The Conditions of ‘Savages’? Vluchtkerk (Flight Church), Vluchtgarage, Vluchtgemeente (Flight Municipality, in a former district council office), Vluchtmarkt, Vluchtschool, Vluchtmandela (after the neighbouring Nelson Mandela Park), to name only a few — is an integral part of their ongoing demonstration. The mayor’s eviction order and the Amsterdam District Court’s rejection of We Are Here’s legal challenge to this order mention a couple of ‘incidents’. 96 One night, an extreme-right organisation named Voorpost (‘Outpost’), which was founded in Flanders in the 1970s and pursues the irredentist ideal of a Greater Netherlands for the supposed Dutch volk, shut off the entrance gate to the Notweg tent camp with a thick metal chain, imprisoning everyone inside. On another occasion, several young people hurled insults at the campers and threw bread at them. What can returning to Arendt’s arguments in ‘Imperialism’ contribute to an analysis of the politics of We Are Here? Arendt considered camps to be the extreme opposite of spaces for politics. Whereas in a political space, speech can appear as meaningful and actions as consequential, in a camp it does not matter what anyone says or does. In a political space, people can appear to each other, ‘publicly’, as equal speaking and acting beings, whereas camps are non-spaces where no speech or action can appear to any public. 97 The racist reactions against We Are Here’s camp-demonstration aimed at the destruction of politics, by transforming the camp-demonstration into a detention camp and by theatrically treating the demonstrators as zoo animals. In this way, Voorpost and the other group foreclosed political interaction and enforced a racialised distinction between nationals and those designated by the state as illegal. If Voorpost’s reaction to We Are Here’s camp was aimed at the destruction of politics, We Are Here’s actions can be interpreted as enacting politics where none existed, as an enactment of what Arendt called the right to have rights. In interpreting We Are Here’s actions as an enactment of the right to have rights, I follow James Ingram’s reading of Arendt’s rights politics as an ‘active, bottomup’ vision of ‘the activity of potential rights holders themselves’. 98 Saying and demonstrating We Are Here can be interpreted as a speech act of insisting that there be a space for politics: against an understanding of ‘here’ as a space from which the members of We Are Here are excluded as ‘illegals’, the speech act of saying and demonstrating We Are Here makes a political claim to a ‘here’ in which this speech act can appear as meaningful and consequential. Indeed, We Are Here has insisted from the beginning that it is a political group. 99 96 97 98 99 These ‘incidents’ at the Notweg tent camp are mentioned in the mayor’s eviction order and in the Amsterdam District Court’s rejection of We Are Here’s legal challenge to this order: Rechtbank Amsterdam (2012) AWB 12/5657 BESLU. They mention these incidents to substantiate their claim that the tent camp provided a potential threat to public order, which is one of the legitimations for ending a protest, even though European human rights jurisprudence has held that a potential threat to public order posed by counter protestors obliges governments to protect the protestors, rather than constituting a ground to end the protest. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 297. James Ingram, ‘What is a “Right to Have Rights”? Three Images of the Politics of Human Rights’ (2008) 102(4) American Political Science Review 401, 411. I also agree with Ingram that although Jacques Rancière opposes his own conceptions of politics and rights to those of Arendt, Rancière’s conceptions of politics and rights can in fact be read as extensions of Arendt’s framework. See ‘We Are a Political Group’ (n 91). 211