TY - JOUR AU - Overgaard, Heidi AB - Abstract Asylum policies in the Global North have increasingly turned towards populist policies of deterrence, as states attempt to make themselves seem as unattractive as possible to would-be asylum seekers. This article examines one such case: the tent camps for asylum seekers that were hastily erected in Denmark in early 2016. However, while the tent camps surely are an instance of symbolic politics, we argue that to understand their daily operation, attention must also be paid to their infrastructural qualities. Drawing on two months of fieldwork at a tent camp in Næstved, this article examines the ways in which asylum policy and infrastructure interact to shape the daily lives and interactions of camp residents and staff. We propose two paradoxical frames for the analysis, which we term ‘spectacular obscurity’ and ‘successful failure’. The tent camps were trumpeted as symbolic politics, while their daily operation remained obscured, only to burst in to scandal as reports emerged of threatening and violent behaviour on the part of the staff. The tent camps’ infrastructure was constantly failing, as both material and social support broke down, but at the same time these failures successfully formed the basis for the everyday interactions that structured life in the camps. We conclude by questioning the effect of the policies of deterrence as mediated through particular infrastructures, suggesting that the materialities of the tent camps played a more significant role than supposed by policy makers, and that paradoxes of infrastructure provide a useful perspective through which to analyse migration management more broadly. 1. Introduction This article examines a particular space of Danish asylum policy: the tent camps used to house asylum seekers, which were hastily erected in early 2016 and emptied later that year following a series of reports of the abuse of authority as well as a decrease in arrivals of asylum seekers. A full year after the last asylum seeker had left the camp, the tents still stood, inflated and heated behind their wire fence. The infrastructure of the camps remained, carefully maintained, officially as a reserve capacity for housing sudden influxes of asylum seekers. While the tent camps were exceptional, most obviously by breaking with the usual Danish asylum infrastructure, which houses asylum seekers in hard-roofed buildings, we argue that they also provide a useful lens through which to think about wider issues of populist asylum policy and the everyday lives of those living there. In particular, the tent camps were emblematic of a wider turn in asylum policies in the Global North towards making host countries seem as unattractive as possible to would-be asylum seekers. In this sense, they may be thought of as infrastructures of deterrence. The tent camps were controversial from their inception. As we will argue this controversy was a key component in their political function as symbolic spaces of policy, whereby criticism of the inhumanity of the camps served to undergird their function as deterrence measures. In fact, the tent camps were thought of as explosive in both a political and literal sense. Mikkel, a staff member at the Næstved tent camp, influenced by the attacks on asylum centres he had heard about in Germany and Sweden, was concerned for the flammable tents and fluids ‘if somebody decides to do something’. His colleague Kenneth, who had just finished his national service, added that ‘there are 200 litres of diesel by every tent, this is a real threat. And there is only a very small fence.’ The fencing, which was flimsy and removable, did not function as a form of protection for the residents of the camp; instead it demarcated difference. Compared to the neighbours, the camp’s residents were subject to different—lower—standards of living, safety, and privacy. The fence embodied the segregation between local residents and the subjects of the symbolic policy. Just as refugee camps have been characterized as spaces which are simultaneously open and closed (Turner 2016), inside and outside (Agamben 2000), Næstved tent camp was both situated within the town and marked as a separate entity by its tents and fencing. Much of the debate about the tent camps in Denmark ignored these infrastructural issues as well as the everyday lives of asylum seekers in the tent camps, instead focusing on more abstract issues such as the limits of humanitarianism and the purported disruptive influence of refugees on the welfare state. This controversy had profound consequences for the daily lives of asylum seekers placed there, not least through the mediation of the various staff members tasked with the daily operation of the camp. Broadly speaking, we argue that the tent camps may usefully be conceived as infrastructure which materializes, tests, and drives forward certain populist policy agendas, while at the same time shaping everyday lives and reflecting back on policy through their materiality and the practices they structured. We start by offering some background on the tent camps, including their policy context and their physical layout, before turning to our methodological approach. We then discuss the tent camps as a form of infrastructure, framing our thinking around two paradoxes, which we call ‘spectacular obscurity’ (while the tent camps were presented as spectacle, their everyday functioning was explicitly obscured) and ‘successful failure’ (while the tent camp infrastructure was routinely failing, this formed the basis for its actual daily functioning). These two paradoxes frame the following two analytical sections, which concern themselves both with the enactment of an explicitly restrictive asylum policy and with the everyday lives of the asylum seekers living in the camp. We end by considering the tent camps as a form of policy experiment (Jensen and Morita 2016), arguing that their success was at best ambiguous. 2. The Danish tent camps Denmark lies between Germany and Sweden, two of the top destinations for asylum seekers in Europe in 2015 and 2016. It is worth noting that despite media images of large numbers of asylum seekers walking on Danish highways during the latter part of 2015, estimated figures suggest that only 10–20 per cent of those who entered Denmark in that period actually applied for asylum there (DR 2015; Statistics Denmark 2015). In other words, Denmark functioned in large part as a transit country for refugees trying to reach Sweden (and to a lesser extent Norway and Finland) from Germany. This was explicitly framed by Danish government officials as a result of the relative unattractiveness of Denmark as a host country. As the Danish Minister for Foreigners, Integration and Housing, Inger Støjberg, put it during a visit with her Norwegian counterpart to the Næstved tent camp: ‘We are the country with the lowest number of arrivals [of asylum seekers] out of the countries to which we compare ourselves, and that is most certainly because of the conditions of stay we offer.’ (Information 2016; our translation). Given the Danish government’s explicit aim of deterring asylum seekers from lodging asylum claims in Denmark, Danish asylum policy was and is very responsive to changes in the policies of its two neighbours. Danish asylum policy has become increasingly restrictive in the past decades, as Danish politicians have pushed the limits of international conventions when maintaining low standards in the asylum system (Danish Institute for Human Rights 2016: 10). As Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen (2017) argues, these restrictions are increasingly carried out through what he calls ‘indirect deterrence measures’. These measures, in contrast with actual refusal of entry to state territory, are ‘designed to make the asylum system and protection conditions appear as unattractive as possible, thereby achieving a “beggar-thy-neighbour” effect in pushing asylum-seekers towards other countries’ (Gammeltoft-Hansen 2017: 100). Gammeltoft-Hansen calls this a form of ‘negative national branding’, whereby the Danish state actively promotes—and in some cases even oversells—its unattractiveness as a receiving state. Recent examples include high profile measures, such as the Danish government taking out advertisements in Lebanese newspapers in September 2015 to communicate the restrictiveness of Danish asylum policy (these ads were later criticized as misleading by the Danish Ombudsman [Ombudsmanden 2015]) and the contentious so-called ‘jewellery law’ (Amendment to the Danish Aliens Act, Law No. 102, 3 February 2016), which mandated impounding valuables from refugees to help pay for the processing of their cases. At the same time, a range of less high-profile measures has arguably had a greater impact on the lives of refugees granted asylum in Denmark by limiting their right to family reunification, reducing their financial benefits to about half of the lowest level available to Danes, and restricting access to permanent residence and citizenship. A key point about all these sorts of measures is that attacks on their restrictiveness or inhumanity largely serve to broadcast the negative branding that motivated their adoption in the first place. The tent camps are usefully conceived in this vein. Their introduction was in part a response to Sweden’s establishment of a tent camp in the autumn of 2015 to address a lack of short-term housing for new arrivals. The Swedish camp was shut down after one month, however, in favour of cheaper and more long-term solutions. The Danish tent camps, by contrast, lingered, despite the higher costs and poorer conditions. According to government figures, the cost of housing asylum seekers in tent camps in Denmark was about 50 per cent higher per person than in the normal system under hard roofs. More broadly, the Danish Red Cross argued that the tent camps were pure symbolic politics and further disputed that they were necessary given sufficiency of normal houses (DR 2016a). All of this suggests that the establishment of the Danish tent camps was in large part motivated by the kind of negative branding exercise that Gammeltoft-Hansen (2017) describes. However, we want to argue that the camps were also distinct from other indirect deterrence measures, not least through their infrastructure, which structured the daily lives of the asylum seekers living there. In other words, while there was a general, populist asylum policy of deterrence, the ways in which this policy played out on the ground was very much bound up in the specific infrastructures put in place to achieve it. In Denmark, asylum seekers are normally housed in asylum centres while they wait for their cases to be determined. The Danish Immigration Service is responsible for this task, but they subcontract it out to asylum operators [asyloperatører]. Traditionally, the Danish Red Cross has run the majority of asylum centres; however, in the past decade a handful of rural municipalities have started to operate more and more asylum centres. Currently, nearly two-thirds of Danish asylum centres are run by other operators than the Red Cross. The centres are often placed in former schools, retirement homes, and similar buildings, often in rural parts of Denmark. They mostly house a few hundred asylum seekers, often with about four to a room, sharing bathroom and kitchen facilities. Asylum seekers are barred from employment and education, but receive a small stipend, commonly called ‘pocket money’ to cover basic expenses. While they are in principle allowed to leave the centres during the day, the combination of the often-remote location of the centres and the asylum seekers’ lack of money effectively keeps most of them in place. Waiting in the asylum centres is at once uncertain, stressful, and intensely boring, and many asylum seekers spoke with frustration of wasting their time, as they sat about drinking tea, smoking cigarettes and watching TV (Whyte 2011). This waiting time also has serious mental health effects on the asylum seekers, as has also been documented elsewhere (Filges et al. 2016). The Danish tent camps were first introduced to the public via images of asylum seekers moving into snow-clad tents during the winter of 2015. They were set up in four towns across the country (Thisted, Haderslev, Herning and Næstved) on the grounds of Danish Emergency Management Agency (DEMA) regional support centres, but were operated by four different rural municipalities. DEMA provided the grounds and set up and maintained the tents, while the municipalities staffed and ran the camps. They had a combined capacity of 2,000 places, of which 1,000 were in actual tents rather than barracks or dormitories. The tent camps never ran at full capacity, however, and they never accounted for any significant number of places in the Danish asylum system. We estimate that no more than 600 asylum seekers were actually staying in the tents at the height of their use, out of a total of some 16,000 asylum seekers in Denmark, housed in more than 100 asylum centres. Nevertheless, they came to dominate political debates about asylum in Denmark. This study is based on research in one of the tent camps, located in an upper middle-class suburb of the town of Næstved. Our research began in early 2016, when the temperature was still regularly dropping below freezing, a particularly uncomfortable period for the camp residents who had to walk up to 200 metres from the tents to the toilets and shower blocks which were located in non-insulated portacabins. With eight people to a tent, group shower areas, and very little indoor space for recreation, the possibility of privacy was virtually non-existent. The camp, surrounded by a flimsy wire fence, consisted of 52 yellow tents erected on a sports field covered in woodchip; two sets of portacabins