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.     

The micropolitics of border struggles: migrants’ squats and inhabitance as alternatives to citizenship

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the struggles of the We Are Here movement in Amsterdam as resistance to both securitarian and humanitarian border regimes. It explores the tensions between everyday forms of commoning emerging in migrants’ squats and technologies of enclosure and capture. In the first place, the paper contends that the creation of housing squats marked an important shift in migrants’ struggles that went from acts of protest to the performance of resistance at the level of the micropolitics of borders. By squatting buildings and creating common living spaces, current struggles mobilize material, affective and political solidarities and constitute a politics of inhabitance beyond and against dependency on the state and humanitarian practices. The second part of the paper discusses the government’s attempts to repress, govern and enclose the We Are Here movement within confined fields of action. With negotiations and humanitarian concessions through the provision of emergency shelters, local authorities attempted to re-direct the movement into politics of rights and recognitions. However, these tactics did not succeed to contain the struggle in its entirety: many migrants rejected humanitarian solutions, continued to create radical home spaces through squatting, enacting a politics of inhabitance beyond citizenship.     

From the Morality of Living to the Morality of Dying: Hunger Strikes in Turkish Prisons

Political hunger strikes have been part of the debates on human rights in many countries around the world. This paper explores the preconditions for and motives behind hunger strikes in Turkey by conceiving the hunger strikers as a part of citizenship politics through which strikers not only express their views against certain common issues, but also declare total opposition to an unjust condition within their political community. The paper focuses on the question of why some such “citizens” choose to participate in hunger strikes, which appears as an individual commitment to achieve a certain common objective. In doing so, the meaning of the experiences of hunger strikers and their universal right to live are elaborated in relation to their political and moral views. Hunger strikes are suggested to be seen as voluntary fasting, undertaken as a means of civil disobedience against an injustice within the context of citizenship. As examples of non-violent political acts, hunger strikes are not only part of citizenship politics but also expressions of commitment to achieving one's goals through non-aggressive means for the common good of all citizens. Moreover, they can also be considered examples of martyrdom/heroism because hunger strikers altruistically risk their life for a public cause. As a particular altruistic act, hunger strikes can also be viewed as an effective form of communication directed toward fellow citizens. Moreover, they are expressions of self-determination for having control over and for one's own life conditions. Finally, hunger strikes can be conceptualized as a struggle for transforming the configuration of structures and practices of citizenship about which one is passionately concerned. In this context, hunger strikes seem to be struggles for recognition in a relationship between two subjects, in which one subordinates the other.     

When the slaves go marching out: indignatio,invisible bodies,and political theory

In January 2010, hundreds of illegal migrants took to the streets of Rosarno in Italy for a violent protest against the acts of racism which they had routinely suffered. A collective subject, considered invisible, dared to revolt. These migrants are an anomaly in the social, legal, and political senses. Their revolt is an example of rebellions who constitute a litmus test for the discourse of citizenship; it reveals itself as a form of political subjectivity and highlights the corporeality of the conflict. Understanding the revolt also troubles the boundary between body discourses and traditional political theory. In this paper, I analyse the revolt through categories of contemporary political theory such as the ‘bare life’ of Giorgio Agamben, and the ‘disagreement’ of Jacques Rancière. I show how these categories only partially help to interpret the phenomenon of this uprising. However, the Spinozist concept of indignatio is a more useful intellectual tool to interpret and understand the phenomenon of the revolt of Rosarno.     

What Stops the Torture?

States whose agents engage in torture in a given year have a 93% chance of continuing to torture in the following year. What leads governments to stop the use of torture? We focus on the principal–agent relationship between the executive and the individuals responsible for supervising and interrogating state prisoners. We argue that some liberal democratic institutions change the probability that leaders support the creation of institutions that discourage jailers and interrogators from engaging in torture, thus increasing the probability of a state terminating its use of torture. These relationships are strongly conditioned by the presence of violent dissent; states rarely terminate the use of torture when they face a threat. Once campaigns of violent dissent stop, however, states with popular suffrage and a free press are considerably more likely to terminate their use of torture. Also given the end of violent dissent, the greater the number of veto points in government, the lower the likelihood that a state terminates its use of torture.     

