Migrants, Borders and the European Question: The Calais Jungle (Mobility & Politics) 3030759210, 9783030759216

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MOBILITY & POLITICS SERIES EDITORS: MARTIN GEIGER PARVATI RAGHURAM

Migrants, Borders and the European Question The Calais Jungle Zaki Nahaboo · Nathan Kerrigan

Mobility & Politics

Series Editors Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Parvati Raghuram, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Mobility & Politics Series Editors Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Parvati Raghuram, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK Global Advisory Board Michael Collyer, University of Sussex Susan B. Coutin, University of California Raúl Delgado Wise, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas Nicholas De Genova, King’s College London Eleonore Kofman, Middlesex University Rey Koslowski, University at Albany Loren B. Landau, University of the Witwatersrand Sandro Mezzadra, Università di Bologna Alison Mountz, Wilfrid Laurier University Brett Neilson, University of Western Sydney Antoine Pécoud, Université Paris 13 Ranabir Samaddar, Mahanirban Research Group Calcutta Nandita Sharma, University of Hawai’i at Manoa Tesfaye Tafesse, Addis Ababa University Thanh-Dam Truong, Erasmus University Rotterdam Human mobility, whatever its scale, is often controversial. Hence it carries with it the potential for politics. A core feature of mobility politics is the tension between the desire to maximise the social and economic benefits of migration and pressures to restrict movement. Transnational communities, global instability, advances in transportation and communication, and concepts of ‘smart borders’ and ‘migration management’ are just a few of the phenomena transforming the landscape of migration today. The tension between openness and restriction raises important questions about how different types of policy and politics come to life and influence mobility. Mobility & Politics invites original, theoretically and empirically informed studies for academic and policy-oriented debates. Authors examine issues such as refugees and displacement, migration and citizenship, security and cross-border movements, (post-)colonialism and mobility, and transnational movements and cosmopolitics. This series is indexed in Scopus.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14800

Zaki Nahaboo · Nathan Kerrigan

Migrants, Borders and the European Question The Calais Jungle

Zaki Nahaboo Faculty of Business, Law and Social Sciences Birmingham City University Birmingham, UK

Nathan Kerrigan Faculty of Business Law and Social Sciences Birmingham City University Birmingham, UK

ISSN 2731-3867 ISSN 2731-3875 (electronic) Mobility & Politics ISBN 978-3-030-75921-6 ISBN 978-3-030-75922-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75922-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Modern building window © saulgranda/Getty This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Hayatte Lakraâ inspired me to write about the Calais Jungle. Thank you so much for the encouraging conversations in London, Lydney and Liverpool. Béatrice Huret, Mohktar and Benedict O’Boyle generously offered their time for interviews at the early stages of the project. A different line of enquiry was taken as the writing progressed; none of the interview material has been included or drawn upon to inform the following work. After arriving at Birmingham City University in 2019, Nathan Kerrigan assumed a co-authorship role. I am grateful for his infusion of human geography and his efficiency in writing the latter parts of the manuscript. Thank you to Martin Geiger, Parvati Raghuram, Manikandan Murthy (Springer), Kayalvizhi Saravanakumar (Springer) and Anna Pusca (Palgrave) for considering this book for publication. David Fleming’s detailed comments on all of the chapters were hugely appreciated. Mum’s assistance with providing a thorough translation of Calais mon Amour was invaluable. Aila’s love kept me grounded in these itinerant times. —Zaki Nahaboo When Zaki Nahaboo outlined the idea for this project and needed someone to come onboard as co-author I jumped at the chance. The idea of examining the European Question in the Calais Jungle through a spatial lens really piqued by interest. I had never thought of writing about the Calais Jungle before. I am thankful to Zaki for welcoming me onto this project and for being a great co-author and scholar to work v

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with. I am also indebted to so many human geographers, philosophers and sociologists of space (Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, Doreen Massey, Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Martina Low and many, many more) who, without them, my love of space and spatiality and ergo, my involvement in this project would have not been possible. A massive ‘thank you’ goes to David Fleming for proofreading my work. You have definitely made me a more conscious writer. Lastly, to Dylan and Archie who have kept me sane by reminding me to take regular breaks from writing to play video games together. —Nathan Kerrigan

Contents

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The European Question Introduction Europe in Question: Setting the Context Multiperspectival Border Studies Chapter Outline References

1 1 4 10 11 13

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Traces of Tropicality Introduction A Space of Exception Ruling through Jungles ‘Jungling’ the Jungle Conclusion References

19 19 20 23 28 34 34

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The Right to the Jungle Introduction The Space of Political Subjectivity in the Jungle Assembling the Political (I): Crafting a ‘Liveable’ Space Assembling the Political (II): Regenerating Mobility Capital Contesting Eurocentric Political Subjectivity Conclusion References

41 41 42 47 49 55 56 57

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CONTENTS

Calais mon Amour Introduction Critical Literary Geographies Calais mon Amour Intimate Geographies: Love, Spatiality and Contesting European Bordering Practices Caring for the ‘Other’: ‘Agape’ Love, Collective Action and Moral Duty Béatrice and Mokhtar: Romance and Family Life as Acts of Citizenship Border Crossing(s) and Intimate Transgressions: Criminalizing the Spatial Practices of Love Conclusion References

63 63 65 66

Spatializing the European Question in the Calais Jungle Introduction Applying the Spatial Triad to the Calais Jungle Representations of Space Spaces of Representation Spatial Practices Endnote References

85 85 86 89 90 91 92 93

Index

68 71 75 78 80 81

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CHAPTER 1

The European Question

Abstract The Calais Jungle (2015–2016) has been subjected to ever mounting academic enquiry. Previous studies describe state violence, grassroots humanitarianism and the experiences of the Jungle’s residents. The aim of this book is to examine how the European Question is articulated in the Jungle, via its spatial and political axis. Within this first chapter, the authors provide an outline of the European Question through the prism of borders, refugees and subjectivity. This offers the backdrop for analysis of how the Jungle articulates the European Question. A case is made for approaching the European Question in the Jungle through aspects of a multiperspectival border studies lens. This establishes the theoretical coordinates for examining how the Jungle exhibited a struggle over the making of territory, rights and refugees in Europe. Keywords European citizenship · European identity · Border studies · Calais Jungle · Migrant crisis

Introduction Calais serves as a transit hub between England and mainland Europe. Everyday its rail and ferry infrastructure carries goods and people across © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Z. Nahaboo and N. Kerrigan, Migrants, Borders and the European Question, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75922-3_1

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the English Channel. Not everyone can pass smoothly from Northern France into Britain. Refugees in Calais are often caught in limbo. Their entry is frequently intercepted and denied. Refugees remain within the small port town without an asylum application being processed or a rejection decision being acted upon by the state. The number of destitute refugees in Calais has fluctuated in tandem with global trends in forced migration and the British/French state’s efforts to relocate them. This has become especially apparent over the past two decades. In September 1999, The Red Cross opened the Sangatte reception centre in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region to accommodate the growing number of refugees from Kosovo, Kurdistan and Afghanistan (Varada Raj 2006). The converted warehouse soon became overcrowded, squalid and viewed by the Home Office as a magnet for irregular Eurotunnel crossings (Schuster 2003). By December 2002, many of the refugees were relocated to Britain and the camp was closed (Schuster 2003). The ‘Sangatte’ problem reflected a cyclical pattern of governing that continues to define the Calais region: a fleeting toleration of under-resourced refugee encampments that ends with their closure on humanitarian and security grounds. This strategy has not stemmed the arrival of new refugees, nor resolved the issue of unfulfilled protection duties, or addressed state anxieties over illegalized migration. With increasingly diminished state assistance, refugees and supportive charities have since constructed makeshift shelters around Calais town centre by using material from abandoned industrial areas (Rigby and Schlembach 2013). Politicians, the media, refugees and aid workers referred to these crude settlements as ‘jungles’. While not an exclusive definition, a leading activist association deems jungles in Calais to be ‘highly impoverished and autonomous squats, the purpose of which is to provide temporary shelter for migrants to rest while they traverse the French/UK border’ (Calais Migrant Solidarity 2017, 56). To this day, makeshift camps continue to be destroyed. French authorities recently dispersed around 800 refugees, who were encamped near the Port of Calais, by bussing them to reception centres (Wallis 2020). What made the period between 2015 and 2016 particularly remarkable was the development of the largest migrant squat in post-war France: the ‘new’ Calais Jungle. The Jungle, as it came to be known, was located approximately 4 km east of the town centre, close to the Zone Industrielle de Dune and adjacent to the Jules Ferry Day Centre (repurposed into a state-sponsored humanitarian shelter) (Chrisafis 2015). This desolate site was unsuitable for long-term encampment. Until its partial demolition in March 2016, the south of the Jungle was on municipal-owned land. The