containing toilets and showers; an indoor sleeping hall—formerly a sports hall—with space for 110 men in bunk beds; three rooms for 75 women, also in bunk beds; two food tents; a games portacabin; a shipping container and a small wooden hut for smoking; a staff room; a security checkpoint; and an empty two-storey portacabin building used for the purpose of distributing clothes. The tents were six by eight metre tunnel tents, owned by DEMA. They are officially called ‘base camps’ and are primarily used during missions abroad (Beredskabsstyrelsen 2015). They are designed to accommodate eight people with a bed and locker each. The physical design of the tent camps was often criticised by residents. Khaled, a single man from Afghanistan and one of the first residents to move to the camp, explained: ‘There are two main problems about living in the tents. First, it is not soundproof. You are easily awakened, as people walk outside 24 hours a day. Second, there is no privacy, there is only a small space between the beds, just a two cm thick sheet of plywood between every second bed.’ As the weather got warmer, several wooden benches were also erected for residents to sit outside. With these warmer temperatures, however, the temperatures inside the tents became increasingly intolerable. Year round, warm air was blown into the tents by generators located between the tents together with diesel containers, to prevent mould. The residents were not allowed to regulate the heating in the tents themselves, nor were they allowed to have the openings of the tents unzipped, which meant that there was never fresh or cool air in them. Residents regularly commented on the difficulties of sleeping or spending time in these tents as a result of constant noise, smells and the temperature. Whilst expressing gratitude for having a place to stay, many of the residents were surprised that the tents were not simply short-term accommodation; as Khaled put it, ‘I thought I should stay here two or three nights, but I’m still here’ [after 45 days in the camp]. The tent camp in Næstved was also unusual for the harshness of the staff regime, even in relation to the other Danish tent camps. The head of the camp, who called himself the ‘chief’, regularly threatened and harassed residents, browbeating them loudly in public and imposing a variety of sanctions from cleaning toilets to confiscating identity cards. Following a public exposure of the chief’s threatening behaviour towards residents, including the release of a secretly filmed video of him and two other centre staff putting an asylum seeker in a leg lock, as well as the revelation that he had a two-year old conviction for violence against children in a previous leadership position, he was relieved of his position five months after the tent camp opened. 3. Methodology The empirical data that forms the basis of this qualitative study was collected over a two-month period during the spring of 2016. We gained access to the camp via an employee, after a month of being redirected between different departments, and were granted relative freedom provided that we registered our arrival, wore guest cards, and always had a prearranged meeting with a resident. Semi-structured interviews and informal conversations were conducted with a total of 65 informants, consisting of 14 staff members and 51 residents (at that time around a quarter of the camp’s residents, representing 10 nationalities). Rumour and uncertainty are characteristic aspects of the Danish asylum system (Whyte 2002), and the general situation of asylum seekers living in asylum centres, under the control of a system, which to them is both unfamiliar and unpredictable (Mackenzie et al. 2007), provides a solid basis for misunderstandings. Information collected was verified using triangulation (Lund 2014: 226–7)—that is, by discussing the same issue or event with multiple, independent informants—to gauge how prevalent certain issues were in the camp environment, as well as to attempt to compensate for any linguistic misunderstandings that might have arisen from our conversations being conducted in English. Interviews and conversations were combined with participant observation, whereby we spent time with residents in the different spaces of the camp. Due to the lack of privacy within the camp, spaces outside of the camp’s boundaries became more attractive environments for conducting interviews and spending time with informants. The camp was an extremely stressful place for residents, something we also came to appreciate. The atmosphere within the camp was quite literally unpleasant that spring; the cold outside air contrasting with the heavy artificial warmth and strange humidity of the tents. Residents were clearly uncomfortable about being overheard during our conversations. Further, the militarized surroundings and the absence of any form of safe or comfortable space in the camp affected both the content and possibilities for conversations with residents. It was as if the infrastructure and the uncertainty of the camp as a social space folded into one another. We were also conscious that, by being in the camp and asking questions, we contributed to the paranoid environment. Our presence may have given false hope to individual asylum cases or for positive changes within the camp; we may have even stirred up anger without the possibility for a productive outlet (Mackenzie et al. 2007). Mohammed, who had fled Syria from ISIS, warned us: ‘You will set us on a collision course with the staff and then leave.’ We therefore constantly reflected on our own positions within the camp and discussed our roles with the residents (Darling 2014). We found that the overwhelming majority of our informants expressed a desire to be listened to and heard, which we aligned with the importance of speaking to those who are disempowered (Mackenzie et al. 2007). Staff were in general less concerned about our role as researchers, though the (former) head of the camp refused to allow us to interview him, or quote or use anything he said to us. During our fieldwork, and after many conversations with residents as well as staff members, we realized the full severity of the behaviour of the head of the camp, which had induced an overwhelming atmosphere of fear. In part because of the volatile nature of our field, we have thoroughly anonymized all our informants. All names used are pseudonyms, and we have obscured personal details of both residents and staff. 