Border within Borders: Politics of Care, Modular Designs and Architectures of Disappearance

The article provides a temporal-spatial and material analysis of contemporary spaces of exception, ranging from international intervention zones to refugee camps and corridors of humanitarian aid. It shows the dominance of modular designs. Such designs are introduced as material expressions of the convergence of defense, development and diplomacy that characterizes contemporary humanitarian as well as military interventions in ‘fragile’ environments. The morphology of these spaces also points towards the ongoing commercialization of the intervention terrain. However, while some authors have criticized the neo-imperial implication of interventions, the spatial analysis of such variegated spaces of exception and the dominance of an ‘architecture of disappearance’ rather point to an explicit anti-imperialist stance of interventions. They are rather the expression of new and modular forms of sovereignty – flexible, adaptable and transformable forms of rule that operate without subjects and aim at the betterment of human live (and humanity) as a whole.