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northern half was located on Conservatoire du Littoral property, which endured till late October 2016. As the Jungle waxed and waned in size, what remained relatively constant was the squalor. Flooding, flimsy shelters, poor sanitation and sporadic rubbish collection all conspired to make the Jungle a health risk for refugees (Dhesi et al. 2015). In addition, unlike the Sangatte reception centre (1999–2002), the Jungle was not well positioned for UK entry via the Eurotunnel. By October 2016, charities estimated that roughly 10,000 people were living in the Jungle (BBC 2016). Despite its wretched living conditions and distance from the town centre, some refugees found the Jungle still held promise of being the last waystation before the British Isles. The site paralleled the main thoroughfare to the Port of Calais. Refugees who had not enlisted the service of smugglers, and were feeling particularly daring, created opportunities to force their way onto lorries bound for Dover (Oxfam et al. 2017). Notwithstanding periodic and partial dismantlement, the Jungle also gained notoriety for being a self-organized settlement. Throughout its brief existence, an informal economy and public space flourished. This was largely due to citizens and refugees’ collaboration. At its peak, the Jungle comprised of rudimentary shops, restaurants, places to worship, libraries, schools, a theatre and a legal centre (Konforti 2017). This book was conceived almost a year after police-backed demolition crews destroyed the Jungle on 28 October 2016. It was therefore unsurprising to find a wealth of media, government, NGO, literary, artistic and academic attempts to make sense of the place. These accounts portray the Jungle as a site of destitution, community, conviviality, crime, loss, hope, hospitality, state humanitarianism, state abandonment, police brutality and resistance. While this book enriches our understanding along existing lines, its purpose is to discuss the Jungle’s significance for a much broader political issue. The material formation and human activity that shaped the Jungle is examined as a technique for addressing the European Question. The European Question concerns itself with ‘what “Europe” is supposed to be and who may be counted as “European”’ (de Genova 2017, 23). Always partial and failing to reach a consensus, Europe need not be explicitly formulated, desired or reflected on by those who craft its meaning. This chapter expands on these points. Against this backdrop, the book probes the following issues: What does the Jungle’s spatial organization tell us about the making of European and non-European territory? How

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are dominant notions of political subjectivity in Europe problematized through the Jungle? How did the material and social aspects of the Jungle shape or destabilize European/non-European binary relations? For the remainder of this chapter, we expand on the introductory remarks presented thus far. The following section funnels discussion of the European Question through the prism of borders, refugees and subjectivity. Although not a comprehensive overview, it outlines key perspectives that illustrate the presence and absence of race in the government of Europe’s refugees. We contend that it is important to examine how practices of governing through, contesting and/or disregarding racial hierarchies intersect to produce refugees as non-European. Recognition of this complexity leads us to approach Europe as that which is constituted through localized, fluid and mobile geopolitical borders. The second section builds upon these insights by detailing how multiperspectival border studies offer a general frame for interrogating the Jungle. Its sensibilities shall gain further meaning as the book progresses. Lastly, a chapter outline provides a cursory exemplification of the approaches taken. Subsequent chapters draw upon existing scholarship, media accounts and Béatrice Huret’s love story Calais Mon Amour to explore the European Question. These focal points, along with the disparate sources analysed, reveal a borderland that affirms and ruptures colonial legacies in Europe. Tracing this political ambiguity leads us to argue that the Jungle exhibited a struggle over the making of territory, rights, and refugees in Europe.

Europe in Question: Setting the Context What is Europe? Where is Europe? Who is the European? It would be misleading to treat these constituent facets of the European Question as inviting a definitive answer. Such an approach is flawed due to diverse historical, institutional, geographic and experiential understandings of what makes Europe (Paasi 2001). Yet, recognition of Europe’s polysemy does not necessarily lead one to the daunting task of tracing centuries of literature, art, philosophy, geography, imperial domination, political struggles, treaties or its recent formation into a multi-scalar polity. Instead, significations of Europe are carried, disrupted and transformed through localized expressions. To work towards the Jungle as a prism for examining the European Question, it is vital to

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first acknowledge how the refugee becomes a fulcrum for Europe’s contemporary territorial and racial borders. The 1951 UN Geneva Convention codifies the refugee as ‘someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted’ on social and political grounds (UNHCR 2010, 3). While being a refugee is not dependent on state recognition, the latter is necessary to secure a meaningful refugee status. In this book, we use the term refugee to refer to those in the Jungle. This underscores a particular type of flight and political claim. However, the modern concept of the refugee should not be uncritically embraced. The realization of protection duties challenges neither internal sovereignty (a source of refugee production) nor the international societal norms that organize rights; the locale of rights proper continues to hold nation-state primacy thereby positioning the refugee as a necessarily deviant subject (Haddad 2008). The twentieth-century refugee embodies the limits of an international state system. It is a figure defined by an absence of formal national citizenship, enabling recipient states to treat the purely human as an exceptional and aberrant problem to be managed (Arendt 1979). In turn, state agencies—a scale of governing that produces refugees in the first place—become final arbiters of human rights (Arendt 1979). The potentially deadly consequences of making refugees an exceptional responsibility of a host state, which has the de facto power to observe or deny human rights, come into sharp relief with the European refugee/migrant crisis. Since 2015, new conflicts and economic catastrophes, ranging from Cote d’Ivoire through to Pakistan, have sparked an increase in forced migration into the European Union (EU). This development is popularly framed as a European ‘refugee’ or ‘migrant’ crisis. Its ambiguous labelling is a testimony to arrivals’ valuation in terms of their worthiness for international protection (Genova et al. 2016; Crawley and Skleparis 2018). States and media evoke ‘crisis’ in reference to undesirable racial others, numbers and/or irregular routes of passage that circumvent Europe’s ability to govern its heterogeneous borders (de Genova 2017). Crisistalk legitimates exceptional border policing and deflects attention from migration management’s creation of refugees as an external and intrusive problem (Genova et al. 2016).

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The EU and affiliated institutions create the contemporary refugee as a non-European object of government and a European problem. The Protocol on Asylum for Nationals of the Member States (2004) stipulates that common adherence to the Geneva Convention means each ‘Member State shall be regarded as a safe country of origin by the other Member States’ (Guild 2005, 33). EU law made this explicit through the Dublin II regulation (2003); entry to the first EU member state necessitates an asylum claim (with the exception of authorized secondary movement such as family reunification) (European Parliament 2017). This does not, however, oblige refugees to make an asylum claim within the first nation. With the refugee crisis and disproportionate arrivals to the Southern ‘buffer states’, variation in the implementation of asylum policies and state capacities led to significant discrepancies in acceptance rates (European Parliament 2017). The Dublin III Regulation recommended population transfers when a state’s asylum practices failed protection duties stipulated by the Common European Asylum System (CAES); uptake and success were minimal (Fratzke 2015). Dublin has still not realized its core purpose: to ‘avoid “asylum-seekers in orbit”’ (European Parliament 2015, 4). In addition, ‘burden-sharing’ initiatives to mitigate a state responsibility and state proximity nexus remain voluntary for member states (European Parliament 2015, 5). Core to these policy bottlenecks is the assertion that contemporary refugees necessarily arrive in Europe from beyond member state borders. This discounts the possibility of a more processual understanding of the refugee as a figure who is continually created through violence and destitution within Europe. Nevertheless, an initial glance at European-level governance of refugees projects an image of hospitality free from racial underpinnings. This is enshrined through: the promotion of anti-racism in member states (Council of Europe 2011); the monitoring of human rights in subsidiary ECHR legislation (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2017); and the maintenance of CEAS grounded on the Geneva Convention (European Commission 2016). When EU policy explicitly prescribes the refugees’ non-Europeanness, it does so in terms of personalized mobility data. Biometrics, a central facet of the European Visa Information System, along with EURODAC (a pan-EU database of asylum claims registration), is employed to monitor the legal and physical routes taken rather than establishing racial roots (Kingston 2018). Since EU principles and policy abhor racialized difference, rightwing movements have shown predictable hostility. Commonalities emerge