4. Infrastructures of populist policy The creation of tent camps in Denmark marked both a continuation and a rupture of Danish asylum policy. On the one hand, shifting Danish governments have held the reduction in numbers of asylum seekers as central policy objectives. This has been achieved, as we argued above, through a range of policies across the asylum and integration fields, designed to make Denmark a ‘less attractive’ destination. This development has arguably been ongoing since Denmark’s first Aliens Act from 1983, which was hailed by proponents at the time as among the most liberal in the world. On the other hand, the tent camps also marked a deliberate rupture with the Danish system of maintaining asylum seekers in houses. This rupture was in significant part marked by a changed infrastructure: the use of tents rather than buildings to make a symbolic political point. It is worth reflecting here on the terminological contrast between ‘asylum centres’ and ‘camps’. While the structures used to house asylum seekers are commonly called ‘camps’ by asylum seekers themselves, both the state and the Danish Red Cross have insisted on calling them ‘asylum centres’ (Whyte 2002). By contrast, the tent camps were called ‘camps’ by all parties from the outset. They were run by uniformed staff and were enclosed by wire fences in a sign of the general shift from care to control, explicitly expressed by staff. In this sense, the establishment of the tent camps served as a materialization of an escalating policy of asylum deterrence: an infrastructural response to a purported crisis. Broadly speaking, infrastructural policies arguably provide the logical response to the populist language of ‘waves’ and ‘flows’ of migrants. In the same way that the risk of floods calls for the building of dykes, ‘floods of migrants’ call for building walls and camps. By the same token, the building of infrastructure points back to and reiterates these ‘risks’, thus at once responding to and creating the conditions for their construction. In the following, we draw on an understanding of infrastructures as ‘extended material assemblages that generate effects and structure social relations, either through engineered (i.e., planned and purposefully crafted) or non-engineered (i.e., unplanned and emergent) activities’. (Harvey et al. 2017: 22). In this sense, infrastructure brings together both the policies that are made material in it and the everyday experiences of those forced to live with it, bearing in mind Star’s point that: ‘One person’s infrastructure is another’s … difficulty’ (Star 1999: 380). Further, drawing on.the assertion that ‘Any theory of infrastructure … ought to be a theory of paradox’ (Howe et al. 2016: 559), we consider two paradoxes animating the tent camps, which we term ‘spectacular obscurity’ and ‘successful failures’. The first paradox, ‘spectacular obscurity’, speaks to the visibility of infrastructure. Infrastructure often remains invisible, at least when it works (Graham and Thrift 2007). However, as Larkin (2013) notes, infrastructure may equally be trumpeted as spectacle, evidence of the state’s mastery and control in particular domains (cf Schwenkel 2015). This was very much the case for the Danish tent camps, which were opened under vast media attention and rehearsed political posturing, explicitly responding to and marking a ‘time of crisis’. Harvey and colleagues note that there has been a tendency in academic literatures to read infrastructures as ‘surfaces from which social, cultural, or political motives could be decoded’ (Harvey et al. 2017: 20). This, they rightly argue, distracts from the invisible, everyday work infrastructures perform. But this is not just an academic failing. Danish politicians were, in a sense, also explicitly encouraging readings of the tent camps as surfaces from which politics should be decoded by a double audience. On the one hand, they were presented as a symbol of action and mastery to the Danish public, tempered by an ambiguous recurring insistence on upholding minimal humanitarian standards. On the other, they were meant to deter would-be asylum seekers from coming to Denmark. While the tent camps were thus very much a spectacle of Danish asylum policy, this spectacularity went hand in hand with a persistent lack of attention to the materialities and logistics of their daily operation. Arguably, this lack of attention was a key part of the tent camps as spectacle. Indeed, as we will show, revelations about the obscured daily operation of the tent camps played a key part in their end. Like Todorov’s communist factories, tent camps produced a deficit of control but an overproduction of symbolic meanings (quoted in Larkin 2013: 335). Their function was to a significant extent based on closing off their daily operation from the outside, and instead presenting them as if they were mere surface. The second paradox, ‘successful failure’, speaks to the question of the daily functioning of the tent camp. The camp was a place where infrastructure was constantly failing. These were not the ‘ruins’ of formerly glorious infrastructural projects (Howe et al. 2016), but rather from the outset an accumulation of many minor infrastructural failures, such as showers with only burning hot or very cold water, poor temperature regulation in tents, unpleasant food, and dirty toilets. Therefore, these failures did not so much call for repair and maintenance, as they did for ‘evasion and circumvention’ (Schwenkel 2015: 531). These failures were gestural, as outlined above, materializing a restrictive asylum regime through the deliberately tough living conditions of the camps. But they also structured the daily lives and interactions of asylum seekers and staff at the camp (Gill 2009, 2016). As we shall see, they generated conflicts that inevitably affected the social relations and atmosphere of the camp, breeding complaints and grievances, which were in turn used by the staff to justify stricter rules. In both senses, then, the continuous failings of the tent camp’s infrastructure are also viewable as successes, displaying and undergirding Denmark’s restrictive asylum policy. The rough living conditions on offer underlined the unattractiveness of Denmark as a destination country, while the grievances and conflicts generated by the infrastructural failures structured the daily lives of asylum seekers in the tent camps, framing their understandings of the Danish state and their interactions with each other and the staff. While tents are perhaps not normally thought of as infrastructure, in part because of their impermanence, we argue that they can usefully be thought of as such. It is instructive to contrast the tent camps with roads (Harvey and Knox 2015) as objects of infrastructure. On the one hand, they stand as opposites. While roads are designed to facilitate mobility, to connect people, the camps are intended to stop or hamper the movement of asylum seekers. While roads speak to dreams of the future, the camps are designed to contain the nightmares of the populist imagination. The tent camps are infrastructures of emergency management rather than development. However, at the same time, there are overlaps. Both camps and roads speak to modernist concerns with establishing order, with establishing state control over unruly areas. Both are connected to arguments of economic prosperity, albeit from different angles: roads are understood to open up trade and movement; camps are justified as attempts at damming destructive ‘waves’ of migrants, who supposedly pose risks to the economic stability of the state. 