Counter-mapping citizenship: bordering through domicide in Calais, France

Abstract

This thesis analyses how anti-migrant domicide functions as a technology of citizenship in Calais, France. Evictions, destructions, and securitisations exclude 'non-citizen' migrants from this border city, defining those allowed to exist within it as citizens by contrast. They also destroy the physical infrastructures, social communities, and political solidarities facilitating migrants' irregular journeys to the UK. Thus, the erasure of irregular migrants' autonomous home-spaces reproduces citizenship while reasserting it as the determinant of who can freely exist in, or move beyond, Calais. However, anti-migrant domicide also produces unconventional citizenships beyond nationality or status. The thesis analyses two examples---environmental and humanitarian citizenship---to show how citizen communities in Calais can reconfigure themselves around alternative, nominally more inclusive, sets of values while continuing to exclude irregular migrants. In these cases citizens define themselves either against migrants who are perceived as failing to fulfil citizenship's substantive criteria, or through migrants who are the object of citizen-defining humanitarian or environmentalist performances. While not immediately excluded by their status, migrants 'non-citizens' because of their racialisation in Calais' racist environment and how this has been compounded by the effects of domicide against them.Counter-mapping in this project takes three different forms: cartographic, presenting a map of domicide between 2009-19; narrative, elaborating descriptions of select case studies in Calais' anti-migrant domicidal history; and conceptual, demonstrating how citizenship is produced by these exclusionary spatial interventions. These three modes are combined to map how migrants' spatial exclusion from Calais' 'spaces of citizenship' and their socio-political exclusion reciprocally reinforce one-another.While countering progressive conceptions of citizenship by showing how all citizenship forms analysed in Calais are constituted through migrants' exclusion, the thesis raises questions for the continued invocation of citizenship politics in scholarly analyses of resistance to the border regime. It also argues for the need to (re)create spaces of anti-citizenship as part of struggles for free movement for all. These spaces prefigure coalitional relations beyond citizenship categories, and provide toe-holds from which to resist their institutionalisation in bordering technologies.

Makeshift camp geographies and informal migration corridors

“…As opposed to the sterile and architecturally uniform spaces of institutional camps (Gueguen-Teil and Katz, 2018), the bottom-up, self-generated spatialities of makeshift camps are seen as key in generating a ‘radical sociality and “communing”’ (Mould, 2017b: 401), where refugees organize ‘neighborhoods’, build their own ‘human environments’ such as restaurants, hair salons, video shops or even institutions like schools and places of worship where residents can live together, and carve out a ‘reassuring cocoon, a place of solidarities’ despite the violence, disastrous material conditions, exclusion and dehumanizing nature of these spaces (Agier et al, 2018; Gueguen-Teil and Katz, 2018). In addition to their function as shelters and the tactical coordination of onward transit, makeshift camps have been examined as ‘infrastructures of livability’ and ‘lieux de vie’ – as sites of hospitality, meeting points, spaces of sociality and solidarity for their residents (Tazzioli, 2021; Van Isacker, 2019, 2020). Makeshift camps have also been framed as sites of political possibility (Gueguen-Teil and Katz, 2018; Mould, 2017b; Rygiel, 2011, 2012), where new forms of ‘political subjectivities are being created and where spatial resistance to political action increasingly takes place’ (Martin et al, 2019: 754), as well as the development of micro-politics and social hierarchies among the camp’s diverse actors (Jordan and Minca, 2022).…”

“…In these marginal, transient and ephemeral sites, it is often difficult, contentious and unpredictable to carry out research, to develop, plan and execute methodologies that are possible in other contexts, to foster trust and relationships with ever-changing resident populations or even the activists and NGO workers within them, or to return to the same site for follow-up visits. Scholarship has highlighted some of the key challenges, risks and roadblocks of research in this context and how to approach makeshift camps, honing in on aspects such as ethics, vulnerability, volunteering, reciprocity and solidarity, language and translation, among others (Augustová, 2020; Jordan, 2020; Jordan and Moser, 2020; Minca, 2021; Sandri, 2018; Van Isacker, 2020). Yet, questions remain regarding how to more effectively approach the study of makeshift camps and to develop nuanced understandings of these informal geographies and the roles they play in informal migrant mobilities and migrant corridor-formation, in particular.…”

“…We propose to take this further, calling for further investigation of what comes after a makeshift camp has been closed, destroyed or simply disappeared. Sometimes there is a new one in its stead, sometimes camp residents move down the road or behind a building or into the woods nearby, while other times the camp is simply razed and built over, leaving no trace of what it had been, the purpose it served or the lives led within it (on temporalities and makeshift camps, see: Hagan, 2021; Jordan and Minca, 2022; Queirolo Palmas, 2021; Tazzioli, 2019; Van Isacker, 2020). Each former makeshift camps served as a historical ‘site-event’ – often including eviction, police violence, orchestrated abandonment – that can help contribute to an understanding of contemporary informal mobilities and the lives led en route .…”

“…Each former makeshift camps served as a historical ‘site-event’ – often including eviction, police violence, orchestrated abandonment – that can help contribute to an understanding of contemporary informal mobilities and the lives led en route . There is burgeoning interest and scholarship on ‘counter-mapping’ in the context of migration studies (Ellison and Van Isacker, 2021; Tazzioli, 2013, 2019, 2020; Tazzioli and Garelli, 2019; Van Isacker, 2020). As a methodological approach, counter-mapping aims at investigating and uncovering the mobile, invisible and temporary spaces of transit and refuge, highlighting the ‘spatial and temporal’ traces of these informal geographies that are often not ‘apprehensible on the geopolitical map’ yet which may continue to live on even after they have been evicted, destroyed or ‘disappeared’ (Tazzioli and Garelli, 2019: 3).…”

“…Even though the term has been developed by migrants themselves and then integrated into the language of activists, journalists and scholars, Davies et al (2019: 224-5) have highlighted how the term 'jungle' has 'troubling, racialized connotations' which, alongside the 'neocolonial spectacle' of contemporary border regimes, should be considered critically. 2 The vast majority of scholarship on jungles in Europe has focused on the now infamous 'Jungle(s)' of Calais, which has been highly represented due to its enduring role and importance as a transit node and crossing point for migrants seeking to reach the UK over the last twenty years (Agier et al, 2018;Davies et al, 2017;Davies and Isakjee, 2015;Gueguen-Teil and Katz, 2018;Ibrahim and Howarth, 2018;Mould, 2017aMould, , 2017bRygiel, 2011;Sandri, 2018;Tyerman, 2019Tyerman, , 2021Van Isacker, 2020). 'Jungles' have also proliferated along the so-called Balkan Route corridoraround border zones, at the outskirts of cities and in various transit zones and bottleneck sites where refugee mobility has become more difficult, dangerous and protracted (Arsenijević et al, 2017;Border Violence Monitoring Network et al, 2020;Isakjee et al, 2020;Minca and Collins, 2021).…”