‘They tell us to keep our distance, but we sleep five people in one tent’: The opportunistic governance of displaced people in Calais during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

When COVID-19 hit France, over 1,000 migrant people were living in insalubrious encampments in the northern city of Calais. A national lockdown was declared in March 2020, and in the face of the health risks the virus posed, it seemed the ongoing struggle between police and displaced people at this border might come to a halt. This article however argues that rather than appeasing tensions, the state leveraged the exceptional mobility regimes the pandemic brought about to strengthen its border deterrence. Drawing on 5 months of ethnographic research in Calais in the first half of 2020, and on interviews with displaced respondents and humanitarian workers through 2020 and 2021, I conceptualise the biopolitical mode of governance mobilised by the state against displaced people during this period as one of necropolitical opportunism. The lockdown period saw displaced people’s survival at the border compromised by continued attacks on their encampments and access to services, as well as on the work of autonomous humanitarians seeking to hold the state accountable for its violence. This article contributes important new insights to debates on border biopolitics and the specific necropolitical agenda pursued by the French state at its northern frontier.

Resumen

Cuando el COVID-19 golpeó a Francia, más de 1,000 inmigrantes vivían en campamentos insalubres en la ciudad norteña de Calais. En marzo de 2020, se declaró un confinamiento nacional y, ante los riesgos para la salud que planteaba el virus, parecía que la lucha en curso entre la policía y las personas desplazadas en esta frontera podría detenerse. Sin embargo, este artículo argumenta que, en lugar de sosegar las tensiones, el estado aprovechó los regímenes espaciales y de movilidad excepcionales que trajo la pandemia para fortalecer su disuasión fronteriza. Con base en cinco meses de investigación etnográfica en Calais en la primera mitad de 2020, y en entrevistas con encuestados desplazados y trabajadores humanitarios durante 2020 y 2021, conceptualizo el modo de gobierno biopolítico movilizado por el estado contra las personas desplazadas durante este período como uno de oportunismo necropolítico. El período de cierre de negocios vio comprometida la supervivencia de las personas desplazadas en la frontera por los continuos ataques a sus campamentos y acceso a servicios, así como por el trabajo de los trabajadores humanitarios autónomos que buscan responsabilizar al estado por su violencia. Este artículo aporta nuevos conocimientos importantes a los debates sobre la biopolítica fronteriza y la agenda necropolítica específica seguida por el Estado francés en su frontera norte.

Résumé

Quand la COVID-19 a atteint la France, plus de 1000 personnes vivaient dans des campements insalubres dans la ville de Calais. Un confinement est entré en vigueur dans tout le pays en mars 2020, et compte tenu des risques sanitaires que posait le virus, on aurait pu imaginer que les confrontations incessantes entre la police et les personnes exilées à cette frontière cesseraient. Néanmoins, cet article soutient que plutôt que d’apaiser les tensions, le gouvernement a profité des régimes de mobilité exceptionnels engendrés par la pandémie pour renforcer ses dispositifs frontaliers. En m’appuyant sur cinq mois de recherche ethnographique à Calais pendant la première moitié de 2020 et sur des entretiens avec des personnes exilées et acteurs humanitaires au cours de 2020 et 2021, je conceptualise le mode de gouvernance biopolitique que les pouvoirs publics ont employé contre les personnes exilées pendant cette période en tant qu’opportunisme nécropolitique. Pendant le confinement, la survie des personnes exilées à la frontière a été compromise par des attaques continuelles sur leurs lieux de vie et sur et leurs accès aux services, de même que contre les actions des travailleurs humanitaires autonomes qui dénoncent ce harcèlement gouvernementa. Cet article jette une lumière nouvelle sur les débats relatives à la biopolitique frontalière et au programme nécropolitique particulier que le gouvernement français poursuit à sa frontière nord.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• Calais
• migration
• encampment
• humanitarianism
• lockdown
• border biopolitics

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• COVID-19
• Calais
• migración
• campamento
• humanitarismo
• encierro
• biopolítica fronteriza

MOTS CLEFS:

• COVID-19
• Calais
• migration
• camps
• humanitaire
• confinement
• biopolitique frontalière

Introduction

Considerable early scholarly work on the pandemic has signposted the exacerbated vulnerability of displaced people brought about by COVID-19 as they saw themselves affected by pauses in asylum procedures, border closures, lockdowns, restricted rights and access to sanitary living conditions (Crawley, 2021; Jauhiainen, 2020; Tazzioli & Stierl, 2021; Wang et al., 2020). While these offer rich starting points for exploring the impact of the pandemic on displaced populations, ground-level accounts of how these groups have been affected are few and far between. This article scrutinises the case of the northern French city of Calais, where around 1,100 people seeking passage to the United Kingdom were living in precarious encampments when the pandemic struck. France imposed a nationwide lockdown on the 18^th of March 2020, effectively leaving the displaced at the border locked out and ‘confined to the border’ (Timberlake, 2020). In the months leading up to the pandemic I was carrying out field research working alongside humanitarian groups in the port city, and remained at the border for the duration of the first national lockdown. During this time, displaced people faced a period of crisis within crisis: the uncertainties of their individual migration journeys were exacerbated by the threat of viral infection and legislation designed to limit its spread.