5. Spectacular obscurity Throughout the operation of the tent camps, they were sites of political attention. The Minister for Integration arranged numerous photo ops in them, and journalists regularly visited to gather stories and images. This concentrated attention on the tent camps, rather than the many other smaller asylum centres, placed in former schools and retirement homes, serving to materialize Danish asylum policy in the physical structures of the tents. Indeed, it is worth noting that though half the capacity of the tent camps in fact consisted of hard-roofed barracks, these were rarely described or filmed by visitors. Further, the tents themselves provided a certain spectacle. Rubing (2017) argues that tents represent an extra layer of skin, allowing the body to occupy more space, which suggests that even though the camps never ran at full capacity, the tents helped inflate the impression of the volume of asylum seekers. The tent camp was erected on the site of a Regional Support Centre of the Danish Emergency Management Agency (DEMA) and operated by Langeland Municipality. DEMA played an interesting role in relation to the spectacular obscurity of the camps. DEMA staff had been incorporated into the design of the camp in the form of a portacabin by the front gate, which residents often referred to as the ‘checkpoint’, and the uniformed staff members held a permanent fire watch. Our informants called them ‘soldiers’ and ‘uniform men’ because they were distinguishable by their dark blue uniforms, with indicators of hierarchy on the shoulders, surnames on the chest and heavy-duty boots. Like Feldman’s informants from Frontex, they were military in form, though they spoke rather less of their commitment to ‘the liberal virtues of humanitarianism and legalism’ (Feldman 2011: 87). However, DEMA did not operate with the power and authority otherwise associated with the military. A substantial range of equipment for handling emergencies was located in buildings next to the camp on the DEMA grounds, but according to their own accounts, they did not have the authority to put their skills, training and equipment to use in the tent camp. Their only function was to keep an eye out for fire and perform a caretaker role. Though they had fire engines parked next to the camp, they were required to call the fire brigade from town, if there were a fire in the camp. Nor were they authorized to deal with electrical issues; then they called on an electrician. When explaining their role in the camp to us, DEMA staff repeated the example of being on hand to fix a broken sink. On one occasion when a tent collapsed—a regular occurrence—the DEMA staff members attended to the problem by blowing hot air into it and ordering the doors and windows to remain closed. But for the most part, they had no particular task at hand and simply sat and waited. In this sense, DEMA represented an incapacitated authority in the camp itself, performing an almost ceremonial role; though they understood their own role as one of repair and maintenance (Graham and Thrift 2007), fixing sinks and tents, their prominence as spectacle in no way was reflected in their importance to the daily running of the camp. They were, in a reasonably literal sense, there for show. Their involvement had political relevance through their name and remit, though, which brought crisis vocabulary (Nyers 2006; Mountz and Hiemstra 2014) into the everyday running of the camp, and thus reiterated the supposed exceptionality of the situation, which underwrote the use of tent camps in the first place. The more military expression of the uniformed DEMA staff as well as the tents themselves were a part of the spectacle and contrasted with the humanitarian tropes symbolized by the Red Cross flag, flying over other Danish asylum centres located in hard-roofed buildings. This quasi-military experience was not lost on the residents, many of whom recounted seeing the same style of camps in their home countries during conflict, where the tents were used as soldiers’ sleeping quarters or for storing weapons. For several residents, the tents provoked such severe war traumas and panic attacks that they had to be moved to the adjacent sleeping hall. This military connection also provided the basis for the government’s defense of the tent camps: the tents were ‘good enough for our soldiers’, and therefore ought to be fine for asylum seekers. This implicitly recast the tent camps as testing grounds for the desperation of the asylum seekers housed there. The argument seemed to be that true refugees would accept any conditions so long as they were better than their homelands, and that complaints about conditions at the camps thus necessarily raised questions about the extent of the residents’ persecution. More broadly, the military spectacle of the camps obscured the humanitarian work going on there. While the camp was a much more hostile place than most Danish asylum centres, the core of the work carried out there was of a humanitarian nature: Asylum seekers were housed and fed (however poorly), while their cases were heard. And the great majority of the asylum seekers at the camp were granted refugee status (the average approval rate in the first instance was 72 per cent in 2016—97 per cent for Syrians). The powerful framing of the tent camps as militarized zones of control thus tended to obscure that Denmark in fact had one of the highest rates of approval for asylum applications in the EU. The militarized atmosphere of the camp was not in the least inscribed in the ways in which gender was invoked around the tents. Only men were housed in them. Elias, a staff member and former soldier, explained: ‘women are more vulnerable, especially Arabic women; they would feel more safe in a room with walls’, and further that, ‘you don’t know what will happen out there’. The idea that men are ‘usually tougher’, and ‘used to having it hard’—also the words of staff members—reinforce the sense that these were not humanitarian spaces of care, but potentially dangerous spaces of hardship. But this also suggested that women were still objects of humanitarian concern, even in the tent camps (Malkki 1996), unlike men who could be expected to tough out the harsher conditions. This spectacle was not lost on the asylum seekers we spoke to. As Hussain, a resident who had lost his wife and child whilst fleeing Afghanistan, told us: ‘In Afghanistan these tents are for front line of war, they move around when soldiers do missions [...] living in the tents is just like being a soldier in the military.’ The majority of our informants told us that they understood the design and spatiality of the tent camp to speak a message of rejection. Samir, a Syrian man who had arrived in the camp two weeks earlier, after being stopped on his way to Sweden, explained: ‘The function of tents is to make people not want to live here and ask to be sent back.’ The spectacular materialization of Danish asylum policy in the tent camps relied on, as it obscured, everyday practices of control. One asylum seeker at the camp had been given the task of welcoming visitors, showing them around and providing answers to their questions. This was not unimportant given the large media attention the tent camps attracted. Khaled, having been one of the first to arrive in the camp reported that he had been instructed to ‘smile for the camera’ and ‘help the camp’, which he did when various local and national media sources were directed to his tent at the very front of the camp. Khaled’s understanding was that there was both an implicit threat and possible reward embedded in these instructions, reflecting the rather unusual relations between staff and asylum seekers at the camp, which were far more menacing than in other Danish asylum institutions. At the same time, some of our informants reported threats of arrest in response to having spoken to journalists without the chief’s permission, and having mobile phones smashed for containing footage of incidents which might have been incriminating. In this sense, the production of the tent camps as spectacle was in part predicated on obscuring the power relations that structured life in the camp. As this example starts to suggest, the spectacular obscurity of the tent camps relied more broadly on the system of subcontracting their operation to other actors, in this case DEMA and Langeland Municipality. The everyday management of the camp and the maintenance of the tent infrastructure were thus delegated to actors who operated semi-autonomously within a contractual frame. This delegation of authority also served to obscure the everyday workings of the tent camps as infrastructure from both the state and the public, because it relied on the reports of the camp staff themselves to identify any problems there. This issue was compounded at the tent camp, because the majority of staff at the camp had little or no previous experience of working with asylum seekers, while the volatile nature of the camp tended to produce more conflicts. 6. Successful failures The infrastructure of the camp was constantly failing. Tents collapsed, toilets were blocked, heaters failed or jammed, showers ran too hot or too cold, and so on. These failures were so to speak built into the tent camps. They did not amount to unhappy coincidental events, but formed the everyday operation of the camp. The failures were understood to be communicative by both staff and residents. They understood the difficult conditions in the camp to constitute a signal of restrictiveness to both the Danish public and the asylum seekers themselves. The failures of infrastructures of care successfully communicated that asylum seekers were not welcome. This restrictiveness further tended to provide its own justification. The stress of camp living tended to generate more conflicts, which necessitated calling the police more often. When local news picked up on the fact that the police had come—as they did on various occasions in the Næstved camp—the politicians’ harsher asylum rules and implementation of worse conditions were implicitly justified to the Danish public. Similarly, complaints about conditions were regularly turned back on asylum seekers, who were accused of being ungrateful. This failing infrastructure also extended to the social facilities provided by the staff. Unusually for the wider Danish asylum infrastructure, most of the tent camp staff had little or no experience of working with asylum seekers. And many did not fully understand or implement the rules governing the Danish asylum system. For example, Danish asylum centre staff are required to keep journals for individual asylum seekers, logging their internships, movement between centres, incidents they were involved in, and so on. Residents had no access to their own journal, and the majority of our informants had an overwhelming fear of the journals having an influence on their case. Per, another former soldier without experience in asylum work, explained (incorrectly) to us: ‘There are differences in what our notes in the journals mean for the processing of their asylum case. I don’t think Immigration Service put as much emphasis on what we write in the Syrians’ cases, as they do for others. Maybe with Iranians they concentrate more on it, as they are less likely to get asylum.’ At the same time Per contradicted his speculation, explaining (correctly) that the residents’ journals had no impact on their cases, but that ‘this is something the residents must not know’, alluding to the fact that journals are used as a threat in order to control behaviour. When a 70-year-old Iraqi woman was assigned to a top bunk in the barracks area, she found it very difficult to climb into bed. Yet staff insisted that she could not trade beds with other asylum seekers without permission from the Immigration Service. This permission was not in fact required, and she was allowed to change beds in time, but again the immediate response is telling. It is unclear whether these examples are a strategic misuse of the Immigration Service as authority or simply ignorance, but the key point for our purposes here is that this failure had effects that were considered helpful in managing the tent camp. The failures could constitute a success, a successful failure. Moreover, these two kinds of failing infrastructure exacerbated one another. Mealtimes were characterized by long queues in the food tent; an employee stood at the entrance counting the residents in and asking them to disinfect their hands before they went to stand in line in order to receive a plate of food (they were not allowed to serve themselves). The warm food was dished out first, which the residents were required to set down on the table before standing in line again for the other elements of the meal, by which time the warm food had become cold. Asylum seekers were also checked on the way out to ensure that they had not brought any food with them, as food was not allowed in the tents for fear of rats. The existence of such forms of control was perpetuated and justified by the staff, who interpreted problems (often ones which were never proven and based largely on prejudice, such as the belief that residents were cheating the meal system and selling the food to family members who were waiting outside the camp) as an indicator of the need for greater control. In other words, the particular material infrastructure of the camps structured and justified certain interactions in the form of enforced rules. Some of these rules were seen as arbitrary by asylum seekers, who tried to circumvent them, which