Urban citizenship of rural migrants in reform-era China

One paradoxical reality of today's China is that urban citizenship does not necessarily go to those who have already moved to the city. Rural migrants are now allowed to work in cities but are deprived of a wide range of entitlements. Taking Shanghai, the most populous city in the world's most populous country, as a case study, this article establishes significant empirical content to elucidate how the notion of urban citizenship is interpreted in China, what criteria are applied for granting the urban citizenship, to what extent the entitlements of migrants in cities are comparable to those of the bona fide urban residents, and whether the lack of urban citizenship influences migrants' integration into host cities. Empirical investigation shows that granting of the urban hukou (household registration) is based largely on migrants' contribution to, rather than simply on their presence in, the host city. In the context of reform-era China, urban citizenship is used by city government not only to exclude some members of society from accessing urban welfare but also to make the urban economy more competitive by grabbing capital and human resources possessed by migrants.     

Impossible protest: noborders in Calais

Since the closure of the Red Cross refugee reception centre in Sangatte, undocumented migrants in Calais hoping to cross the border to Britain have been forced to take refuge in a number of squatted migrant camps, locally known by all as ‘the jungles.’ Unauthorised shanty-like residences built by the migrants themselves, living conditions in the camps are very poor. In June 2009, European ‘noborder’ activists set up a week-long protest camp in the area with the intention of confronting the authorities over their treatment of undocumented migrants. In this article, we analyse the June 2009 noborder camp as an instance of ‘immigrant protest.’ Drawing on ethnographic materials and Jacques Rancière's work on politics and aesthetics, we construct a typology of forms of border control through which to analyse the different ways in which the politics of the noborder camp were staged, performed and policed. Developing a critique of policing practices which threatened to make immigrant protest ‘impossible’, we highlight moments of protest which, through the affirmation of an ‘axiomatic’ equality, disrupted and disarticulated the borders between citizens and non-citizens, the political and non-political.     

The Swedish dystopia: violent imaginaries of the radical right

ABSTRACT

Thorleifsson examines the ways in which violent imaginaries of Sweden have been discursively constructed and used by populist radical-right (PRR) parties and actors in contemporary Europe. Based on multisited fieldwork among politicians and supporters of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the Hungarian Jobbik party, this article demonstrates how individual acts of violence are ‘transvaluated’ into violent imaginaries of migrants from Muslim-majority lands. What Thorleifsson terms ‘the Swedish dystopia’ not only entails a message of alarm and warning. PRR actors also use the trope of the Swedish dystopia in their call for action against Muslim migrants and minorities who, they claim, pose an ethnoreligious threat to national identity, security and even (Judaeo)-Christian civilization as a whole.     

Guerrilla Statesmanship: Constitutionalizing an Ethic of Dissent

According to judicial precedents, administrators informed by their expertise can speak on issues of public concern under First Amendment protections. In one sense, they could dissent by working against their employers in an attempt to direct issues of public concern through an educational function. The power to act like a statesman in raising such issues allows administrators to lead from behind and in front, as long as certain judicial thresholds are met. However, the U.S. Supreme Court recently moved to tighten the scope of such activity. This article assesses how an ethic of dissent has been translated into a constitutional perspective that at first was moderately constrained and later became very restricted. While the move to limit an ethic of dissent provides necessary constraints, it also may have weakened administrators’ ability to perform necessary statesmanship acts rooted in guerrilla government to achieve the common good.     

How much is citizenship worth? The case of Kyrgyzstani migrants in Kazakhstan and Russia

In the past few decades, political membership has become more complex, for example, through the proliferation of dual and multiple citizenships. Some scholars argue that, as a result, state membership may have become less relevant to individuals. In the same vein, our article argues that Kyrgyzstani migrants working in Russia and Kazakhstan have developed a pragmatic approach to citizenship. This case study, which builds upon in-depth interviews conducted in April and May 2008, is pertinent for several reasons. Labor migration from Kyrgyzstan has surged in recent years and is radically affecting the country's economy, society, and polity. Besides, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Russia have been separate political units for less than two decades; transnational practices and attitudes are thus not new. Our results show that for Kyrgyzstani migrants in Russia and Kazakhstan, citizenship is mainly defined in terms of concrete, short-term benefits. They have difficulties formulating what it means to be a citizen beyond the expression of a vague patriotic support. Those who have naturalized, mostly in Russia, do it for convenience purposes without attaching much affective meaning to it. Most see their stay as temporary (particularly in Kazakhstan), are not engaged in diasporic organizations or activities, and are estranged from the politics of both their home and host country.     

