Displaced people’s humanitarian-camp existence exemplifies Agamben’s bare life.

Evidence

I’m transfixed by people displaced from their homes, millions of people across the world who are living in transit camps or in UNICEF camps, who are the objects of humanitarian aid, who are being fed from the air. This is Agamben’s bare life. This is a way in which the system has simply ground half of civilized life into nothingness, into just relying on its bare bones, operating on its flesh and its body and nothing more to give. People stowing away on the undercarriages of airplanes to get out of it, setting sail in leaky boats when they know they probably won’t arrive, boats that are already leaking before they leave, but they must leave the horrors that they are now obliged to live in. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1154

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely grounds the Agambenian ‘bare life’ concept — a citizen reduced to flesh and bare survival — in the contemporary refugee camp, a central biopolitics toolkit item.
• XREF: Directly feeds the biopolitics/necropolitics module the reader is building; links to statelessness and the imagined community of the nation.
• ADDENDUM: The leaky boats and bare-life camps resonate with the reader’s already-published work on sacrifice and on the management of excluded bodies.