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.

Racialized geographies of home: Property, unhoming and other possible futures

“…Darling (2011) describes a British domopolitics of asylum wherein visions of ‘threatening’ migrants legitimise the subjection of those awaiting immigration decisions to techniques and sites of discomfort, where eviction, movement or inspection threatens subjects’ every moment. Over the Channel, in the refugee camps of Calais, Van Isacker (2019: 617) and Mould (2018) detail a ‘hyperactive campaign’ of domicide and state technologies of ‘destabilisation’ involving evicting, destroying place-making efforts and impeding social service provisioning, that ultimately aims to ‘break human bodies and spirits’ such that migrants abandon all unregulated movement, recognising their ‘dead end’. At that site, unhoming produced a fragile cycle of home(un)making that entrenched migrants’ impermanence and invisibility.…”

“…15.Unhoming is resisted, see Section VI. Writing on anti-citizenship politics, Van Isacker (2019), Mould (2018: 7) and others illustrate propositional potentialities in how Calais migrants’ resourceful homemaking thickened relations of solidarity in socially and politically valuable ways to resist and refuse bordering regimes, such as by spatialising an anti-citizenship agenda by, for instance, setting fire to their own dwellings to protest impending state demolition.…”

Micro‐Politics of a Makeshift Refugee Camp: The Grafosrem Factory in Šid, Serbia

“…Scholarship on makeshift camps has grown over the last years, focusing primarily on the Calais “Jungle(s)” (Agier et al. 2019; Davies and Isakjee 2015; Hagan 2022; Ibrahim and Howarth 2018; Mould 2017, 2018; Queirolo Palmas 2021; Van Isacker 2019), although scholars have also explored sites in other European cities (Altin 2020; Bock 2018; Squire 2018) as well as along the Balkan Route (Davies et al. 2019; Jordan and Minca 2022; Minca and Umek 2020; Obradovic‐Wochnik 2018).…”