Bordering through domicide: spatializing citizenship in Calais

ABSTRACT

This paper examines domicidal practices against illegalized border crossers in Calais, France as a technology of citizenship and migration governance. It addresses recent calls to include actions and interventions which restrict citizenship in the context of illegalized migration within critical citizenship studies literature. Studying the state violence upholding and spatializing normative citizenship allows for a deeper understanding of citizenship’s implication in the European border regime, and raises questions on the concept’s continued application to theorizations of migrants’ political movements and spatial manifestations. The paper proposes anti-citizen politics as an alternative before arguing that the presence of this politics within the city’s squats and jungles, more than the physical occupations as such, is what the French state seeks to eradicate through acts of domicide. Working from empirical examples, the article describes a ‘carrot-and-stick’ domicide currently at work in Calais where the eviction and destruction of autonomous forms of migrant inhabitance is combined with a simultaneous offer of state managed accommodation. These tactics operate together to drive migrants out of the city of Calais, away from the UK border, and ultimately into a determination of their detain/deport-ability via citizenship’s scrutiny.

KEYWORDS:

• Calais
• France
• domicide
• technologies of citizenship
• anti-citizenship
• spatial inhabitance/segregation

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks goes to the CAPPE Social Movements Network at the University of Brighton, friends and colleagues, and the two anonymous reviewers whose challenging and insightful feedback on earlier versions of this work were indispensable in helping to think through and revise this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The city’s squats and jungles can in one and the same time be places of segregation and exclusion, but also politicized spaces of struggle and resistance. They operate as a technology of citizenship as they ‘deny and interrupt “presence” to people by hindering the visibility, association, recognition, status, and rights that come with being of the city’ (Rygiel 2011, 14), while they also render hyper-visible people deemed to inhabit the camps when they are out in the city; produced as ‘out of place’ they are easily spotted, rounded up, detained, and sent back. However, these occupations are also collaboratively built and autonomously organized nodes in Papadopoulos and Tsianos’ ‘mobile commons’ (King 2016, 107). This dual quality produces certain paradoxes in political organizing around such spaces. For example, ‘The Jungle’ existing between 2015–2016 was vehemently fought against when it was first proposed by the state as a ‘tolerated’ (and segregated) form of inhabitance, but then struggled for when faced with eviction (Ansems de Vries et al. 2017, 14–15).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Travis Van Isacker

Travis Van Isacker is PhD candidate in the School of Applied Social Science at the University of Brighton and obtained his MA in Critical and Creative Analysis from the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. His current project is on the geographies of borders and citizenship in Calais, France.