Paradoxical infrastructures of asylum: Notes on the rise and fall of tent camps in Denmark

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.