Topographies of the undesired: Tracing the camp from colonial confinement to digital control in the EU asylum regime

Abstract

This article traces the evolution of the asylum camp in the European Union as a spatial and political technology of control, from its colonial origins to its contemporary digital form. Drawing on a historical and geographical genealogy of camps, it explores how mechanisms of segregation, containment, and racialised labour management—first developed in colonial and totalitarian regimes—have been repurposed within the EU asylum system. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Sicily between 2018 and 2021, the article examines how reception centres and hotspots function not merely as sites of detention but as nodes in a broader network of surveillance, biometric registration, and mobility governance. Through the lens of custodianship, the paper shows how contemporary camps blend humanitarian care with coercive control, enacting what Deleuze terms a “society of control.” It argues that today's asylum infrastructure no longer relies on fixed boundaries or mass internment, but instead operates through digital enclosures, legal ambiguities, and spatial marginalisation. By situating empirical observations within a critical genealogy of the camp, the article contributes to debates on bordering, biopolitics, and the postcolonial condition of asylum in Europe.