The law and the camps. Material translations of the specifications of transit camps for exiles

The ‘refugee studies’ literature has largely examined the question of legal implementation through its practice: the words and gestures of bureaucrats. This paper, which is broadly methodological, seeks to question the translation of scriptural signs (legal texts) into empirical forms (transit camps for exiles). The etymology of ‘implementation’ invites the research to broaden its object from human action to material fill up. The words of the law fill the world with exile camps; it is this performativity that must be accounted for. Through a case study: the specifications of a new type of transit camp in France for the reception of exiles has produced thirty-three such camps. We will seek to measure the implementation through material data: the site and location of these camps, their architecture, the objects and documents found there. The virtues of this methodological approach (inspired by historical research) are that it (a) allows for greater comparability, with objectifiable data on the accommodation space, the measurement of places, their dissimilarities and their convergence; (b) reaches directly into the living environment of the recipients of this policy - rather than their face-to-face interactions with agents. These recently created camps (2018), which have been scattered throughout France, provide a particular case study that will give methodological ideas for comparison with transnational fields. The paper will be based on legal sources, an eight-month ethnography in one of these camps as well as interviews and photographs of a dozen camps in France.