In times of crisis, state biopolitics tend to be vividly exposed. This article interrogates what happens when the onus of protecting lives on the territory of the nation state from viral infection comes up against the political imperative of migration deterrence. The pandemic posed the biopolitical question at the heart of border struggles in Calais in a new way: in the face of the urgent threat of infection, it demanded the state make clear its intention to make live or let die (Foucault, 2008). This article documents the early days of pandemic from the ground, before they are forgotten, glossed over or rewritten. It also contributes to current debates on multiplying biopolitical modes and technologies mobilised in the name of border control at numerous contemporary frontiers (Aradau & Tazzioli, 2020; Davies et al., 2017; Martin et al., 2020). Drawing on empirics, it conceptualises the French state’s mode of governance during the pandemic as one of necropolitical opportunism; a biopolitical mode emergent at a time when events demanding (or legitimising) exceptional governance measures intersect and overlap.

After contextualising the pre-pandemic Calais border zone as a space in which exceptional practices are routinely deployed (Agamben, 2005), submitting displaced people to a necropolitical mode of governance (Davies et al., 2017), this article draws on Carastathis’s concept of ‘nested crisis’ to think through the overlapping exceptionalisms evoked by border control and pandemic. More specifically, it argues that overlapping exceptionalisms were actively mobilised by the French state to reinforce its border deterrence project. I detail how state authorities mobilized the exceptional spatial and mobility regimes that lockdown generated to further expose displaced people to suffering, as well as to undermine the autonomous humanitarian groups that support them. The article concludes with a discussion of the core argument that this period, despite initial humanitarian pretence and under the cover of exceptional pandemic circumstances, was in reality characterized by the pursuit of an opportunistic agenda seeking to rid the border zone of displaced people at all costs, squeezing the viability of their living conditions and increasing their willingness to expose themselves to risk.

The necropolitical space of the post-camp border

To assess the French state’s response to COVID-19 in Calais, it is essential to understand the pre-pandemic particularities of this border zone. The France–UK border at Calais has been a key site of clandestine passage for over two decades, and a testing ground for French migration and border control strategies (Guenebeaud, 2016). Most notoriously, an insalubrious makeshift camp known as the Calais ‘Jungle’ existed on the outskirts of the city between 2015 and 2016, home to an estimated 10,000 people at its largest (Agier et al., 2019; Dhesi et al., 2018; Mould, 2018). The camp was demolished in late 2016, and displaced people at the border have since lived in even more precarious conditions. Since the demolition and up until the time of writing, displaced people who venture into this border zone are actively injured through constant attacks on their encampments. Under a ‘no point of fixation’ policy, any attempts at cobbling shelter together face relentless eviction operations coordinated by state authorities (Hagan, 2018; Van Isacker, 2019; Agier et al., 2019). In 2017 and 2018, camp raids were violent and unpredictable, effectively turning the border zone into ‘a hunting ground’ (Palmas, 2021, p. 509). Since late summer 2018 and up until the time of writing, eviction operations are routine: each site of encampment is evicted every 48 hours (Human Rights Observers, 2021; Welander, 2021).

The Calais borderland is governed through meticulous and active acts geared at rendering the border zone unbearable through multiple dispossessions, or what Aradau & Tazzioli describe as a biopolitics of ‘subtraction’ (Aradau & Tazzioli, 2020). This brutal biopolitical mode works to bestialize the displaced person, ensuring that when life is not lost at the border it is systematically devalued (Gazzotti, 2020). It is a space of inhumanity in which the sovereign actively devalues the lives of its racialised ‘enemies’ by keeping them alive but in a state of ‘permanent injury’ (Davies et al., 2017; Mbembe, 2003). Living at this pressure point while seeking to continue their journey beyond France, displaced people effectively surrender their claims to legitimacy and humanity. Davies et al. (2017) draw on Mbembe’s work on necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003) to fittingly qualify border space in Calais as one of deliberate exposure to suffering, in which a brutal biopolitics informed by ‘the racialized identity and status of Calais’ migrant population’ and the coloniser-colonized power relations that inform border violence, is at play (Davies et al., 2017, p. 1268).

While these circumstances tend towards what Agamben conceptualises as the state of exception (1998), in which a state vested with exceptional powers exerts social and political power over human life, during the pre-pandemic period, the deployment of exceptional powers remained limited: humanitarians, activist groups and the media regularly drew on accountability mechanisms to pressure the state to cease its violent practices by exposing their inhumanity and opaque legality. Under such conditions, the sovereign works to degrade migrant life but cannot actively erase it, constrained to act within the parameters of a state of law and rights under scrutiny. In this sense, this article speaks in terms of exceptionalisms rather than in terms of the state of exception per se, unpacking how pandemic-related circumstances and legislations coalesced with pre-existing practices and measures to extend and reinforce the necropolitical sovereign mode deployed at this border. Indeed, the necropolitical nature of Calais border biopolitics was emphatically sharpened by state responses to displaced people in the early weeks of the pandemic.

When COVID-19 struck, the French state enforced a series of exceptional measures: people were required to go into lockdown, leaving the house a maximum of once daily carrying an official document justifying their presence in public space (Légifrance, 2020).¹ This was enforced through heavy policing and the threat of fines. The displaced however, already suffering shelter deprivation, were of course unable to comply with these spatial regulations.

Pandemic at the border: exceptionalism, crisis, and border humanitarianism

Migration has long been framed as an abstract, uncontrollable and infectious force to be feared, lying at the root of many social anxieties (Amin, 2012; Nail, 2016). Esposito draws a pertinent comparison between the ‘realm of infectious disease’ and ‘the social realm of migrants’ (Esposito, 2013, p. 59) describing how ‘virus has become the widespread metaphor for all of our nightmares’ (ibid, p. 60). However, while infection operates as a powerful imaginative metaphor for migration, the concrete ground-level encounter of criminalized migrants and viral threat in Calais in 2020 gives rise to the important biopolitical question of what happens when the displaced person may no longer purely be understood as a threat, but also as under threat to the same external force as the citizen. The aforementioned modes of governance and humanitarianism to which the displaced are submitted in a pre-pandemic context are brought into question and renegotiated on new grounds. The pandemic presented another crisis, overlapping with existing crises, in which multiple perceived threats intersect, justifying a plethora of exceptional measures. These measures entail an extension of state powers and suspension of the constitution which protects individual liberties, threatening to merge into the ‘juridical phenomenon we call the state of exception’ (Agamben, 2005, p. 5).