Political Belonging in a Neoliberal Era: The Struggle of the Sans-Papiers

This article argues that political belonging should be understood in the context of diverse spatial imaginaries which encompass but are not confined to the state. Engin Isin's approach to citizenship provides a theoretical grounding for this claim. By way of demonstration, the article focuses on the spatially reconfigured practices of the neoliberal state in relation to irregular migration. It shows how the policing of irregular migration sustains a logic of political belonging based on connections between state, citizen and territory. This logic is simultaneously compromised by transnational state practices including the exploitation of irregular migrant labour. Irregular migrants are contesting their positioning within these multidimensional statist frameworks that posit them as outsiders even while they are integrated into local sites of a global political economy. The struggle of the Sans-Papiers, a collective of irregular migrants in France, provides an example in this context. Their claims to entitlement also mobilize multiple dimensions of political belonging and provide insight into transitions in political community, identity and practice.     

Is there Something Wrong with Intelligence in France? The Birth of the Modern Secret State

The lack of academic interest in intelligence in France partly explains the prevalence of many preconceived ideas about French Intelligence. This article deals with the slow building of France's intelligence machinery in the nineteenth century, as part of a study of the modern French State. At this time, intelligence practices were transformed by the appearance of several intelligence bureaucracies. Studying three dimensions of the development – informal practices, formal organizations and statutory rules – the article demonstrates the closeness of intelligence to politics. Doing so it suggests that intelligence needs to be considered not only as an instrument of policy-making but as an actor at the centre of the modern French state, a part of its very essence.     

Past and present African citizenships of slave descent: lessons from Benin

This paper takes up the notion of citizenship and ethnicity as forms of belonging in the context of globalisation. The discussion draws on a case study focusing on a Fulfuldephone servile group from Northern Benin called the Gando. Since pre-colonial times, their servile status ascribed by birth has been an argument for placing them at the margins of their society and excluding them from political participation. While still claiming their belonging to the nation-state of Benin and the Fulbe's culture, the Gando have progressively built a new social identity that is showing to be a new ethnic group. In the context of the decentralisation reform implemented in 2002–2003, the Gando have taken the opportunity to access local power; they conquered municipal power in the 2003 and 2008 local elections. In doing so they opened the gates to a full citizenship that in the context of today's Benin means a clientelistic citizenship. Contrary to recent literature focused on the simultaneous emergence of belonging dynamics and violent conflicts in the context of recent globalisation in developing countries, the author argues that belonging dynamics do not necessarily imply violent conflicts and exclusion dynamics.     

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

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.     

Looking at Muslims: the visibility of Islam in contemporary French cinema

ABSTRACT

Tarr analyses the representation of Islam in five feature films made since 2006 that centre on the changing identities of Muslims in contemporary France. She locates the films within the context of the rise in Islamophobia in France following 9/11 and anxieties about immigration and terrorism, but also in relation to France's troubled postcolonial history and French republican ideology. In particular, the French notion of laïcité (secularism) has given rise to active hostility to any public expression of religious or cultural difference, particularly on the part of Muslims. Cinematic representations of Muslims, and particularly of the children of migrants from the Maghreb, have, therefore, since the mid-1980s, been treated with caution in order not to alienate mainstream Franco-French audiences and to facilitate the second generation's integration into French society. However, the five feature films addressed here—two mainstream popular comedies, Mauvaise foi/Bad Faith (2006) and L'Italien/The Italian (2010), and three independent, low budget, auteur-led, realist films, Dans la vie/Two Ladies (2008), Dernier maquis (2008) and La Désintégration/Disintegration (2012)—offer new narratives that challenge fears of Islam by foregrounding the protagonists' negotiation of their Muslim identities in a French context and, by implication, argue for the integration of Islam as a legitimate referent of French identity. However, their construction of Islam does not extend to positive representations of young veiled women, and they thus still risk confirming the oppressive majority view that certain practices associated with Islam, such as the wearing of the veil, are incompatible with the secularism of the French Republic.     