in turn generated conflicts with staff, structuring in particular antagonistic forms of relationships with them. As Nick Gill has shown in the UK (2009, 2016), a combination of physical elements and institutional structures may serve to present asylum seekers to asylum authorities in ways that mitigated against relations of compassion. Indeed, the tent camp infrastructure precisely undergirded a variety of processes of what Gill calls ‘moral distancing’ (2016) through the framing of encounters around its failings, conflicts over the food, arguments about the toilets or showers, and so on. This is not necessarily the result of some Machiavellian state policy, however. As Gill rightly notes, ‘while the drivers of this trend towards moral distancing might occasionally be premeditative and calculative, they are more often mundane and banal, associated with the achievement of immediate targets, the minimisation of costs and the adoption of efficient organisational models and business practices’ (2016: 6). In the case of the tent camps, these banalities often revolved around the infrastructure itself as, for example, a concern about rats was used to justify the seemingly unreasonable system of eating described above. The widespread failures of the ‘chief’, in terms of standards of conduct, were also seen by some staff as useful for the successful and smooth operation of the camp. They were successful failures. As Jens, a middle-aged staff member put it, ‘the asylum seekers are always trying to cheat, so we have to tighten up, and [the head of the camp] is the world’s best at that’. Even some staff members, who were initially sceptical of the chief’s autocratic management style, told us that they found it useful to be able to refer to him. During a discussion about control within the camp, Anette, a female staff member who had worked for the Red Cross and considered herself one of the more compassionate employees, told us that she became convinced of the leadership style: ‘We are not afraid of using [the chief] as a threat, it works very well.’ Though there was a good deal of variation among the staff, when it came to their approaches to and interactions with the asylum seekers, feelings of fear and contempt were fostered by the infrastructure of the camp, and previous experience working with vulnerable groups began to have less of a defining influence on staff members’ behaviour (Hall 2010). As we have argued, the chief’s use of punitive measures tied in closely with the material infrastructure of the camp. Indeed, his punishments themselves often related directly to the camp infrastructure, frequently involving cleaning toilets and common areas. The chief’s management style was deliberately conflictual. Our informants, including both staff and residents, recounted regular threats of deportation and instances of collective punishment and power misuse. They argued that the chief’s approach seemed to involve ruling by fear. In reflecting on the aforementioned leglock incident, Yaser, a 21-year-old who fled from Syria with his younger sister, told us: From the first day he [the man who was put in a leg lock] was in the camp, [the chief] was after him and tried to agitate and push his limits. [The chief] did this on purpose; it is like he wanted him to explode. If [the chief] was a wise camp leader, he would have treated him good. Then he would have had a loyal resident, instead of an aggressive one. He could have used 100 different solutions; he should have been the smart one. From how he chose to act, I know that he is not trying to lower the level of conflicts. Obviously, this stands in stark contrast with the humanitarian principles of care that are also meant to guide the Danish asylum system. However, the approach does seem to follow on, in somewhat extreme form, from the premise of the tent camps, understood as manifesting the restrictive line in Danish asylum policy. This contrast with the humanitarian approach was understood and expressed by a wide range of staff at the camp. According to our asylum-seeking informants, centre staff regularly rejected their requests and concerns with the words ‘we are not the Red Cross here’. And the staff also discussed their understandings that the camp was and ought to be different from and harsher than other Danish asylum institutions. This was not least materialized in the tents themselves. For the asylum seekers, this deliberate distancing from humanitarian principles of care was compounded by the seemingly arbitrary enforcement of the rules. When one of the tents collapsed, Rohullah, an Afghan man in his 60s, walked 10 metres away from the rather vaguely defined outside smoking area, with his cigarette still lit, in order to take a photograph. A member of staff saw this and reacted by confiscating his identification card. Usually when identification cards were confiscated, it was because the staff needed them in order to write a note in their journal. Rohullah was then sent to the office where he was told to clean toilets as a punishment for this misconduct. His outrage about this happening was heightened by the fact that he had not intentionally broken any rules, but was affected by his tent falling down. However, he was met with no sympathy from the member of staff who did not hesitate in handing out his punishment. While life within the wider Danish asylum system is characterized by uncertainty and a lack of privacy (Whyte 2002; Vitus 2011), for the residents of the tent camp this was exacerbated by both the camp’s material conditions and its atmosphere of fear. Rules seemed to be applied erratically and punitively, and many residents simply tried to keep their heads down and avoid trouble. Stories of wilful injustice abounded. Asylum seekers spoke of a man, who had been arrested for asking for a second plate of food. They told of constant threats of deportation. One group of residents complained to the chief about the food. The chief told them to organize a petition, and if they gathered 100 signatures he would change the caterer. Having met the chief’s request with 200 signatures, the resident responsible was then removed and placed in another tent camp. In another instance, a peaceful protest organized by some residents regarding the conditions in the camp was disbanded when staff members mentioned police permission, which struck fear amongst the residents. For the asylum seekers there thus seemed to be a failure of identifiable cause and effect, which shaped their everyday lives at the camp. 7. The aftermath: policy experiments By way of conclusion, we argue that one way of conceiving the camp infrastructure is as an experiment, an ‘open-ended experimental system’ as Jensen and Morita (2016: 3) put it. This, they argue, is explicitly not an experiment in the scientific sense of controlled tests of hypotheses within a laboratory framework, but in the broader sense of trying out interventions for