Each crisis summons up its own form of exceptional legislation, policing or securitisation practices. Carastathis’s concept of ‘nested crises’ (Carastathis, 2018) offers valuable openings for assessing the spatial and biopolitical workings of state responses to COVID-19 at ground level. She proposes the term for thinking through how a state handles the crises it faces in relation to one another, rather than in siloes; to the mutual effects of crises and the ends to which they, in their overlap, are mobilised (ibid). Scrutinising the crises the French state faces (and the exceptionalisms they give rise to) in their nestedness is crucial for identifying the opportunistic mode the state adopted in a context of sanitary emergency at the border. Indeed, the pandemic comes in addition to two predominant pre-existing ‘crises’ in contemporary France: that of terrorism and that of migration. Since the 2015 Paris terror attacks, the migration crisis is no longer understood as separate from the crisis of terrorism, despite the fact that they are completely opposed (Nail, 2016). That a given legislation is introduced in the context of the ‘war against terrorism’ (Hollande, 2015) or the ‘sanitary war’ (Macron, 2020) by no means prevents it from being mobilized in service of the border crisis. In other words, separate crises are misleadingly made to inform one another, and exceptional measures taken to attenuate one crisis may opportunistically be subverted to stifle another. As Fassin wrote in the context of the protracted state of emergency the French state implemented following the 2015 terrorist attacks, crisis operates ‘as a pretext to expand the lawful extent of the use of state force’ even though, significantly, the state itself admits that in many cases this means contravening the European Convention on Human Rights (2016). The ‘nesting’ of crises and the exceptionalisms they give rise to is particularly visible along controversial migration routes, where biopolitical modes of governance are constantly and actively being tested, tightened, and refined (Aradau & Tazzioli, 2020). By pursuing a strategy of rendering border space hostile, the state continues to place responsibility with those who ‘choose’ to commit their body to the deathly geography of the border while removing themselves from responsibility for their injury or death (De León, 2015). In a pandemic context, the threat of exposure is not only to the elements, but also to potential infection.

Many scholars have scrutinized the various biopolitical modes and technologies emergent along migration routes (ibid; Minca & Collins, 2021; Pallister-Wilkins, 2017), particularly at pressure points where people are governed according to a protracted logic of exception and crisis. An important concept to be drawn from this work is that of the humanitarian border, which draws attention to ambiguous humanitarian configurations that have emerged in controversial border contexts, and between which it is important to differentiate (Pallister-Wilkins, 2017; Walters, 2011). Dadusc & Mudu (2020) propose a pertinent distinction between groups performing autonomous solidarity (from where I draw the concept of the ‘autonomous humanitarian’) and those performing humanitarianism, explaining that while the first acts with the goal of resistance to border militarisation and the criminalisation of migration, the latter is paradoxically intertwined if not complicit in the violence of borders, working to conceal or ‘render tolerable’ border enforcement (Pallister-Wilkins, 2017) by providing the bare minimum (Gazzotti, 2020). While several major humanitarian organisations were present at the time of the Calais ‘Jungle’ (Agier et al., 2019), many of these have gradually disappeared as state violence has come to play an increasingly significant role in generating humanitarian need at the border; creating an uncomfortable situation in which traditional humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence are called into question (Hilhorst et al., 2020; Scott-Smith, 2016). In short, intervention at this border becomes ‘too political’ for many traditional humanitarian actors who do not usually intervene in a European context, exposing serious ethical concerns regarding the role and limited scope of intervention of these actors (ibid). In the stead of their departure, a few state-appointed organizations perform an ambiguous humanitarianism in Calais; an example of the state seeking to maintain its self-image as a state of rights.² Assistance is nonetheless for the most part provided by a semi-formal ecosystem of autonomous solidarity groups who work collaboratively to advocate against the brutal deterrence politics set in motion by the state (ibid), and sit ambiguously in a context of determined border enforcement (Agier et al., 2019). Intrinsically opposed to the militarisation of borders and humanitarian technologies of government, they face criminalisation by the state, framed as ‘pull factors’ or facilitators of illegal migration, as a result of which they become targets for repression (Dadusc & Mudu, 2020). Taking note of this tension between autonomous humanitarians and the state is important in the context of the sanitary crisis, during which exceptional powers may be put to work to undermine their actions.

The aforementioned exceptional lockdown rules lent the police further liberties in targeting the displaced, hindering their movements and access to services, as revealed in what follows. This legislation also further enabled the policing of citizens, namely limiting the activities of autonomous humanitarians working on the ground at this time. The remainder of this article draws on empirics to pull loose the specifics of necropolitical opportunism as a biopolitical mode emergent at a time of nested crisis. It hones in on the relevance of incorporating this concept within broader debates on biopolitics, especially at a time when the pandemic protracts and border and global crises are ever-more profoundly intertwined.

Field research under lockdown

This article draws on 5 months of ethnographic fieldwork that I carried out in Calais in the first half of 2020, as well as on in-person and phone conversations and interviews with displaced respondents (9), humanitarians (7) and state responders (1) through 2020 and early 2021. It also draws on broader fieldwork I have carried out in Calais since 2016 and on several reports. When the French government declared a national lockdown in March 2020, I went into lockdown with displaced people at a safe house in Calais. During this time, I was in close interaction with house residents as well as people living in the encampments, to whom we offered limited ‘through the window’ support (food and phone charging). The names of all displaced respondents have been changed to protect their identities, and humanitarian respondents’ identities appear according to their expressed desired levels of anonymity. All respondents gave informed oral or written consent for their inclusion in the research, and were given the choice as to whether or not their interview be audio recorded. Interviews conducted in French and report extracts in French have been translated by the author.

