‘L’Archipel et le lieux du ban. Tableau de la ville désastre’

Our world has become an archipelago of connected islands in a ubiquitous periphery . In the archipelago there are, for the time being, rather peaceful and ordered islands such as 'Fortress Europe'. But this does not mean it is not part of an archipelago. Moreover, the island itself is disintegrating into an archipelago. The spatial order of the archipelago might become a Russian doll: archipelagos inside bigger archipelagos.
Both the archipelago of camps and the 'state of abandonment' in which these camps are inserted represent states of emergency. The camps (detention centres and labour camps) are part of the 'willed state of exception' . The 'state of abandonment' is the non-willed state of exception and marks the return of the nature state. Indeed, living in the 'state of abandonment' comes close to living in the state of nature. People living in illegal settlements and slum conditions are tolerated, for the time being. As soon as the power logic of the archipelago crosses their path (with bulldozers for instance), they do not exist. Whoever lives in the nature state 'barely lives' and is simply ignored. The rising statistics of forced evictions in the cities of the Global South, registered by organizations such as the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights , are the only traces left of these 'evictees'.
The megacities of the Global South reproduce within their own geography the same opposition of archipelagos of capsular heterotopian enclaves and camps that colonize the globe. Archipelagos of well-connected, fortress-like precincts, held together in a matrix of 'glocal' bypasses, in stark contrast to the landscape of endless townships of marginalized communities. The rest of the city and its citizens are simultaneously exposed to the wild capitalism of global extraction and to the Mafioso logic of the informal economies that have sprung up in the absence of any formal alternative.
Our planet is beginning to look like a dual system, a sharp division of what military analyst Thomas Barnett has called 'the Pentagon's New Map' with on the one hand 'the Integrated Core' and 'the Non Integrating Gap'. He uses this metaphor without irony. The 'Non integrating Gap' simply labels the black hole of poverty, failed states and terrorism . It should be contained at all costs: with immigration control, anti-terror intelligence, international policing, invasions and permanent (low or high intensity) war.