Public Camp Orders and the Power of Microstructures in the Thai-Burmese Borderland

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 material and social history of camps (one of the great strengths of the book) Bochmann demonstrates that what she calls the “microstructures” of camp life—temporal discipline, communication systems, camp secrets, surveillance, mobility, and so on—are always an integral part of the form and function of camps themselves. This frame, grounded in her ethnographic fieldwork in refugee camps in Thailand, produces a broader series of interventions in camp theory itself.The body chapters of the book begin with an examination of the historical context of camps along the Myanmar and Thailand border. Pointing out that Myanmar is the largest landmass in mainland Southeast Asia, with a population of over fifty million, Bochmann shows how the British colonial legacy and decolonial, national, and regional dynamics, coupled with forms of nested sovereignty and resource claims, and ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences all play a role in making contemporary Myanmar one of the most contentious nations in Southeast Asia. She also describes how a global humanitarian discourse, the United Nations, and Thai authorities played a role in the construction of camps for displaced peoples from Myanmar. The built environment and rules designed by these authorities shape, but do not fully determine, the basic organization and governance of camps divided into sections and centered on ration stores. This is where, to reprise Foucault's conceptualization of biopolitics, “rules from above are replaced by norms within the population” (18).Utilizing an examination of the announcements broadcast in camp sections over a public address system, subsequent chapters then examine how camp residents establish temporality and flexible forms of order by utilizing communications infrastructure. The use of the public address system facilitates both what Goffman refers to as an “underlife” (8), where residents utilize the power of camp infrastructure at their own discretion—issuing private requests in public and public warnings regarding things like agency inspections—and forms of intersubjective pressure. This is at once an “equalizing process” (6), enacted on residents addressed in the announcements and, indirectly, their neighbors, that typifies camps as a “total institution,” and a technology that fosters communal belonging. As Bochmann notes, “by presenting private messages to the public, the public is disciplined as well” (75), but not necessarily in the manner that state authorities intend. Part of what is communicated via announcements and in formal section meetings are “camp secrets,” ways of communicating work-arounds of imposed rules from “them”—a placeholder used to refer to Thai and UN agency authorities (95). Because camp residents are not permitted to have telephones or formal jobs and are thus dependent on Thai business owners and rations to meet their basic needs, much of the focus of camp discipline centers on the flexible performance of norms for different outside audiences while maintaining precamp or community-generated status hierarchies.In the second half of the book Bochmann points out the architecture and ritualized use of equipment in the camp—a central store, with carefully positioned monitoring stations, bounded spaces and norms of food collector behavior, intricate accounting systems, and a scale for weighing rations (114–21)—all play a role in maintaining self-discipline and community-policed norms of behavior. These microstructures collectively are what produce much of the possibilities of behavior within the camp and beyond its borders. They establish a normalcy that belies the liminality with which camps are often characterized.Bochmann ends her study with a careful discussion of its theoretical importance. This is important because, while I find her discussion of the particularities of refugee camps in Thailand valuable in its own right, the theoretical contribution of the text as an examination of camp orders more generally is even more illuminating particularly for scholars examining camp systems in other contexts. The primary contribution of the book is its challenge to “theoretically and politically overloaded camp conceptions” (176). Bochmann does this by placing her analysis of her ethnographic data in conversation with an exhaustive reading of the literature on concentration camps, labor camps, and so on, making the implications of her findings so much richer.Bochmann is not only intervening in studies of refugee camps in Asia and the Global South but also pointing out the necessity of thinking from the perspective of the governed within all types of camps—even those where access to empirical observation is limited by more totalizing forms of control. In a manner similar to Partha Chatterjee's (2004) reconceptualization of biopolitics and governmentality in noncamp contexts,2 Bochmann is demonstrating that thinking from the ground up is necessary to theorize claims about what life in a state of exception actually means. For all these reasons, Bochmann's work is an essential text for understanding contemporary camp orders and life within them.

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