Reinforced exposure to suffering: manipulating geographies of migrant life through pandemic

Half-hearted humanitarianism: ‘a plaster on a gaping wound’

‘Again, today, the buses did not come,’ Daniel writes to me for a third consecutive morning. We’re 10 days into lockdown, and he and his Eritrean peers, living on a stretch of land beside a motorway, await the arrival of buses to bring them to state-provided accommodation centres where they might wait out the lockdown. For this national group in particular, reliant almost exclusively on passage attempts by clandestinely hiding away on lorries, the pause in cross-Channel traffic the pandemic caused left them with little incentive to stay in the border camps. Concerned for their health and seeing little opportunity for passage, most of those I spoke to in the early days of lockdown considered it better to go into accommodation to stay safe from the virus until traffic returned. However, as Paton and Boittiaux (2020), it wasn’t until April that the Pas-de-Calais préfecture had 623 beds in accommodation to offer, though nearly double that number were estimated to be living in the encampments. By this time, the initial fear of infection had somewhat reduced among the displaced, who did not see the viral outbreak they had feared among their groups. Many were suspicious when offered a roof under which to lock down: up until that point, their experiences with the authorities had predominantly been in the context of routine evictions or forced dispersal to asylum-claim centres, designed to force them into ‘traps of humanitarianism’ and containment (Tazzioli, 2020) of which this accommodation seemed a novel iteration. Ariana from Iran explained: ‘I am worried about the virus. Not for my health, but because I am worried they will put us in quarantine for 6 months or something and stop us from going [to the UK].’ It is important to bear this affective dimension in mind: long-standing animosity between the authorities and the displaced festered at the border during this period, making displaced people concerned as to whether they would be able to leave accommodation centres at their will, how far away they would be from Calais, what the conditions would be like and whether these centres would be more crowded and prone to the spread of infection than the outdoor camps. Was the goal to protect them from the virus or to protect Calais citizens from them? Many of those initially eager to go into accommodation changed their minds when the sheltering response came late and staggered.

These distrustful relations were intensified by restrictions indiscriminately placed on the ability of the displaced to navigate border space: on the orders of officials from Calais’s town hall, drivers of the free local buses began to racially profile those waiting at bus stops, told to bypass those they identified as ‘potential migrants’ (Amnesty International, 2020; Human Rights Observers, 2021). Not only was this a blatant discriminatory act of racial violence, it also hindered people’s access to essential services like the Calais hospital and clinic. Moreover, in the early days of the pandemic, several migrant people told me that police officers were preventing them from moving between their encampments and the city. Though this was short-lived, the rationale behind this extra-legal, discriminatory practice clearly seeks to protect the citizen from the displaced person framed as liable to ‘infect’ (Esposito, 2013). The poor faith of the authorities regarding the displaced was further visible in the dissatisfaction of humanitarians working on the ground. A medical worker described:

La Vie Active [mandated by the state] set up a few extra taps, and there were distributions of hand sanitiser, of soap, but it’s like sticking a plaster on a gaping wound. When you have groups living several people to a tent, in great proximity and in deplorable hygienic conditions … OK, hand out soap, but it’s just not enough, it’s a palliative measure.

The hypocrisy of the state is exposed here, engaging in a weak performance of care by making basic sanitary improvements with one hand, while rendering life at the border more precarious through continued evictions with the other. Pre-pandemic, those living in the encampments had access to just one water tap and 20 or so chemical toilets. Considering this dramatic neglect of the living conditions of the displaced pre-pandemic, to provide a genuine humanitarian response would have seemed contradictory, cornering the authorities into acknowledging the absurd inhumanity of their brutal governance of these groups under normal conditions. Instead, it embarked on a half-hearted and performative, bare minimum response, to save face while making few genuine efforts to protect those whom it remains their main goal to deter. As Gazzotti writes, in border zones that routinely devalue Black lives, the scope of humanitarian practice is limited to a minimal biopolitics: ‘the bestialization of migrants at the border can be taken care of, not radically reversed’ (2020, p. 425).

Through my interviews with humanitarian actors, it became apparent that the Ministry of the Interior has taken over all responsibility on migration-related issues at the border, whether or not a given issue falls under their expertise. This reinforces the idea that securitisation is the unique lens through which the state accepts to conceive of the displaced at the border. An employee of a medical organisation explained:

We used to be in regular conversation with the sanitary authorities: the Regional Health Agency (ARS) which is a decentralized, region-level branch of the Ministry of Health. But for some time now - I think since Colomb became Minister of the Interior, and it’s continued with Castaner and Darmanin³ - the Ministry of the Interior has centralized everything, and our only interlocuter on all migration-related topics is the Ministry of the Interior. I’ve written many letters and emails to the ARS, because for me they are the most relevant actor when it comes to health - but I’ve never received a single answer.⁴

The exceptional event of the pandemic emphasizes the concerning nature of this single-ministry response on all migration-related issues in Calais. In a context of sanitary crisis, the importance of communication with legitimate health authorities for organisations seeking to provide a response in the encampments seems evident. The half-hearted humanitarian response by the French state to protect the displaced from pandemic, and the coordination of that response by the Ministry of the Interior, demonstrate the state’s prioritisation of securitisation from the displaced above their protection from infection. It finds itself unable to admit that ‘their’ crisis is no longer distinct from ‘our’ crisis but shared, for the virus takes humanity at large as victim.