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between an otherwise fragmented European far right through the civilizationalism of a White Christian Europe threatened by racial others (Colpani and Ponzanesi 2016). The demand to separate formal rights from belonging to Europe is part of mainstream European public discourse, which holds both non-white citizens and refugees to perpetually lack native status (El-Tayeb 2008). In particular, cultural foreignness, the spectre of imported terrorism and ‘bogus’ asylum claims are common motifs for crafting refugees into national security threats (Fekete 2009; Bourbeau 2011). Yet it would be misleading to view incongruities between EU policy, member state practice and nationalist populism in necessary tension. Anti-EU integration movements are proxies for mainstreaming rightwing retrenchments (Benveniste et al. 2016). Racial hostility, whether outright or coded, erodes a uniform commitment to EU regulations on non-discriminatory border policing. However, a suspension of protection duties does align with EU directives that legitimize exceptional decisions on grounds of national security or public interest (Karamanidou 2015, 52–54). National deportation ‘targets’, rejection of asylum claims on the basis of ‘faking’ illness/persecution, variable white lists, charted renditionstyle removals and detention centres closed to independent scrutiny are formative of the EU ‘deportation machine’ (Fekete 2009, 137–155). Instead of allocating a coherent inside/outside to Europe’s borders, which aligns with certain member states’ external borders (i.e. a Fortress Europe), the EU has a multiplicity of ever-changing frontiers that escape a singular site (Anderson and Bigo 2003). Europe’s borders are layered. Paper borders (concentrically organized around national citizenship) foreclose ‘territorial presence’ as a basis for rights, while pathways towards regularized status become differentially obstructed (Balch 2016, 22). Physical borders arise in the moment of preventing refugee collectives and unauthorized transits, which in turn involves individuating subjects’ processing through data profiling (Tazzioli 2016). Moreover, when refugees arrive at a member states’ official territorial border, the ‘inability’ and ‘unwillingness’ of EU states to deport all failed claimants (due to the costs or agreements of reception not reached) lead some to become destitute (Guild 2005). To prevent this situation, Europe’s borders are distanced. Visa requirements and carrier sanctions prevent lawful EU entry routes for undocumented migrants (Guild 2005). Furthermore, the outsourcing of borders takes place through funding buffer states (e.g. Turkey) to process refugees (Allen et al. 2018). The rolling out

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of EU-funded reception centres across partner countries has, at times, enabled North African transit countries to become refugees’ final destination (Yildiz 2016, 76–77). Aside from regulating access to member states, the EU has cast the borders of Europe outside any specific member state’s jurisdiction. A classic illustration is the deployment of Frontex boats off the West African coast, with the aim of deterring migrants from undertaking a dangerous sea voyage to Spanish territory (Goodwin-Gill 2011). The manufactured instability of Europe’s beginning and end serves to limit access from the Global South. These discussions on EU bordering practices capture how the European Question is organized around a series of problematics: racialization-deracialization, generalizing-singularizing refugee subjectivation, confinement-dispersal, territorial permission-prohibition and Fortress-deterritorialized Europe. The use of the hyphen indicates a compound, rather than a slash to suggest a binary logic. It emphasizes their co-constitutive role in addressing the European Question as a border regime. So far, we have discussed the European Question’s resolution as an institutional ‘project’ (i.e. the EU) (Agnew 2005a, 578). As argued above, migration management ushers in conflicting and overlapping attempts to settle the European Question via a layering, outsourcing and offshoring of borders. Regardless of how the contemporary refugee is incorporated, they are deemed an external and exceptional (racial) imposition on Europe. Viewing refugees encroaching upon Europe, instead of vice versa, dissimulates the mobile borderwork that generates and blurs an illegalized human and refugee problematic (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015). Since Europe is not the EU, any study of the European Question must also recognize that it exceeds a set of institutional practices that map bodily or territorial beginnings and ends. Europe is an ever-changing delimited presence (an identity in-flux). To be sure, Europe is a ‘headland’ (an enlightenment-derived beacon for defining human dignity), a direction (an endpoint of history) and an institutional capitalization or centralization (a polity or geographical place as synecdoche for Europe) (Derrida 1992, xxix). But if one were to assign Europe an exclusive set of values, civilization, location or state relations, its sanitized identity would belie its unfulfilled claims and conceal its formation by a constitutive outside (i.e. the ‘non-European’) (Derrida 1992, 15–21). Europe reconsidered contra ipseity is neither identical to

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what it claims to be nor able to differentiate itself from (Derrida 1992). Claims of being the genesis of democracy and rights are only possible through disavowed historical struggles by those counted as non-European (Gilroy 2006; Isin 2013). Put differently, the non-European is ethically responsible for Europe and an object that has become deemed Europe’s problematic responsibility. This politics of deconstruction arrives when the symbolic presence or actions of the non-European takes Europe in directions that interrupt a self-referential identity (Isin 2013). The non-European is always already European: ‘inhabitants, residents or even virtual residents of the continent’ (Balibar 2016, 165). It might seem trivial or even fanciful to document Europe as other and place the ‘non-European’ under erasure. Yet the description doubles as a political claim to unsettle institutional criteria that tether European identity to formal citizenship (Balibar 2016). The claim to destabilize European/non-European binaries need not be an abstract normative theorization or desired political project. If Europe as colour-blindness does little to mitigate the ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ (EI-Tayeb 2011), one needs to reconceive Europe as created through non-citizenship. When irregular migrants and supportive citizens protest against deportation (e.g. the No One is Illegal movement), equality is both claimed and enacted (Nyers 2006). Status is challenged as a precondition for guaranteeing belonging or foundation for enacting rights (Nyers 2006). Transposing these observations to the study of nonEuropeans does not mean ignoring their-our differentiated exposure to violence and deportation. Instead, tracing how people live in, or claim belonging to, Europe (despite their exception to formal citizen rights) is an important route for noticing creative fractures in Europe’s meaning. While governmental discourse makes the contemporary refugee into an archetypical non-European, this figure also disputes what is assuredly counted as non-European. This book offers the first attempt to interrogate the aporetic dimensions of the European Question through the Jungle. Chapter 2 highlights how mobility regulation in the Jungle folds and blurs Europe’s inside/outside through producing a tropicality infused space of exception. Chapter 3 looks at political subjectivity within the European borderland, which decentres Eurocentric notions of rights. Chapter 4 identifies how a French citizen developed a politicized ethics of care. Her support for illegalized migration was highly individualized as it arose from, and remained anchored to, romantic love. Her acts of love reveal the informal intimate binaries of citizenship/non-citizenship

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in Europe. They also deconstructed these dichotomies when putting her citizenship privilege at risk. To practically ascertain how the Jungle created and fractured binaries of Europe/non-Europe, the following section advances a multiperspectival approach to the Jungle that gives primacy to the spatial.

Multiperspectival Border Studies A key strand of border studies is preoccupied with tracing where and how mobile subjects become visible and illegal, especially via security practices (Johnson et al. 2011). In turn, refugee camps have received significant analysis as an expression of a sovereign’s ability to normalize a state of emergency (Minca 2015). This produces inhabitants as simultaneously included-excluded from law (Minca 2015). Camps are also sites where rights are enacted in relative autonomy to the state (Squire 2009; Rygiel 2012) and cultural identifications are reshaped (Agier 2016). These recurring themes are returned to over the course of the book since they heavily inform existing accounts of the Jungle. Collectively, they are instructive for approaching borderlands as a heterogeneous set of depoliticizing and politicizing activity rather than a unified entity. To examine the Jungle as a politicizing and depoliticizing site, the role of the spatial needs to be foregrounded. Space conventionally suggests a location that is undetermined or an intangible conduit that one traverses, while place refers to a territorial occupation or confinement of space (Agnew 2005b). Yet places are never fully dependent on physical coordinates since they relationally occur through separation, connection and disjunction from other sites in order to gain their supposed autonomy (Agnew 2005b). In addition, places exist as spaces of ‘multiplicity’; they are shaped through experiential reflections that pluralize the meaning of a particular location (Agnew 2005b, 90–91). It is therefore more appropriate to view place as a meeting point of lives and objects in their intersecting and ongoing histories; movement is not across a static preconceived place but is instead a ‘travelling across trajectories’ (Massey 2005, 119). If the spatial is continuously achieved, rather than determined before encounters, then the heterogeneous meaning it accrues is relationally produced and never finalized (Massey 2005). Approaching the Jungle as a spatial phenomenon necessitates attention to its emergence as a performative activity and processual construct. Treating the Jungle in this manner of a borderland can begin with

