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Care and control are concepts frequently invoked within Camp Studies, often as a means of characterizing the varied logics of institutional camps. This article builds on recent geographical literature by going beyond care and control and proposing a renewed focus on the idea of custodianship within a range of historical and contemporary camp contexts, from colonial and totalitarian concentration camps to present-day refugee camps. The notion of the camp as a custodian institution, that is, a sovereign authority whose biopolitical interventions imply both the preservation and curtailment of life, provides an effective means of apprehending the complex nature of camp governance, particularly the shifting intensity of power relations between camp management and residents. We develop this conceptual discussion via existing literature on concentration camps, before grounding our analysis in the case study of Krnjača Asylum Centre, a refugee camp along the so-called Balkan Route in Serbia. Our empirical discussion of Krnjača indicates that the concept of custodianship can be useful in understanding seemingly distinct and even contradictory modes of camp governance as part of a single coherent regime of power, from the imposition and negotiation of everyday rules and regulations to the strict containment measures put into place during COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prominence of witness testimony in a range of contemporary political events is reflected in interdisciplinary efforts to theorise the act and genre of witnessing. Notably, this literature has framed the occurrence of errors, contradictions, and other instances of "problematic" speech in testimony as attesting to the traumatic quality of disastrous events. In this paper we extend this line of reasoning by recasting the fundamental quality or "witness‐ness" of disaster survivor testimony outside a logic of representational correspondence. Instead, drawing on the philosophy of Maurice Blanchot, we suggest that the disorienting features of testimony can be interpreted as the disruptive influence or inscription of the disaster itself on the recollections of survivors; a certain "writing of the disaster." Furthermore, we suggest that different disasters disrupt the testimonies of its survivors in unique ways, thus imprinting a signature that betrays the material and psychological character of the event. The "witness‐ness" of survivor testimony is therefore argued to dwell not in its representational accuracy, but in the distinctive, signature ways that it disorients the search for a coherent accounting of the disaster. We explore this proposition first in relation to Nazi death camp survivor testimony, before exploring this approach in the very different testimonial context of the 2011 tsunami in Tohoku, Japan. In the wake of these readings, we argue that the concept of the signature has potential not only for broadening the repertoire of testimonies admissible in the study of disaster, but also for investigating the societal impacts and "countersignatures" of disasters more generally. In this paper we extend recent advances in witnessing theory to argue that the fundamental quality or "witness‐ness" of disaster survivor testimony lies outside a logic of representational correspondence. Drawing on the philosophy of Maurice Blanchot, we suggest the disorienting features of testimony can be interpreted as the disruptive influence of the disaster itself, and that different disasters inscribe themselves on testimonies in unique, signature ways. We explore this proposition first in relation to Nazi death camp survivor testimony, then in the very different testimonial context of the 2011 tsunami in Tohoku, Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]