Exposure: the paradox of eviction through lockdown

During the pandemic, the necropolitical rationale for submitting the displaced to routine evictions only became clearer. Regardless of the chaos generated by the first lockdown and the many unknowns the virus presented, evictions continued: each site of encampment faced eviction every 48 hours, with many people losing possessions or shelter each time. Although state representatives defend this by stating that they did offer shelter in which at least a proportion of the displaced could go into lockdown, this took several weeks. It is precisely in these early weeks that humanitarian support was extremely limited, while humanitarian groups worked to adapt their service provision so as to protect their employees and volunteers. Regardless of these difficult conditions, during the first fortnight of the lockdown alone, displaced people faced 45 evictions and effectively remained ‘confined outside’ (Human Rights Observers, 2021). No alternative shelter was offered to those evicted (as required by law) during this early period. An organisation representative present at meetings between associations and the Calais prefecture in the early days of the pandemic described:

Pfff - it was an aberration. One of our first demands was that the evictions stop. Just imagine, every time people are evicted it means they are dispersed, that contacts between people are multiplied, some people lose their belongings. […] The authorities told us not to mix everything up, that the evictions had nothing to do with the sanitary crisis and that they would pursue their politics of eviction.

This emphasises how various exceptionalisms may be made to intersect at the border. Even the police contested continued evictions through the pandemic, out of concern for their own health. A highly racialized post on the website of one of France’s main police syndicates, Synergie Officiers, protests:

For years our officers have been carrying out this mission without complaints and in deplorable sanitary conditions. This means every morning, in all weather, 1.5 to 2 hours of patrolling the woods and terrains littered with rubbish and excrement under the fearful eye of rats … It has also for years meant, without protective equipment, encountering hundreds of migrants potentially carrying diseases like tuberculosis or scabies. […] But now that France is at ‘war’ [with the virus], that the highest state authorities have decreed an unprecedented lockdown for the whole population, we see these same authorities have not suspended eviction operations. […] It is irresponsible not to suspend [dismantling operations] during a pandemic! [translation from French, Le Bureau National Synergie-Officiers 2020]

This public expression of police syndicate members’ unwillingness to pursue evictions through pandemic emphasizes the state’s determination not to put their border deterrence strategy on hold despite the threat of viral infection. It emphasizes their determination to address migration and the pandemic as two separate crises, and thus to paradoxically pursue their deterrence strategy and sanitary response side by side. A prefecture representative emphasised to me that authorities in Calais have one humanitarian strategy and a separate securitisation strategy, both of which the préfet is at the head of, but which are separate strands. This emphasises the irreconcilability of these strands at a time of pandemic. During the first French lockdown (18^th of March – 11th of May 2020), an overwhelming 96.7% of evictions (176 instances) nationwide took place in Calais, Marck and Grande-Synthe alone – the three main places in northern France where displaced populations live while seeking passage to the United Kingdom (Observatoire des expulsions de lieux de vie informels, 2020). Across the rest of the country, numbers of evictions were reduced on public health grounds, and due to the extension of the trêve hivernale (a winter ‘truce’ period during which people are protected from eviction) to the 10^th of July (ibid). These criteria were evidently not held to apply to this border, further emphasising its exceptional status. The following extract from an interview with the food distribution manager of state-appointed organisation La Vie Active offers a telling example of just how routine eviction operations in Calais have become. When I asked whether he was surprised evictions hadn’t ceased during lockdown, he replied:

Well … no, it’s not really a question I asked myself … Your question is a funny one, because precisely … Haven’t we reached a point when we’re in such a routine of eviction that even now we’re still at it? That’s what’s terrible, that we’ve reached a point where we’re in a routine of eviction. Whereas an eviction should really be an exceptional event.

The state’s determination to persist with evictions despite the increased contacts between people these generate emphasizes that the border zone has become a space in which national sovereignty is valued above the life of the displaced person. During the pandemic, these undesired bodies paradoxically became even less grieveable (Butler, 2016). Echoing the words of the Sudanese man cited in the title of this article, the same respondent working for La Vie Active admitted that ‘[the state] asking people to wear a mask and then letting them sleep four to a tent at night isn’t very coherent.’ Under normal circumstances, a significant proportion of material donations to organisations in Calais come from the UK. However, reduced cross-border traffic and services during the lockdown meant they were arriving in Calais in reduced numbers, stretching a limited supply of essentials such as tents even thinner and making it difficult for humanitarians (also reduced in number) to meet the pace of material confiscations. In such conditions, social distancing becomes impossible.

While the authorities thus reportedly claimed to approach clandestine migration and COVID-19 as two separate crises, the overlapping exceptional regime of restricted mobilities and practices generated by the pandemic was in practice mobilized to bolster the exceptional measures set in motion in the struggle against the first. In other words, the state opportunistically exacerbated displaced people’s exposure to suffering by dispossessing them even further, exposing them to a greater risk of infection in the process.