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witnessing what Wilson and Tunca (2015, 1) note as a ‘threshold’: the differential experience of lives and objects in their intersecting trajectories, which transgress prior boundaries. To be sure, borderlands demarcate an inside and outside group whose dividing practice engenders ‘zones of interaction’ (Conrad and Nicol cited in Rumford 2012, 895). But borderlands are creative activities that disrupt prior assumptions about what, where and for what purpose a border exists. A line that prohibits mobility, a gate that regulates mobility, the creation of a border through encounters between subjects, a representational practice, a differentiated experience and a struggle for rights, imply that the location of analysis surpasses a bounded physical place (Rumford 2012). This is why a ‘multiperspectival study’ is necessary for tracing incongruous or complimentary physical and symbolic bordering practices, which are neither always traceable to state activity nor dependent on an agreement between concerned parties regarding where a border resides (Rumford 2012). Throughout this book, Edward Soja’s interpretation of Henri Lefebvre’s triad of space implicitly and explicitly works to inform a multiperspectival border studies approach to the Jungle. Edward Soja’s reading of Lefebvre’s triad finds ‘perceived’, ‘conceived’ and ‘lived’ space inseparable (Soja 1996, 64–68). Over the course of the analysis, emphasis is placed on different ways of doing space, which either affirm or contest dominant responses to the European Question. To reiterate, Europe is a partially articulated, processual, and contested space. Any attempt to represent Europe fails to fully stand-in for Europe. As Europe is held in abeyance, the deferral of exclusive meaning is not itself a political gesture. When discordant meanings of Europe arise and clash, the European Question gathers political significance. This book departs from current studies of the Jungle by reading it as a space of disagreement over what and where Europe is, as well as who can be counted as European. The multiperspectival approach is important for revealing diverse forms of borderwork whose congruity and conflict reveal innovative ways of articulating the Europe Question.

Chapter Outline The European Question is examined through the four subsequent chapters. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 can be read as standalone essays on the Jungle. However, if read in isolation, the Jungle’s varied ways of navigating the European Question become obscured. Chapter 2 argues that tropicality

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shapes the Jungle to demarcate the European/non-European. Images of jungles as inhospitable spaces and home to savage communities were developed in tandem with European imperial expansion. While of course an entirely different context, a discourse of tropicality produces the Jungle as a postcolonial space of exception. The chapter argues that a discourse of tropicality orchestrated representations of space fused bodies and environment in racialized ways. Residents’ objectification, dwelling and mobility were in turn subjected to practices of frontier-making and eco-bordering. The chapter concludes that the Jungle bore traces of tropicality that casts a distinctive non-European space. Recent scholarship has posited refugee camps as socio-political spaces of domination and resistance. Chapter 3 adapts existing approaches to political subjectivity, which helps uncover ‘the right to the Jungle’. This right is discussed as an assemblage of refugees, aid workers and objects that constitute the Jungle. The chapter examines how this assemblage shaped a space of relational political subjectivity that contested authorized sources of mobility capital. Drawing upon this discussion, Chapter 3 problematizes Eurocentric understandings of citizenship. The chapter concludes that the right to the Jungle is an important, albeit transient, prism for witnessing a struggle over who can belong to Europe and what counts as political subjectivity in Europe. Chapter 4 demonstrates how intimate life arose as a practice subjected to the border regime and a set of everyday actions, which were immanent to the contestations of securitized borders. Taking a literary geography approach, we examine Béatrice Huret’s novel: Calais mon Amour. Through an analysis of the love story between the two protagonists (Béatrice and Mokhtar), the chapter demonstrates how affect and routine became acts of citizenship that challenged French bordering. In contrast, these bordering practices remain durable for formally and informally regulating what kinds of intimate acts are allowed to be performed and by whom. The concluding chapter deploys Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad as a frame for analysing the European Question in the Calais Jungle. Chapter 5 draws upon this triad to reinterpret the themes discussed in this book. First, it sees discourses of tropicality as the production of territory through representations of space. Second, it draws attention to processes of assemblage that gave rise to political subjectivity through spaces of representation. Third, love and intimacy become spatial

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practices that have transformative effects through enactments of citizenship. In sum, Chapter 5 demonstrates the usefulness of Lefebvre’s spatial triad for productively bringing together the book’s themes, refining our understanding of the European Question in the Calais Jungle. A single argument binds the subsequent chapters. The Jungle was a heuristic device for addressing the European Question via its compositionof borders and rights. Rather than documenting yet another interchangeable migrant camp/squat that can be positioned within or outside a European imaginary, the essays on the Jungle contained in this short book reveal different strands of a borderland that intervene in Europe. Aspects of British-French-EU’s border-making practices and legacies of colonial discourse produce the Jungle’s refugees as archetypical nonEuropeans. Yet we also argue that the Jungle was a rejoinder to a settling of the European Question through mutually exclusive categories of European/non-European. It problematizes who counts as European and what political subjectivities can be recognized in Europe.

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European Commission. 2016. “The Common European Asylum System (CEAS).” European Commission. Accessed 16 February 2017. https://ec.eur opa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/what-we-do/policies/europeanagenda-migration/background-information/docs/20160713/factsheet_the_ common_european_asylum_system_en.pdf. European Parliament. 2015. “EU Legal Framework on Asylum and Irregular Immigration ‘On Arrival’ State of Play.” European Parliament. Accessed 12 June 2018. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2015/ 551333/EPRS_BRI%282015%29551333_EN.pdf. European Parliament. 2017. “Secondary Movements of Asylum-Seekers in the EU Asylum System.” European Parliament. Accessed 12 June 2018. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/ 608728/EPRS_BRI(2017)608728_EN.pdf. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. 2017. “FRA Programming Document 2018–2020.” FRA. Accessed 12 June 2018. https://fra.europa. eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/programming-document-2018-2020_en. pdf. Fekete, Liz. 2009. A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe. London: Pluto Press. Fratzke, Susan. 2015. Not Adding Up: The Fading Promise of Europe’s Dublin System. Brussels: Migration Policy Institute Europe. Genova, Nicholas De, Elena Fontanari, Fiorenza Picozza, Laia Soto Bermant, Aila Spathopoulou, Maurice Stierl, Zakeera Suffee, Martina Tazzioli, Huub Van Baar, and Can Yildiz. 2016. “Migrant Crisis”/“Refugee Crisis.” In Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe”, edited by Nicholas De Genova and Martina Tazzioli. Zone Books Near Futures Online. Gilroy, Paul. 2006. “Multiculturalism and Post-Colonial Theory.” In The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, edited by John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips, 656–674. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodwin-Gill, Guy S. 2011. “The Right to Seek Asylum: Interception at Sea and the Principle of Non-Refoulement.” International Journal of Refugee Law 23 (3): 443–457. Guild, Elspeth. 2005. “The Legal Framework: Who is Entitled to Move?” In Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement Into and Within Europe, edited by Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild, 14–48. Farnham: Ashgate. Haddad, Emma. 2008. The Refugee in International Society: Between Sovereigns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Isin, Engin F. 2013. “We, the Non-Europeans: Derrida with Said.” In Europe After Derrida, edited by Bora Isyar and Agnes Czajka, 108–119. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Johnson, Corey, Reece Jones, Anssi Paasi, Louise Amoore, Alison Mountz, Mark Salter, and Chris Rumford. 2011. “Interventions on Rethinking ‘The Border’ in Border Studies.” Political Geography 30 (2): 61–69. Karamanidou, Lena. 2015. “The Securitisation of European Migration Policies: Perceptions of Threat and Management of Risk.” In The Securitisation of Migration in the EU: Debates Since 9/11, edited by Gabriella Lazaridis and Khursheed Wadia, 37–61. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kingston, Lindsey N. 2018. “Biometric Identification, Displacement, and Protection Gaps.” In Digital Lifeline? ICTs for Refugees and Displaced Persons, edited by Carleen Maitland, 35–54. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Konforti, Maya. 2017. “Refugees – The Jungle-Cities of Calais.” Public. Accessed 14 January 2018. http://publicjournal.online/refugees-the-jungle-cities-ofcalais/. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Minca, Claudio. 2015. “Geographies of the Camp.” Political Geography 49 (November): 74–83. Nyers, Peter. 2006. “Taking Rights, Mediating Wrongs: Disagreements Over the Political Agency of Non-Status Refugees.” In The Politics of Protection, edited by Jef Huysmans, Andrew Dobson, and Raia Prokhovnik, 48–67. London: Routledge. Oxfam, Refugee Council, Supporting and Empowering Refugees, Amnesty International, and British Red Cross. 2017. “Together Again: Reuniting Refugee Families in Safety—What the UK Can Do.” Oxfam. Accessed 14 October 2017. https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/ 10546/620199/ja-together-again-refugee-family-reunion-uk-280217-en.pdf? sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Paasi, Anssi. 2001. “Europe as a Social Process and Discourse: Considerations of Place, Boundaries and Identity.” European Urban and Regional Studies 8 (1): 7–28. Rigby, Joe, and Ralph Schlembach. 2013. “Impossible Protest: No Borders in Calais.” Citizenship Studies 17 (2): 157–172. Rumford, Chris. 2012. “Towards a Multiperspectival Study of Borders.” Geopolitics 17 (4): 887–902. Rygiel, Kim. 2012. “Politicizing Camps: Forging Transgressive Citizenships in and Through Transit.” Citizenship Studies 16 (5–6): 807–825. Schuster, Liza. 2003. “Asylum Seekers: Sangatte and the Tunnel.” Parliamentary Affairs 56 (3): 506–522. Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell. Squire, Vicki. 2009. The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Tazzioli, Martina. 2016. “The Government of Migrant Mobs: Temporary Divisible Multiplicities in Border Zones.” European Journal of Social Theory 20 (4): 473–490. UNHCR. 2010. “Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.” UNHCR. Accessed 28 September 2018. https://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2 aa10.html. Varada Raj, Kartik. 2006. “Paradoxes on the Borders of Europe.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 8 (4): 512–534. Wallis, Emma. 2020. “New Calais Migrant Camp Dismantled by French Authorities.” InfoMigrants. Accessed 01 October 2020. https://www.infomi grants.net/en/post/27661/new-calais-migrant-camp-dismantled-by-frenchauthorities-1. Wilson, Janet, and Daria Tunca. 2015. “Postcolonial Thresholds: Gateways and Borders.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51 (1): 1–6. Yildiz, Asyselin Gozde. 2016. The European Union’s Immigration Policy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 2

