In western Europe, illegal migrants or asylum seekers are kept confined in camps and are the objects of much public interest. “Diasporic” loyalties, religious practices and links to the homeland of the ordinary migrant are treated as a problem and a manifestation of disloyalty to their new country of residences. Ovine Fuglerud’s contribution to this volume explores how the Norwegian authorities inscribe a hegemonic set of “cultural values” upon its territory and population as it seeks to control, know and domesticate non-European refugees. Fuglerud demonstrates that such cultural and historical rhetoric is informed by the exercise of the sovereign right to decide on exclusion from the community. As Michael Walzer has argued, admonition and exclusion “suggest the deepest meaning of self-determination”. Although the camp may be the implied rationality of much governance, or the attempts to govern, most encounters between migrants and the communities they live among take place beyond the control of the state, and beyond ordered camps or refugee centres.