On the Brink of a State of Exception? Austria, Europe, and the Refugee Crisis
On the Brink of a State of Exception? Austria, Europe, and the Refugee Crisis

Summary/Abstract: This article revisits conclusions from my earlier ‘The Refugee and the City: Is the Camp Indeed a Space of Exception?’ (Critique & Humanism 42/2013). There, I analyzed Michel Agier’s perspective of the refugee camp as a space of exception (a concept, in turn, based on Giorgio Agamben’s ‘state of exception’). My discussion then was driven by my own ethnographic material on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, as opposed to the massive refugee camps in Africa which seemed to have been the base for Agier’s conceptualization. However, in 2015, hundreds of thousands of refugees entered Europe, in what the European media and many of its governments proclaimed to be a ‘refugee crisis in Europe’. This crisis rhetoric bears resemblance with that of the‘state of exception’, representing the suspension of law and politics. But beyond media and governmental rhetoric, is Europe indeed facing a crisis and, if so, what is its nature? Is Europe on the brink of a state of exception?

• Details
• Contents