Traces of Tropicality

Abstract This chapter argues that tropicality is used in the Jungle to demarcate the European/non-European. Images of jungles as inhospitable spaces and home to savage communities were developed in tandem with European imperial expansion. Though an entirely different context, a discourse of tropicality produces the Calais Jungle as a postcolonial space of exception. The chapter argues that a discourse of tropicality orchestrated representations of space that fused bodies and environment in racialized ways. Residents’ objectification, dwelling and mobility were in turn subjected to practices of frontier-making and eco-bordering. The chapter concludes that the Jungle bore traces of tropicality that casts it as a distinctive non-European space. Keywords Space of exception · Tropicality · Eco-borders · Calais Jungle · Migrant crisis

Introduction Descriptions of jungles were integral to the development of modern European colonialism. From the eighteenth century onwards, a diverse array of botanical, cartographic and anthropological knowledge created © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Z. Nahaboo and N. Kerrigan, Migrants, Borders and the European Question, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75922-3_2

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the tropics as an object of enquiry. These ‘representations of space’ (Soja 1996, 67) were imbricated in the creation of jungles as exotic, savage and (potentially) governable frontiers (Arnold 1996; Duncan 2007). A discourse of ‘tropicality’ (Arnold 1996, 112) did not end with European imperialism. This chapter argues that traces of tropicality inflect the Calais Jungle’s operation as a space of exception. The following section canvasses existing accounts of how and why the Jungle became a site where law could be suspended. Doing so brings into sharper relief the importance of comprehending the Jungle as a postcolonial space of exception. Section two approaches this by describing how tropicality created colonial and urban jungles as frontier regions inhabited by racialized individuals. In particular, the latter were represented as bodies fused to an environment. It would be both anachronistic and absurd to suggest that a small refugee encampment in twenty-first-century northern France was host to imperial strategies of governing climatically tropical spaces. Instead, we argue that a discourse of tropicality orchestrated terms of residents’ objectification, dwelling and mobility. Section three develops this argument by highlighting how tropicality informed the governmental use of shipping container accommodation. On the one hand, the state-sanctioned shelter reveals how a space of exception was produced through casting the resident as security threat and referent object via humanitarian securitization. On the other, this does not testify to the production of an unmarked ‘bare life’—those who are stripped of ‘every political status’ (Agamben 1998, 171). A discourse of tropicality is shown to condition the Jungle as a space of exception by fusing bodies and the squalid environment. After its destruction in late 2016, a different way of fusing bodies to nature gained prominence. Representations of space shifted to a new imagined geography that involved citizen eco-bordering, via a nature reserve programme. In essence, tropicality is shown to produce subjects and regulate mobility within, or beyond, the Jungle by positioning residents as part of a non-European frontier region.

A Space of Exception Calais articulated a European problematic of managed migration (see Chapter 1). Its status as a border town was cemented through a deepening of juxtaposed UK-France border controls; Le Touquet Treaty, codified since 2003, was a consequence of the UK not signing up to Schengen as well as the Sangatte disaster (Reinisch 2015). Aside from

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bi-lateral decisions, Calais’s profile as a border town was raised through the EU’s governing of mobility. The Geneva Convention demands nonrefoulement and stipulates uniform protection in domestic law, while the European Convention on Human Rights offers wider-ranging civil rights regardless of citizenship status (Lambert 2005). With few exemptions, the Dublin III Regulation dictates that the first receiving member state should process refugees (European Parliament 2015, 2017) in accordance with international protection duties. The presence of refugees in Calais presumes arrival to a safe haven (i.e. France); those seeking UK entry are rendered potential suspects of breaking asylum rules. In other words, it appeared that refugees, who failed to qualify for secondary movement, chose to engage in ‘asylum shopping’: the practice of seeking asylum beyond the first EU member state entered (European Parliament 2017). France had a 74% higher asylum refusal rate than neighbouring countries according to Cour des Comptes report on claims made (2009–2014) (Migaud 2015). In addition, there were severe deportation backlogs; Calais remained a site for awaiting further migration from a hostile regime (Migaud 2015). The problem of processing refugees intensified post2015. The Jungle’s increasing population and changing demographics showed that the site was an effect of the European refugee/migrant crisis (Bouhenia et al. 2017). Local decisions also contributed to the Jungle’s formation. Although authorities saw jungles on the outskirts of Calais as a blight, they drew refugees away from squats in the town centre (Calais Migrant Solidarity 2017). The more remote location of the Jungle was initially tolerated by the Pas-de-Calais Prefect since it concentrated the refugee population into an ostensibly more manageable locale (Fassin and Adam 2015). Choices for squatting dwindled due to a strategy of ‘progressive dismantling’ within Calais (Ibrahim and Howarth 2018, 103). Alongside this, police harassment of migrants in the town centre intensified (Le Défenseur des Droits 2015). Refugees seeking entry to the UK were forced to be mobile within Calais and were indirectly encouraged to become Jungle residents. Refugee camps can be analysed as an effect of a sovereign decision. Modern state governments express sovereignty as a claim to indivisibility, exclusive rule over territory, monopoly of force, all of which are backed by a discourse of legitimating authority (Grimm 2016). The performative fiction of state sovereignty is ambiguously prior to law since it ultimately rests on self-justifying foundations; its executive prerogative is to suspend the law (often in the name of law) (Humphreys 2006). For Giorgio

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Agamben (1998), refugee camps materialize this paradigmatic expression of modern sovereignty. The refugee evokes a permanent problematization of the state as a result of their positioning between the ‘birth-nation to man-citizen link’ (Agamben 1998, 134). Being cast between zoe (biological life) and bios (politically qualified life) inaugurates a figure of ‘bare life…a life exposed to death’ (Agamben 1998, 88). Refugee camps materialize and concentrate this life in suspension. For Agamben, these sites mark the normalization of exceptional rule; the refugee becomes an object that can be governed yet exempt from the juridical sphere, thereby potentially revitalizing classical sovereignty’s imperative: the right to take life (Minca 2015). It would appear that the Jungle typifies Agamben’s theory of the camp. The Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales catalogued allegations of Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité beatings meted upon those who attempted to board lorries bound for the UK, as well as unsanctioned use of tear gas within the Jungle (Cragg and Mellon 2016). A major report by Le Défenseur des Droits (2015) (which drew on refugee statements, civil society documentation and independent inquiry) further documented these contraventions of EU and French law. Tactics of hindering mobility were also supposedly employed. Residents, who aimed to leave the Jungle, accused the police of stealing their shoes and phones (Bulman 2016). Justifications for these exceptional measures form part of a broader securitization discourse: the creation of ‘an existential threat, requiring emergency measures and justifying actions outside the normal bounds of political procedure’ (Buzan et al. 1998, 23–25). Drawing on Agamben’s decisionist approach to sovereignty, Hayatte Lakraâ (2017) argues that the hostile environment was buttressed through President François Hollande’s decreed state of emergency in Autumn 2015. Apart from indirectly legitimating excessive force, extra-legality also facilitated the destruction of the Jungle by restricting access for ‘security reasons’ (Lakraâ 2017, 11). This exemplified how the state of emergency differentially cuts across socio-political categorizations; it seeks to prevent the increase in non-citizen residents and activist citizens who want to access the site (Lakraâ 2017). Reading the Jungle through Agamben’s generalized space of exception makes racialization a contingent feature of domination. This is because bare life is an effect of a sovereign decision that needs no prior racializing authorization: ‘all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the