Hollowing out humanitarianism

The support network in Calais has developed over many years, namely through the direct response of autonomous humanitarians to the primary needs of displaced people at the border. Local organisations taking on this responsibility since the early 2000s were joined by national and international grassroots groups at the time of the Calais Jungle, and many remained after the demolition of the makeshift camp in 2016 (Agier et al., 2019). Thereafter and until early 2018, independent associations and grassroots groups provided the bulk of aid (except water and sanitation provided by La Vie Active, who in 2018 also began to deliver meals). These groups are targets of state repression (Amnesty International, 2019), because they disrupt border militarisation and undermine the humanitarianism the state seeks to put in place to render its violent border enforcement ‘tolerable’ (Pallister-Wilkins, 2017). Although this web of autonomous humanitarians has gained in strength and professionalized through years of ground-level response and struggles with the authorities to remain active (Hilhorst et al., 2020), the exceptional restrictions on actions and mobility introduced within the sanitary state of emergency were mobilized to undermine their clout. In the immediacy of lockdown, many autonomous humanitarians found themselves targeted by legal restrictions. Just days after the first lockdown was announced, the French state introduced a sanitary state of emergency (décret n°2020-293 du 23 mars 2020), which outlines the discretionary power of the ‘state representative in the département’ to prohibit or restrict activities in its jurisdiction. The article states:

[…] gatherings, meetings or activities essential to the continuity of the life of the Nation may be maintained by way of derogation by the representative of the State in the department, by regulatory or individual measures, except when local circumstances prevent it. The representative of the State in the département is empowered, for the same purposes, to prohibit or restrict by regulatory or individual measures gatherings, meetings or activities that do not fall into the category described. (article 7, décret n°2020-293 du 23 mars 2020)

While the introduction of emergency measures during a pandemic is unsurprising, the implications of regulations that accord discretionary powers to local authorities become problematic at a site so characterized by struggle between state, the displaced and those supporting them. The subjective nature of what qualifies as ‘essential to the continuity of the life of the Nation,’ as well as the power of the representative of the State in the département to prohibit activities in their jurisdiction, represents a handing over of exceptional powers to local authorities. These authorities, on the unrelated grounds of pandemic, were handed the authority necessary to quash its ongoing struggle with autonomous humanitarians. Although the law provided an exemption to lockdown for those carrying out ‘assistance to vulnerable people’,⁵ the regulation and policing of these exemptions and their applicability was discretionary in practice (Lipsky, 2010 [1980]). As a member of a human rights observation team described: ‘every time the police gave us a fine, they said our work did not meet their definition of humanitarian assistance.’ Associations l’Auberge des Migrants and Utopia56 reported being issued 17 fines while carrying out humanitarian work in the first 20 days of the lockdown alone, on grounds such as ‘invalid exemption certificate’ (9) ‘not allowed to document the eviction of an informal place of life’ (2) and ‘non-respect of confinement measures’ (5). In 2022, organisations on the ground reported that over the course of the three COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, people working for HRO and Utopia56 were issued a total of at least 130 fines for breaching lockdown, to a combined value of close to 20,000 euros (Human Rights Observers, Utopia 56 & L’Auberge des Migrants, 2022). This vividly conveys the extent of the interference and intimidation these groups faced under exceptional sanitary conditions.

When lockdown hit, state-appointed organisation La Vie Active adapted and reduced their food provision: ‘usually, our meal distributions happen en masse, so the idea of introducing sanitary regulations and social distancing was just impossible’ [interview]. The organisation switched from providing breakfast and hot meals – which take time to serve and generate queues – to distributing cold meals, namely meal packs with sandwiches, which could be quickly handed out. While this response was logical at a time of chaos, also designed to protect the organization's staff from a virus whose properties and mode of transmission remained obscure, it also meant the sole state-appointed actor providing food offered a bare minimum. Pre-pandemic, the Refugee Community Kitchen provided a second hot meal to the displaced daily, but the organisation withdrew in the early days of lockdown due to the risks and uncertainties faced by their volunteers. This moment revealed the shortcomings of an autonomous solidarity network providing so much of the aid at the border: their self-appointed status and reliance on volunteers to function renders them particularly liable to fall away in times of crisis. Food security was considerably compromised for several weeks. The first lockdown also coincided with the Orthodox fasting period followed by many Eritreans, soon after which Ramadan began. This placed limitations on what people of many faiths could eat and when, further compromising their ability to sustain themselves well. While this may seem superfluous at a time of pandemic, for many of those unable to take any real action to protect themselves from the virus, faith was a crucial source of comfort (Debele, 2020). Furthermore, with food distributions limited, those able to may have wanted to purchase supplies. However, many reported being refused entry to the local hypermarket, where security would turn away those they profiled as ‘migrants.’ An Eritrean man told me: ‘I am hungry. They aren’t giving us fruit or vegetables anymore, and when we try to go to Carrefour they won’t let us in.’

In response to this situation, the Calais Food Collective emerged, an initiative cobbled together by ‘volunteers who wanted to stay in Calais and find a solution to keep distributing food, seeing that people would otherwise face a considerable food shortage’ [interview]. On their website, they explain that in Calais, ‘emergency food aid was requested by more than 120 people between [the] 17th and 22nd of March 2020.’ This initiative reinforces the biological right to survival of the displaced while contesting insufficient action taken by the state, representing a temporary assemblage of affirmative power in the ‘biopolitical arena of eating’ (Hamilakis, 2017, p. 179). While crisis may be mobilised to weaken autonomous groups, the emergence of this new organisation reveals the adaptability of the collaborative solidarian web that has emerged through adversity in northern France.

