Abstract

Investigating the terms camp, campus, and colony, this essay offers a reframing of encampment and its conceptual offshoots. To shed light on recent encampment protests, it explores the interconnected genealogies of these three concepts, focusing on the Palestinian refugee camp and its colonial counter-insurgent role. Encampment emerges here as a crucial political process of spatial division and allocation, whose unstable and often insurrectionary dynamism is obscured when it is regarded as a finished product—as a camp or a college campus. By examining the intersecting histories of camp and campus alongside the Gaza case, the essay challenges existing scholarly paradigms of the camp, highlighting instead three understudied camp functions—colonial militarism, depoliticized moralism, and the diverting containment of political energies. Indeed, this study suggests that university leaders used the hyperbolic and hyper-visible violence they inflicted on college campuses to divert attention away from Palestine.