which the results are not given but potentially generate new configurations of the world. Indeed, the first tent camp was launched as a ‘pilot project’ to test the feasibility of the infrastructure, but likely also to gauge the public reaction to it. The immediate problem this framing of the tent camps faces is one of intentionality; as we observed above, there is a risk in overstating the calculations of the state (Gill 2016). Indeed, we argue that the tent camps as infrastructure in fact created a range of unintended consequences, which the policymakers in turn had to deal with. In the end, these scandals ended up forcing the closure of the camps. This having been said, we focus on the experimental nature of the camps in part because ‘the shape of politics and power is one of the outcomes of infrastructural experiments’ (Jensen and Morita 2016: 6; original emphasis). In other words, the reach of Danish asylum politics may be reassessed by considering the effects of the tent camps as infrastructure. Like protest camps (Feigenbaum et al. 2013; Brown et al. 2017), the Danish tent camps were thus fundamentally political. However, they seem to invert the ways in which protest camps work. Rather than providing ‘spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state’ (Feigenbaum et al. 2013: 1–2), the tent camps force people together to manifest contentious state politics. For the purposes of our argument here, it is interesting to note a further inversion. While Feigenbaum et al. (2013: 2) note that a distinguishing feature of protest camps is their attempt to ‘create sustainable (if ephemeral) infrastructures for daily life’, tent camp infrastructures were understood as precisely and purposefully unsustainable for daily life. While the overall policy aim of the tent camps was one of indirect deterrence, the everyday practices of the camp were very much structured by the maintenance of the infrastructure itself. The concerns about mould and rats meant a constant, cloying heat in the tents and rigid rules about eating there, and these in turn fuelled conflicts and structured interactions with staff. In a sense, the imperative of care in the asylum system was at least partially shifted to the asylum infrastructure, rather than the asylum seekers. This was epitomized by an episode that Ali Saif, a young Iraqi man, recounted: ‘When I asked to be moved [to a different bed within the camp] the reply was “yes, but then you have to clean the toilets for two weeks; after that, we can discuss the matter”’. Here then infrastructure didn’t so much undergird systems for daily living, like in a protest camp, but was deliberately used to make life difficult for the residents. The fundamentally experimental nature of the tent camps was quite literally invoked by some of our informants, who described the camp as an ‘experiment’, and themselves as ‘mice in a laboratory’. These feelings were fuelled by the spectacular obscurity of the camps: the numerous visits to the camp by politicians and journalists, whom the residents believed were coming to look at them, but who failed to see or understand their daily experiences. At the same time, the experimental nature of the camp was also evident in its constantly failing infrastructure; this was not an established, well-functioning system, but a makeshift trial run of substandard care. The purpose of the experiment was also clear to them. As Amir, a young Iranian fleeing persecution on grounds of his sexuality, put it, ‘they make it like this to push us out’. Amir’s understanding was a common analysis of the camp among its residents. They felt that the camp itself was designed to make them give up and leave, but also to send a wider message. We heard several interpretations of the tent camp that echoed the following statement: ‘They want us to call our family and friends to say “do not come here”.’ However, in this respect the tent camp as a materialized policy of deterrence failed. Several informants recounted that they did not tell family and friends about the standards of their living conditions, nor even that they lived in tents, whilst others told us of outright lies; for example, that no asylum seekers lived in tents in Denmark. This is in line with other studies of migrants’ descriptions of their situations to people back home, where there is a tendency to underplay conditions of hardship and emphasize the positive (e.g. Carling 2008). Even though, as Ramadan rightly notes, politics, struggle and agency make and are made in camp environments (Ramadan 2012: 74), these refusals to pass the word on the restrictiveness of Danish asylum policy were not necessarily about opposing either politics or politicians. Rather, our informants more often told us that they did this in order to protect their family from being concerned and out of pride. These are what Ramadan calls ‘everyday geopolitics’ (2012: 74). While the infrastructure was thus understood to communicate deterrence, the very experience of humiliation that it structured inhibited its wider communication. While the behaviour of the ‘chief’ and some of his employees was well beyond the normal range of asylum centre staff behaviour in Denmark, it is nevertheless useful to consider the ways in which the particularities of the camp, if not actively encouraged, at least failed to identify and limit this behaviour. The lack of oversight that came with the spectacular obscurity of the camps allowed these interactions to continue, while the continuing successful failure of the camp infrastructure undermined the critical position of the asylum seekers. Their complaints were often centred on the infrastructure: the poor food, the uncomfortable tents, the unhygienic toilets, which were easily dismissed by politicians and staff as signs of ingratitude. ‘If you don’t like it here, you can go back to your own countries’, as staff members regularly put it. Our argument is that these complaints should rather be taken seriously, and that an analytical focus on the paradoxes of infrastructure precisely brings in to view the production of social relations and unstable operations of power, which frame asylum seekers’ daily lives. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the asylum seekers, who kindly shared their time and stories with us in trying circumstances. Conflict of interest statement. 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( 2011 ) ‘Enter the Myopticon: Uncertain Surveillance in the Danish Asylum System’ , Anthropology Today , 18 / 6 : 18 – 21 . Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices) TI - Paradoxical infrastructures of asylum: Notes on the rise and fall of tent camps in Denmark JF - Migration Studies DO - 10.1093/migration/mny018 DA - 2018-06-13 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/paradoxical-infrastructures-of-asylum-notes-on-the-rise-and-fall-of-KdX4ir0lrB SP - 1 VL - Advance Article IS - DP - DeepDyve ER -