Resurging police violence: restricting the right to bear witness

Following the demolition of the Calais ‘Jungle’ in late 2016, police harassment of migrant people at the border intensified (Agier et al., 2019). Numerous instances of police violence occurred under the ‘no point of fixation’ policy introduced by President Macron (Hagan, 2018; Palmas, 2021). However, autonomous humanitarians in Calais have worked for years to professionalize their actions and bear witness to this violence through the establishment of a team of Human Rights Observers (among other initiatives). This team, established in 2017, counters violent governance practices by acting as an oversight: they document eviction operations, direct violence against the displaced and the intimidation of humanitarians. This pool of data makes state and police strategies at the border more visible and tangible, triggering investigations by human rights actors such as Amnesty International (2019; 2020) or Human Rights Watch (2017) and by accountability actors like the French Ombudsman and the General Inspection of the National Police (IGPN et al., 2017), and thus limiting the escalation of violence. From my experience, the nature and frequency of police violence in early 2020 had decreased since 2017–18, a period during which it was disproportionate, rampant and most often played out with impunity (Human Rights Watch, 2017). Observers help enforce accountability at a border where, as one of them explained: ‘they [the police] can do whatever they want, because obviously the people who fall victim to them are eventually going to leave,’ and are afraid of making official complaints due to their informal status. During the pandemic however, a regression occurred, with pressure placed on human rights observers who were no longer tolerated at evictions. Many faced repeated 135-euro fines for breaking lockdown regulations, despite having documentation to justify their presence in the field (Amnesty International, 2020) and the fact that their ‘presence serves a goal of access to rights and information that the authorities can’t prevent’ (Human Rights Observers, 2021). Similarly to other autonomous humanitarians, human rights defenders were fined 32 times for non-compliance with restrictions on their right to freedom of movement during the two 2020 lockdowns (ibid).

This emphasizes how authority may arbitrarily be reenforced at a time of crisis. Local authorities take an arbitrary interpretation of lockdown law and implement it strategically, as a sort of ‘payback’ that undermines the observers. While the hindrance of the observers might at first seem of lesser import than that of groups providing food, this does not quite hold in the Calais context: both the first and second lockdowns saw an increase in police violence outside of routinized evictions (Amnesty International, 2020). During the first lockdown, a letter signed ‘The Eritrean Refugee community of Calais’ (2020) testifies to an increase in violence by CRS [French riot police] officers in March 2020. As well as listing eight accounts of violence against them in the last week of March alone, they write:

Our complaint is about the CRS company and their aggressive, impulsive actions on us. They don’t think that we are humans. They called us names like monkey, bitch, etc. And … a couple weeks ago, they started threatening our lives by keep beating us every time they get a chance, like when they found two or three people walking around the food [distribution] street or in our tents where we sleep. They keep driving fast towards us on the street, like they want to run us over, and start to take people in their car to some places which is outside Calais and keeping beating us until we faint out. They hide their personal [identification] code when they are doing something wrong over us. And whenever they see [us] recording them while they are doing something wrong, they break our mobiles and our bodies.

This striking account of increased violence at a time of lockdown, when the possibility of bearing witness was compromised, emphasises the importance of these groups’ presence. A similar spike in violence occurred during the second lockdown. An observer working on the ground at the time described:

The violence was obviously growing. We got a lot of reports like ‘they are blocking us [from going to and from our camps] a lot,’ ‘they are tear gassing us,’ ‘they are coming at night and gassing our food stock,’ stuff like that. And it ended with one of the guys taking an LBD [flash-ball] bullet to the head.

The same person explained: ‘I think the increase in violent incidents during lockdown was linked to the fact that there was nobody in the streets, so it was easy for the CRS to just arrest people because not many people would witness it.’ The link between lockdowns, reduced visibility of police interventions, and increased police violence is clear: reduced visibility reduces the likelihood of police being held accountable for their acts, making the pandemic an opportune moment for the performance of abusive and often unlawful ground-level deterrence practices (Amnesty International, 2020).

Discussion: the necropolitics of opportunism in crisis

Eighteen months on from the declaration of the first nationwide lockdown, the displaced in Calais have been spared the worst of the pandemic. There does not appear to have been a mass outbreak (cases were predominantly mild or asymptomatic) with few positive cases recorded by humanitarian groups or the prefecture. It remains unclear why numbers of (confirmed) infections were so low, but this outcome was impossible to anticipate. As Solnit writes about retrospective disaster response analysis: ‘that something has not happened is not always evidence that it was prevented by the measures taken’ (Solnit, 2010, p. 37). The eviction operations performed by the state in the encampments, along with its opportunistic mobilisation of exceptional COVID-19 measures to exacerbate precarious living conditions, could have had a more dramatic outcome. The necropolitical mode of governance enforced at this border under normal conditions is emphasised through pandemic: an intentional and racialised, protracted violence of exposure is waged against the displaced (Mbembe, 2003).

The 2020 lockdowns brought with them greater biopolitical consequences than exposure to infection alone. The ground-level insights this article has offered into the governance strategies people faced in Calais in the early months of this period bolster the argument that deterrence was prioritised over protection: exceptional legislation and mobility regimes put in place by the state in the name of sanitary response were opportunistically mobilized at local level to weaken migrant people’s ability to survive at a border already subject to exceptional forms of policing. This was most evident in the refusal to cease a deterrence strategy of routine eviction, working not only to exhaust the displaced but also hindering their ability to socially distance and meet basic hygiene standards. Furthermore, while failing to introduce sufficient measures to protect the displaced, the authorities proceeded to try and suffocate resistive autonomous humanitarians working to support them through the mass imposition of controls and fines. This emphasises the contemporary paradox of the ‘humanitarian border’, the untenability of a state co-opting humanitarian responsibilities while simultaneously enforcing violent border enforcement measures designed to meet its primary goal of deterrence. The implications of this sharpened landscape of vulnerability through pandemic are significant both in practical and ethical terms, playing out on emotional and affective levels by imposing new experiences of suffering on those already dispossessed.

