162 Int. J. Migration and Border Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2016 Copyright © 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Rethinking spaces of exception: notes from a forced migrant camp in Jammu and Kashmir Ankur Datta Department of Sociology, South Asian University, Akbar Bhavan, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi 110021, India Email: ankurdatta@soc.sau.ac.in Abstract: In recent years, the camp has emerged as a paradigm of social and political phenomena. This article seeks to engage with the camp as a fact of life and as a framework in the South Asian context. I will first draw on perspectives that have emerged from studies on forced migration and camps in South Asia. I will then draw on anthropological fieldwork I have conducted among Kashmiri Pandits displaced by conflict in the Kashmir valley since 1990, who lived in a displaced persons camp colony in the city of Jammu, Jammu and Kashmir until its closure in 2011. I will try to compare the notion of the state of exception with perspectives from the everyday lives of displaced Kashmiri Pandits, focusing on space and place. I argue that a theoretical framework for studying camps will benefit by paying attention to how forced migrants inhabit a space of ‘exception’. Keywords: state of exception; camps; internal displacement; space and place; Jammu and Kashmir; South Asia. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Datta, A. (2016) ‘Rethinking spaces of exception: notes from a forced migrant camp in Jammu and Kashmir’, Int. J. Migration and Border Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp.162–175. Biographical notes: Ankur Datta is a Social Anthropologist by training and conducted research among displaced Kashmiri Pandits in Indian administered Jammu and Kashmir. He is currently preparing a book based on his research for publication. This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled ‘Voices from a South Asian ‘space of exception’: space, place and community in an internally displaced person’s camp in Jammu and Kashmir, 1990–2011’ presented at Conference titled ‘State and Society in South Asia’. It was part of a panel titled ‘Is Displacement a ‘State of Exception’? Issues and Perspectives’ in Forced Migration in South Asia, Delhi University, New Delhi, India, 28 February to 1 March 2014. 1 Introduction According to the Anthropologist Liisa Malkki (1992), human communities have often been conceptualised as rooted and tied to particular places. The refugee, and for that