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one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns’ (Agamben 1998, 84). The structural symmetry between sovereignty as an exceptional act and bare life (both are effects of the nomos ) seems to further indicate racialization as incidental to spaces of exception (Agamben 1998, 84). Yet it is no coincidence that spaces of exception, which once found their home in European colonies, can be activated for postcolonial migrants in Europe (Shenhav 2012). When contemporary Europe’s spaces of exception are ‘racially based’, they attest to the continued differential production and exposure to bare life through postcolonial ‘subject races’ (Shenhav 2012, 26–27). A dismissal of Agamben’s approach is not being anticipated with the variable of race. Rather, our understanding of the Jungle as a space of exception gains more precision when supplemented with an account of how tropicality inflects its quality of domination. Therefore, to distil what makes the Jungle a borderland governed through tropicality (in contrast to merely an interchangeable refugee camp/squat), it is worth outlining tropicality’s numerous historic functions.

Ruling through Jungles In Sanskrit, jangala refers to flat and arid land. Early Aryan society positioned this terrain in a hierarchical opposition to untrammelled tropical vegetation (Dove 1992, 234). Brahmins deemed the savannahs of western India amenable to settlement and juxtaposed them to anupa (or ‘wetlands’) (Dove 1992, 234). Tropical areas were derided as an area where ‘impure’ ‘barbarians’ lived and could be driven out (Dove 1992, 234). British and French geographical use of the word ‘jungle’ is closer in meaning to the Urdu jangal, meaning a forest. The modern colonial descriptions of jungles replicate a hierarchy of civilization and tropics— while taking it in new racializing directions. European accounts of jungles developed from the late fifteenth century onwards in parallel with imperial expansion. Tropical jungles were regarded as spaces of ‘Edenic plentitude’, inhospitable climate and rampant disease that impeded European settlement (Arnold 2006, 111). The colonial ambivalence that suffused tropicality was racialist. Tropical forests were imagined as areas where locals were part of flora and fauna (McLaughlin 2000). Humans were depicted as innocent, noble or savage creatures who were indistinguishable from their surroundings; inhabitants of the tropics were often cast in a state of nature (McLaughlin 2000). These representations of space situate the tropics as a constitutive outside to European civilization.

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Colonial jungles were not harmless, if reprehensible, descriptions. They became biopolitical techniques of domination. To briefly recall, biopolitics surfaced in Western Europe during the nineteenth century as an ‘end and instrument of government’; ensuring the welfare of a population became a measure of a state’s health (Foucault 2009, 105). It governmentalized populations through applied knowledge (such as political economy and public hygiene), which strove to regulate conduct in the interest of optimizing life. Preserving the ‘natural’ dynamics of indigenous social life in colonial jungles was one, occasionally beleaguered, dimension of colonial authority. Colonial junglescapes were imagined as harmonious ecological and social orders that had been thrown into disarray through insatiable colonial extraction (Grove 1995). In turn, the adaptation of local knowledge and promotion of conservationism were, intermittently, advanced as a stabilizing force for the longevity of a colony (Grove 1995). Techniques for restoring a ‘natural’ order, which served the interest of colonial authority, depended on creating populations as objects of preservation. A notable example was when Verrier Elwin contested the wisdom of scientific forestry in India by claiming Adivasis’s cultivation was suited to the region, and their livelihood was unjustly threatened by expropriation (Jewitt 1995). Such instances of benevolent orientalism informed ‘isolationist’ policies aimed at protecting tradition, while also entrenching divide and rule by segmenting Adivasis from ‘non-tribal’ Indian political agitators (Jewitt 1995, 73–74). Early twentieth-century French colonialism also reflected a protectionist orientalism, albeit with different political consequences. Pierre Gourou’s renowned ethnography of diverse farming techniques by villagers in the Tonkin Delta led him to reject environmental determinism. He emphasized their varied cultivation as suited to specific local objectives, which could not be plotted along a linear notion of progress (Bowd and Clayton 2003). Although still adamant about European superiority, Gourou saw the transposition of European approaches to settlement as a failure, believing them to be unsuitable for the region and population (Bowd and Clayton 2003). Regulatory biopolitics follows the maxim: the ‘right to make live and let die’ (Foucault 2003, 241). However, the classical act of sovereignty— ‘the right to take life or let live’ (Foucault 2003, 241)—is not supplanted by a biopolitics of fostering life. ‘State racism’ is a vital part of biopolitics. It decides who is unfit, leaving them to wither away or subjecting them to active expulsion (Foucault 2003, 82). The othered group is cast as a biological threat to the health of a dominant population, the latter

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being situated as the embodiment of a territorialized society (Foucault 2003, 82). Cementing this population-territory-society nexus occurs via purges within and beyond state borders, whereby every expulsion is made correlative to the health of society (Foucault 2003). The legitimization of plunder and the expulsion of indigenous peoples in colonial jungles employed these deathly aspects of biopolitics. Despite paternalistic orientalism imagining non-Europeans as quaintly transforming their surroundings, they were nevertheless consigned to the latter side of the deceptive modern culture/nature dualism. Separation from, and domination over, nature became a self-asserted trait of the colonizer. This relation was cemented with the rise of nineteenth-century utilitarianism, which largely supplanted orientalist conservationism (Ballantyne 2002). In the context of tropicality, utilitarian forestry was central in fashioning the European/non-European dichotomy. Nineteenth-century colonial forestry served to deny villagers land rights on grounds that shifting cultivation was primitive, inefficient and not in the best interest of the population (Jewitt 1995). In French Indochina, forestry assumed a similar role in claiming mastery over a land and justifying expropriation. During the early twentieth century, local population’s shifting cultivation and communal ownership were judged inferior to ‘settled farming’ (Cleary 2005b, 362). In turn, the 1930s Code Forestier legitimized the displacement of peoples (Cleary 2005a, 272). Maintaining frontier regions was vital for governing without ‘ius publicum Europaeum’, which prescribes sovereignty as dependence on recognition from other states (Mbembe 2003, 23). Colonial jungles gave licence to suspend legal rule in the perceived absence of borders, opening the possibility for violence with impunity (Sivaramakrishnan 1999). Yet the colonial jungle achieves more than this. They exemplified Achille Mbembe’s (2003, 24) observation on frontiers as liminal juridical zones. Situating the tropics beyond international relations inaugurates a geography of frontiers where only ‘animal life’ is killed (Mbembe 2003, 23). Killing can be enacted without acknowledging that the murder of people has transpired. This is why colonial jungles materialize a broader settler-colonial logic of external sovereignty that eschews ius gentium (Evans 2009). Aside from treating colonial jungles as objects of preservation or destruction, tropicality gains an alternative expression when avoiding a claim to territorial mastery. Failure to fully know and govern jungles was part of their crafting as a frontier (Upstone 2009; Simpson 2017). Dense