The hastily imposed first lockdown represented a time of panic for the displaced. As Ho & Maddrell write, the pandemic has created new experiences of vulnerability which ‘reconfigure individual and collective emotional-affective landscapes’ (Ho & Maddrell, 2021, p. 3). Those in Calais were not only fearful of COVID-19, but concerned about reduced prospects of passage. What had been a port city offering opportunities to smuggle oneself across the border amidst cargo was dried up of traffic almost overnight. The dwindling hope of passage along with continued evictions exacerbated a sense of stuckness, despair and panic, in many cases making people more inclined to expose themselves to risk: it comes as no surprise that lockdown coincided with a marked rise in numbers attempting the Channel crossing by small boat. A long-term autonomous humanitarian working as part of a wood distribution team in Calais at the time, described:

Before it was mostly Iranians [making boat crossings] who, because they hadn’t made a boat crossing before, I think were less terrified, where Eritreans and Sudanese were like, ‘am I f**k getting on a boat again.’ But now, because it’s been so difficult getting on lorries and there’s so much less of a chance for much higher risk, people are chancing boats […] saying ‘it’s the only way I’ve got.’

Numbers of smugglers offering passage multiplied during this period, seeking to maximize profit from the rise in demand. In some cases however, this demand was met at the expense of safety. Moreover, many could not afford the smuggler fee, as a result of which, as another humanitarian described: ‘a lot of people started trying to make the crossing without smugglers. People started trying to build boats and that kind of thing.’ This willingness to take greater risks emerges violently in the data of failed passage attempts, namely a surge of people attempting the crossing using rudimentary equipment: mid-June to mid-October 2020 saw a surge in such attempts, with 23 failed occurrences involving 76 people in rudimentary vessels described as ‘kayak,’ ‘toy boat,’ ‘paddle board,’ ‘beach inflatable’.⁶ Sudanese teenager Abdulfatah Hamdallah drowned in August 2020, after he and a friend attempted to propel themselves across the Channel in an inflatable dinghy using shovels for oars.

Conclusion

Contributing to early analyses of the ground-level impact of the pandemic on displaced people in border zones, this study of the Calais case sheds light on how the French authorities approached the period of sanitary exception with opportunism, twisting the exceptional circumstances activated by a nationwide sanitary state of emergency to the ends of migration deterrence. As Ho & Maddrell write, ‘the spatial implications of COVID-19 reflect and exacerbate existing social inequalities […] in multiple intersectional ways’ (Ho & Maddrell, 2021, p. 5). Through the lens of this particular moment, this article contributes to recent debates surrounding the ‘humanitarian border’ and contemporary biopolitical modes more broadly. In the context of the pandemic, exceptional legislations were paradoxically put to work to exacerbate the suffering and vulnerability of displaced people. Building on Carastathis’s work (Carastathis, 2018), this article has proposed necropolitical opportunism as a biopolitical mode of governance emergent in certain situations where a state faces nested crises: while taken individually, each crisis may require exceptional practices and legislation, these exceptional measures may in practice be mobilised in the struggle against other crises. Conceptualising opportunism as a sovereign biopolitical mode that arises when crises are nested may be a valuable analytical frame from which to analyse governance strategies adopted at other socially problematized sites where discrimination has been exacerbated by crisis. It emphasises that exceptional legislation must be held up to scrutiny and remain accountable to those whose lives it intimately and negatively impacts.

This article furthermore expands existing work on the northern French border zone as a space in which the migrant body is actively exposed to suffering. Joining the work of scholars on the Calais border as a racialised, necropolitical space (Davies et al., 2017), it argues that the pandemic has rendered the necropolitical logic at the heart of French deterrence policy in Calais more explicit than ever before. Bearing witness to how the lockdown periods were mobilised to further squeeze the living conditions of displaced people and to compromise their basic rights, it sharpens the devastating implications of the hostile logic at the core of French border securitisation strategies. Significantly, this article also extends these arguments by demonstrating how autonomous humanitarians seeking to hold the state accountable may quickly be delegitimised in moments of nested crisis, undercut by the authorities who mobilise exceptional legislation against them. This reinforces the argument made by scholars of humanitarian borderwork that, when co-opted or solely provided by the state, humanitarianism may be rendered complicit in enforcing and concealing violent border enforcement (Gazzotti, 2020; Pallister-Wilkins, 2017). This is an important observation for scholars examining how humanitarian borderscapes have been affected by the pandemic. It is also significant for autonomous humanitarian practitioners on the ground who, in the aftermath of the pandemic, might advocate for greater recognition of their role and legitimacy to operate in times of crisis.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the many displaced people and humanitarians in Calais who generously took the time to share their experiences with me, particularly under the difficult circumstances of the pandemic. I am also thankful to Ash Amin and Lorena Gazzotti who took the time to provide comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. Finally, many thanks to Elaine Ho, Avril Maddrell and Michele Lobo for accepting this article for inclusion in the COVID-19 special issue of which it is a part.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Wolfson College, the Cambridge Trust, the Robert Gardiner Memorial Scholarship and the Cambridge University’s Fieldwork Fund.

Notes

1. Loi n° 2020–290 du 23 mars 2020 d’urgence pour faire face à l’épidémie de covid-19.

2. This is emphasised by the fact that the state provides meals in Calais but not in Grande-Synthe, a less mediatised (so less visible) city just 40 km away, where similar numbers of displaced people live in similarly degrading conditions.

3. Ministers of the Interior: Gérard Colomb 2017–18; Christophe Castaner 2018–2020; Gérald Darmanin 2020-time of writing.

4. My own requests to discuss this with the ARS went unanswered.

5. Furthermore, a ministerial instruction to departmental prefects on the 27^th of March stated that: ‘the sanitary state of emergency shouldn’t have the effect of degrading the living conditions of the most precarious’ (Human Rights Observers, 2021, p. 18).

6. Numbers drawn from the author’s collation of press release data published by the Préfecture Maritime de la Manche et de la Mer du Nord.