Bordering solidarities: migrant activism and the politics of movement and camps at Calais

Abstract

The proliferation of more restrictive border controls governing global mobility provides important sites of crystallization through which differentiated and stratified rights to movement are produced, negotiated, and reimagined. One such form, the detention of migrants, is often understood through a logic of exception as the exclusion of unwanted migrants from the borders of the political community. Critical scholarship on detention informed by an autonomous migration perspective suggests a more nuanced reading of detention as the differential inclusion of migrants through positions of precariousness, transformations of legal statuses and subjectivities, and control over the direction and temporality of migratory flows. Building on this trajectory, this paper argues that the very meaning of the camp also needs to be brought into the analysis of a politics of migration and of control. For spaces of detention are sites of contestation that can be used by migrants (and those in solidarity with them) as resources to navigate border controls, reimagine political community and subjectivities and through which migrants engage in practices of citizenship. Reflecting on the destruction of the migrant camps in and around Calais, the paper examines three different images of the camp space known as ‘the jungle’ and draws attention to camp spaces as social and political spaces, in which the struggles to define them are an integral part of what is at stake in the struggle between a politics of control and a politics of migration.

Keywords:

• camp
• detention
• border controls
• migrant activism
• Calais
• Agamben

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all of the individuals who, over the course of this research, shared their time and knowledge with me, especially Gabriella Alberti, Philip Amaral, Don Flynn, Vincent Lenoir, Sara Prestianni, Claire Rodier, Vicki Squire, and activists connected with the UK No Borders group in London and with Bristol No Borders. I would also like to thank William Walters and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this article, Vicki Squire for her editorial assistance and Peter Nyers and Will Coleman and the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition for their support of this project. The project was funded with the assistance of McMaster University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I appreciate the input that I received on this paper from Feyzi Baban, participants at the ‘Putting Citizenship in Motion’ workshop, McMaster University (October 2009); and participants at the European integration: past, present, and future workshop, Wilfrid Laurier University (April 2010). This paper builds on ideas around the camp developed in a co-authored paper with Isin on ‘Abject Spaces’ and I would like to thank him for his intellectual contribution and collaboration.

Notes

1. I refer to detention as a technology of citizenship to reflect that detention, as with other border controls, is fundamentally about the government of populations, in which the citizen and non-citizen are co-constitutive. Thus, detention has as much to do with the production of citizen subjectivities through their regulation of outsiders such as non-citizens. However, I also use the term strategically to destabilize the common reading of citizenship as a necessarily progressive concept and institution. For as I have noted elsewhere (Rygiel 2010b, p. 99), ‘contrary to liberal and Enlightenment perspectives, citizenship, struggles for greater rights should not be read simplistically and unidirectionally as merely progressive and emancipatory; rather, according to Foucault, they should be read as being the product of power (i.e. bio-power) and embedded in power relations. This means that, while citizenship struggles involve winning greater freedom for some individuals, they also further embed citizens within relations of power’, which may or may not lead to a progressive politics.

2. As Rancière (2004, p. 307) notes, when refugees are thought of in terms of victims who receive charity rather than as political subjects who demand and have rights to protection, the result is a hollowing out of the political quality of human rights where the act of giving refuge becomes akin to an act of charity: ‘Ultimately, those rights appear actually empty. They seem to be of no use. And when they are of no use, you do the same as charitable persons do with their old clothes. You give them to the poor. Those rights that appear to be useless in their place are sent abroad, along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes, and rights. It is in this way, as the result of this process, that the Rights of Man become the rights of those who have no rights, the rights of bare human beings subjected to inhuman repression and inhuman conditions of existence. They become humanitarian rights, the rights of those who cannot enact them, the victims of the absolute denial of right.’

3. This sentiment was similarly expressed in my personal email correspondence with Vicki Squire about her impressions of the no border camp. Squire writes: ‘The camp was at a distance from many camps and obviously migrants were not keen to come due to police presence…I went to the Pashtun jungle and disturbingly it seemed that many of the migrants really genuinely may have thought the NB camp meant that the borders were open…in terms of support the migrants wanted the campers to give them passports or open the borders’ (personal correspondence, 22 July 2009).