Normative political theory,democratic politics and minority rights

In Equal Recognition, Alan Patten argues that in a proper relationship between normative political theory and democratic politics, we must make a clear distinction between two questions related to cultural rights: (a) authority (who should decide?) and (b) the substance of deliberation. The question he wants to explore, however, is not the authority question but the substantive question. The aim of this article is to show that an account of equal recognition cannot bracket out the democratic element. It argues, first, that Equal Recognition does not live up to its initial promise, as it contains a number of reflections and recommendations (on language rights, on secession, on the rights of migrants’ cultures) that either explicitly or implicitly include the democratic element. Second, it points at other important areas of political decision-making – such as electoral system design, districting, referendums, quotas – in which it is quite clear that in order to extend equal recognition to minority cultures, we are obliged to take decisions related to the design of democratic institutions.     

Medical aid as protest: acts of citizenship for unauthorized im/migrants and refugees

This article examines organized efforts by citizens to provide medical aid to unauthorized migrants in Germany. A case study of an activist organization in Berlin highlights how prevailing forms of governance through citizenship are disrupted. Three major themes are explored. First, historical contingencies and policy realities explain why, given examples of grassroots protest by migrants in other settings, efforts in Germany have been driven primarily by citizens. Second, migrants' biolegitimacy shapes specific ideas of relative deservingness. As a result, advocacy for some groups, such as survivors of torture or refugees from specific geopolitical settings, is more highly valued than that which addresses needs of unauthorized labor migrants. Finally, although their sustained efforts have resulted in challenges to policy and called into question prevailing notions of citizenship, medical activist organizations have become increasingly institutionalized, which may jeopardize their goals. As this case illustrates, the distinctive ethics associated with providing medical care has the ability to disrupt the scaling of citizenship by the state by treating noncitizens – especially ‘illegal’ noncitizens – ostensibly as citizens, thus protesting citizenship as the exclusive organizing principle of German society.     

Mediterranean regionalism from territory to trains: spatial politics and planning of macro-regions and transport networks in Spain

The contested planning of European macro-regions and Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) exemplifies the complexities of spatial politics, territorial and relational. What stratagems – discursive and cartographic – may regional actors employ in the process, and what can we learn from them? In context of European Union integration policies, we explore Spanish regional politics – discursive and cartographic – surrounding planning of cross-border regions and a TEN-T “Mediterranean Corridor” (and its alternatives). The contested remapping of macro-regions and transport networks reveals the role of spatial planning in the vertebració (structuration in Catalan) of European territory in distinct ways, as Mediterranean regionalism shifts from territoriality to trains.     

Now: prefigurative politics through a north Indian lens

This paper focuses on ‘prefigurative politics’ – embodying in the present one's vision of the future – among young people in north India. In so doing it contributes to wider debates on oppositional politics, temporality, India and youth. Building on recent fieldwork in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, we highlight the ubiquity of civic-minded everyday forms of prefigurative politics among a subset of young men and young women. We examine the temporality of this politics, which, like other recent prefigurative action across the world, emphasizes acting in the present. Young people in north India tend to view the future not as a point on the horizon but as the precipitate of their daily activities. By identifying the energetic attempts of young people within and beyond India to engage in social action, we also provide a counterpoint to negative stereotypes of youth circulating in the media and some scholarly circles.     

A more-than-human political moment (and other natural catastrophes)

Catastrophic events such as wildfires are predicted to increase and intensify because of climate change. This paper speculates on how politics may look within such a context by deploying Rancière's political theorisations. We examine how a posthumanist re-configuration of this humanist notion of politics contributes to thinking about, acting for, and living within a rapidly changing climate. Specifically, we make a case for “more-than-human” political moments using the illustration of wildness – in the form of a wildfire – breaking free of wilderness and burning the settled lands of human habitation. In doing so, we draw on a relational ontology that re-configures agency and speech as “more-than-human”.