benefit by paying attention to how forced migrants inhabit a space of 'exception'.

Keywords: state of exception; internal displacement; space; place; Jammu; Kashmir; South Asia; forced migrant camps; migrants; anthropology; displaced persons.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMBS.2016.075576

International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, 2016 Vol.2 No.2, pp.162 - 175

Received: 31 Jan 2015
Accepted: 25 Aug 2015
Published online: 28 Mar 2016 *

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