Hybrid Spaces of Nonselection in World Society: Camps as Global Infrastructure

Borders are often understood as mechanisms of selecting and ordering. Camps, however, are sites where nonselection is materialised – a condition in which people are neither selected nor rejected, but held in indefinite suspension. This article argues that camps are integral components of the global border infrastructure rather than exceptional or temporary responses to crises. They reveal a border logic that systematically produces permanent interim spaces where people live, navigate, and contest this condition. The article brings theoretical frameworks of camp studies across diverse global contexts into dialogue. Rather than treating these as competing perspectives, the article argues that their combination reveals how global structures become situated through the interplay of legal suspension, institutional norms, temporality, material infrastructures, and local practices. The common denominator of all theoretical approaches is that camps are understood as deeply problematic by design. Yet, camps are and will remain products of a global order while they are shaped by local microstructures and the everyday practices of those who live and work within them. Therefore, camps are a paradigmatic case for how bordering not only produces order but systematically produces conditions of indeterminacy. Every border drawn produces what cannot be contained by it.