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vegetation became a fantasy where unrestrained domination was matched by one of an unknown and impenetrable region, which threatened colonial stability. Jungles were considered by colonial authorities as a refuge for banditry (Sivaramakrishnan 1999; Benjamin and Mohanty 2007) and a hinterland to escape rule (Allen 1983; Alpers et al. 2009). Refiguring jungles into insidious and unknown frontiers did not always lead to formal (re-)territorialization or subjection to indirect rule, whereby the eradication of the other is positively correlated with the health of an ‘us’. The jungle frontier further substantiates Hagar Kotef’s (2015, 93–99) observation on early theorizations of a peaceful commonwealth, which was conditioned through a juxtaposition of the ‘savage’—‘whose freedom of movement is unlimited’—and citizen (whose movement has to be regulated to give rise to civic life). Thus far, colonial jungles signified a continuum of racialized bodies and environment. Occasionally, a native subject was construed as having a legitimate claim to thrive in the ‘natural’ world. Paternalistic orientalism and indirect rule informed these views. In contrast, as natives were subordinated to Europe through expert knowledge (e.g. colonial forestry), they were made into disposable subjects. What exceeded these biopolitical developments was the operation of colonial jungles as frontiers. Making racialized bodies and the tropics indistinguishable evoked a continual state of insurgency upon the ‘civilized’. According to Edward Said, Western history, travel writings, philosophy, art, science and literature (unintentionally) generated an Eastern region and people as inextricably other to Europe (Said 2003). This diverse array of orientalist knowledge did more than create an enduring ‘Eastern’ object of inquiry. Representations of inferiority facilitated and legitimated imperial domination (Said 2003). Since Said’s indictment of orientalism, numerous studies have uncovered its circulation beyond its traditional agents and geographic location (Baki´c-Hayden 1995; Jun 2011; Jakimów 2012). Critical accounts of tropicality have not seen a similar uptake. Focus remains largely centred on European imperialism and its legacies in former colonized possessions or imperial metropoles. This is understandable. Late colonial jungles were rooted in parts of what is now referred to as the Global South, whose physical geography continues to denote the tropics. Yet underwriting tropicality with a scientific truth about ‘real’ jungles risks reauthorizing a natural space as the essential factor for its emergence (Driver and Martins 2005). Like orientalism,

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‘“tropicality” needs to be treated as “a conceptual, and not just physical, space”’ (Arnold cited in Clayton and Bowd 2006, 209). A critical and contemporary approach to tropicality demands a tracing of its unique racializing effects beyond the history and geography of the colonial Torrid Zone (Driver and Martins 2005). Studying the discourse of tropicality as a political device does not imply an abandonment of its temperate/tropical binary. Instead, it allows one to shift analytical focus onto the discursive movement of the temperate/tropical onto climatically different sites. In the same period when industrial urbanization was lauded as the pinnacle of development in opposition to the tropics, their binary organization became less clear-cut. In the nineteenth century, imperial imaginaries of tropical jungles were adapted to characterize Britain’s industrial cities. Realist literature portrayed squalid residential urbanity in spatial opposition to progress (e.g. factories); lawlessness, animality and disease were dominant motifs (McLaughlin 2000). Although urban migrations of the nineteenth century were ushered in by economic sectorial changes, the growing industrial lower classes were cast as detritus like the pollution emitted by the factories they worked in (McLaughlin 2000). The purportedly superfluous population were viewed as overly mobile during the nineteenth century. In particular, working-class youths were referred to as ‘nomads’ who lived in ‘jungles’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006, 267). The jungle became a trope for characterizing unruly urban inhabitants tethered to the undesired environmental consequences of industrialization. Depictions of tropical jungles were not always formulated elsewhere and then adapted to urban settings. Representations of tropics as rife with contagious disease and degenerate inhabitants were physically written against the backdrop of metropole cities that were deemed to bear a family resemblance (Valverde 1996). The blurred lines of where jungles begin and end in representations of space extend to the government of urban settings, traces of which inform the present. Rivke Jaffe (2016) documents the legacies of colonial racial zoning in Caribbean cities, which found black areas as inherently pathogenic and inextricable from a tropical imaginary. While not consistently applied, rationalizations for the contemporary governmental neglect of slum areas find urban jungles a consequence of fused impure spaces and bodies (Jaffe 2016). Clamour for intervention arises when these urban jungles are perceived to spill over into richer areas (often resulting in slum dwellers being treated as populations to be dispersed under emergency measures rather than co-citizens) (Jaffe 2016).

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The aim of this discussion on tropical/urban jungles has not been to provide a comprehensive historical outline of their diversity. Moreover, the accounts presented remain context-dependent and any casual transposition of specific empirical developments to the present-day Calais Jungle would be anachronistic. Attempts to facilitate domination through (or against) an indigenous so-called socio-ecological order, for the purposes of wealth extraction or pacification, are clearly far removed from the state problematic of governing the Jungle. Instead, this section sought to identify key features of tropicality as a heterogeneous strategy of domination, which exceeded a particular climatic zone. Tropicality was a discourse malleable enough to craft a space that required: (1) preservation; (2) destruction based on fears of violence or contamination; (3) treatment as an ungovernable frontier. What cut across these techniques of government was the creation of the other as a separate species entwined with their surroundings. The schematic presentation of tropicality helps us gain an optic for grasping how the Jungle cannot be reduced to a generic and interchangeable space of exception. As the following demonstrates, tropicality is discursively reconstituted in the Calais Jungle’s organization of residents and space.

‘Jungling’ the Jungle Racialized descriptions of the Jungle create and legitimate a climate of hostility (Harker 2016). The Jungle is also a performative metaphor. It is violence inscribed on bodies. Refugee Rights Europe (2017) found that Calais’s migrants, who had experienced verbal abuse (82.4% of a snowball sample survey of 244 participants), were subjected to citizens ‘making animal sounds, shouting racial slurs and giving the finger’ (Refugee Rights Europe 2017, 16). In an uncanny parallel to the colonial fusing of bodies and environment, tabloid media rendered the lived space of the Jungle a sign of residents’ savagery (Rosello 2016). In similar vein to Rudyard Kipling’s jungle imaginary, dominant discourse on Calais’s jungles identifies residents as ‘not only animals but dangerous predators whose natural habitat was cruel, chaotic, and lawless’ (Rosello 2016). Equally, Ibrahim and Howarth (2018, 22–25) note traces of imperial tropical imaginaries through the Jungle ‘metaphor’, which galvanizes figurations of migrants as uncivilized ‘lesser humans’. Likewise, a study of British tabloids finds the ‘metaphor’ ‘Jungle’ to iterate an orientalist symbolic border that polices who counts as a Western subject (Bhatia 2018, 190–191).

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Not simply a camp where residents were racialized, a discourse of tropicality worked to condition what Dan Hicks and Sarah Mallet term practices of ‘environmental hostility’ in the Jungle. Adapting Mbembe’s analysis of infrastructural demolition in Palestine, Hicks and Mallet’s argues that ‘necropolitical conditions can be made through attacks upon the nonhuman environment as well as just the human body’ (Hicks and Mallet 2019, 29): ‘The hostile environment created by the British and French authorities at Calais is precisely concerned with this form of necropolitics. It experiments with new regimes of violence and destruction directed against possessions and shelters as well as against bodies, against the full range of distributed and extrasomatic personhood of displaced people in Calais, putting material culture, the built environment and the wider landscape into operation as weapons against the weak’. (Hicks and Mallet 2019, 30)

They proceed to exemplify this by documenting physical violence, disruption to food distribution, disruption to sleep, hazardous building materials, as well as negligible welfare that leads to poor sanitation and exposure to the elements (Hicks and Mallet 2019). As we shall see, tropicality gave a particular inflection to the government of imbricated bodies and environment. Humanitarianism, securitization and conservation are shown to entwine—producing the space as a frontier requiring preservation and destruction. It should first be recognized that securitization works through ‘zones’ rather than ‘limits’; as securitization encapsulates new issues, it becomes a practice that can blur the lines of where the security issue begins and ends (Huysmans 2014, 80). This also transforms the operation and goal of the prior ‘non-security’ issue (Huysmans 2014, 80–81). For instance, smugglers are deemed threats to ‘border integrity’ and their passengers are positioned as subjects in need of ‘victim-protection’ (Moreno-Lax 2018, 130–132). This leads to a situation of ‘preventive non-refoulement ’ (Marchetti 2010, 161), whereby assisting irregular migrants in international waters to reach the intended shore risks collusion with a criminalized act (Heller and Pezzani 2017). This aspect of EU-Frontex security is part of a broader discourse of securitizing humanitarianism, which produces the human as referent object (Watson 2011) and threat to security.

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Within the Jungle, it initially appears that the blurred lines of humanitarianism and securitization simply arose in service of bare life. On the one hand, state-provided accommodation in the Jungle (that was not tied to asylum processing) would, in principle, adhere to ‘migrantcenteredness’—as defined through the EU’s 2011 Global Approach to Migration and Mobility (Vaughan-Williams 2015, 3). This policy agenda emphasizes state obligations to place human dignity prior to the evaluation of entry routes and status (Vaughan-Williams 2015). On 11 January 2016, the centre d’accueil provisoire was unveiled in the northeast of the camp. The facility comprised 150 shipping containers, repurposed for overnight accommodation (Fairs 2016). Each container could accommodate up to 12 occupants. Once inside a container, they had access to electricity, a bed and a heater (Blamont 2016). On the other hand, containers failed to meet ‘international humanitarian standards’ (Boyle 2017, 30) (Chapter 3 discusses this in more depth) and sanctioned the Jungle as a space of waiting. The development resonates with facets of the Jules Ferry Day Center, in particular state accommodation as ‘a tool of containment…a spatial technology of “non-citizen” segregation’ (Van Isacker 2019, 121). Potential asylum seekers must ‘sit and wait’ before the law, they are made to invest in an unwanted (but unavoidable) refugee identity (Jeffers 2012, 37). This alienating process of subjectification was intensified via the alignment of state-provided accommodation with the destruction of the surrounding area. The converted steel crates marked the fruition of Bernard Cazeneuve’s (Minister of Interior) plans to create an ostensibly humane shelter, without sending the message of being ‘a new point of convergence for migrants’ (Henry and Durupt 2016). Between January and February 2016, a Western section of the Jungle was demolished due to its encroachment upon the motorway route leading to the port (BBC 2016). A Pas-de-Calais official portrayed the destruction as a solution to the inhumane conditions, while also advancing the newly installed container accommodation as justification for internal displacement (Khomami 2016). With the March 2016 demolition of the southern part of the Jungle, the alienating condition of human as victim and threat was intensified. While labelled a ‘humanitarian operation’ by French authorities, evictions involved disproportionate force, disregard for residents’ property, and an absence of plans to house those whose destitution was

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exacerbated (Moseley 2016). These emergency measures led to roughly 3500 residents being evicted from the tented areas (Singh et al. 2016, 2), which far exceeded the capacity of the containers. The Jungle is no different from a refugee camp that expands and contracts as a result of population movement and state intervention or abandonment. Yet these developments are inflected by tropicality. Recall that a colonial imaginary of jungles positioned inhabitants apart from ius gentinium (along with its necropolitical implications) at the same time as objects of preservation, in so far as they do not disturb colonial government. What rendered this more specific than bare life was the fusing of bodies to a detested environment. A discourse of undesired organic growth and culling, which underlay the local authorities’ regulation of the Jungle, becomes more explicit as humanitarian securitization entwines with concerns about ecological balance. The material crafting of mobility within, and beyond, La Lande (the site of the Jungle) was subject to transformation and conversation. The dismantlement of the Jungle during the last week of October 2016 left masses of debris. It also revealed traces of regularly uprooted structures through the emaciated soil and barren terrain. In September 2017, the Calais municipality undertook a restoration project. Measures were taken to create a coastal nature reserve, thereby fulfilling the broader Conservatoire du Littoral mission (Dauchart 2018). A two-year project for developing hiking trails and observation decks funded by the City of Calais is part of a broader agenda to raise the public profile of La Lande (Dauchart 2018). While not justified in terms of preventing migration to the border town, it reorients the area for authorized forms of mobility and anticipated French citizen public use. The documentary Habitat 2190 further captures how this nature reserve (Fort Vert) worked to efface the traces of the inhumane Jungle, while testifying to governmentality of bordering practices. The project of soil restoration, alongside measures to repopulate dwindled local species, highlights how Fort Vert becomes a struggle to specify what forms of life have a right to inhabit and use the area (Habitat 2190). The drive to restore and preserve a prior ecological order co-constitutes ‘nature’ and territorialization, against a spectre of refugees who were deemed to contaminate the area. While certainly not pandering to the rise of European rural right-wing populism (Mamonova 2020), this effort at enclosure reassigns La Lande to particular bodies through ecobordering. Jones and Cloke (2002) find that representations of nature are

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ways of defining lines of inclusion/exclusion. Tropics are constructed as untameable othered (non-European) areas, geographical features of such arboriculture (e.g. forests) get worked up as the materiality and spatiality of European identity (Jones and Cloke 2002). In the context of the nature reserve, there is the attempt to fuse bodies (hiking French citizens) and ‘nature’ (a managed yet rugged landscape) to instil a tranquil timeless setting. This works against its absence and process of absenting. The reserve is based on the denial of the space as a site of refuge from global wars and poverty. Against the deterritorializing effects of the Jungle, La Lande is subject to an image of a more ‘tameable’ and ‘European’ localization. As previously discussed, another dimension to tropicality is the lack of spatial mastery as a means of governing. The construction of a colonial temperate/tropical binary—embedding a frontier that positioned the latter as a fluid un-delineated and uncivilized space—imagined a locale that cannot be systematically governed or transformed. This broader discourse of tropicality finds resonance through the Jungle as a site of abandonment. Europe’s migrant population are fashioned through a ‘differential inclusion’ whereby the metaphor of ‘walls’ fails to capture how the undocumented are incorporated into Europe as subjects with minimal rights (Mezzadra and Neilson 2012, 67–70). As territory becomes regularly breached, bordering practices work to identify and interdict migrants through lines of transit (e.g. an EU route strategy approach) (See CasasCortes et al. 2015). The freedom to move—‘to go anywhere except where one wants to go’—is an effect of how irregular migrants are incorporated through legal suspension (Scheel 2013, 598). While the Jungle is an effect of UK-France border controls, its status as a borderland is also defined through autonomy from formal detention and deportation. Residents are cast as archetypical non-Europeans through a tenuous freedom to reside without rights-based integration. A lack of state involvement in remedying disease and sanitation led the Jungle to fall well below UNHCR standards (Dhesi et al. 2015). Residents had to rely primarily on medical aid from charities (Cragg and Mellon 2016). Instead, the Managing Migratory Flows in Calais strategy, presented by government departments on both sides of The Channel, predominately aimed to strengthen security around access routes to the UK and bolster containment (Ministère de l’Intérieur and Home Office 2015).

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Ibrahim and Howarth (2018, 30) argue that moments of state ‘withdrawal’ underscore the limitations of viewing the Jungle as a state of exception. Abandonment does not suggest an abdication of sovereignty. Rather, indifference and neglect of the internal dynamics of the Jungle were part of an actively produced biopolitics of ‘letting die’ (Davies et al. 2017, 1269). For instance, abandonment surfaced through the banning of aid as a disincentive for prospective arrivals. Nowhere is this clearer than the post-October 2016 ban on charities to distribute food out of fear it would encourage prolonged gatherings, which were deemed a security risk and potential for reviving the Jungle (Goudeseune 2017). Although the municipal authority’s edict has now been rescinded, it exemplified the broader attempt to cultivate exposure to death. When abandonment is viewed through the lens of tropicality, it is not merely a breach of human rights that is being enacted. Instead, abandonment is an effect of creating the Jungle as a frontier region. Bordering practices that shape the Jungle as a frontier region and ambiguously territorialized site can be probed further by noting its displacement from France, and Europe more broadly. Why the Jungle attracted so much vitriol from the media, as well as state concern, was due to its location in Europe. This location was more than a problem for the French-UK border. Although its size, population and structures paled in comparison with self-organized settlements of the Global South (e.g. Kalobeyei in Kenya or the Kutupalong settlements in Bangladesh), the Jungle demonstrated that sporadically managed refugee settlements were no longer consigned elsewhere. It testified to the fact that slum-like conditions of self-organized settlements could not be kept out of sight and mind in the northern European imaginary. Casting the Jungle as non-Europe localizes what Nicholas De Genova (2017, 18) notes as a disavowal of ‘“post”-colonial entanglements’ in state migration discourse. Here, Europe marks a space where the refugee is a trace of colonial histories and more recent European (indirect) state involvement in contemporary global conflicts (De Genova 2017). The Jungle condensed this aspect of the postcolonial. For the majority of residents, countries of origin have a history of British colonialism or are affected by recent conflicts in the Middle East. Hence, the making of the Jungle is not only an effect of contemporary international and local politics. When the Jungle is framed as non-Europe, it is extricated from a broader postcolonial trajectory. Residents are situated as subjects apart

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from a longer-term trace of European historical and contemporary global connectedness.

Conclusion European colonies were ‘laboratories’ where techniques of domination could be developed, legitimated and imported to the West (Hönke and Müller 2012, 387–388). Tropicality is one, diverse, experiment in domination. Its discourse of fusing environment and racialized bodies was neither confined to the geographical tropics nor the past. We have argued that its traces of rule deepen our understanding of the Jungle as a space of exception. Studying tropicality reminds one of the colonial traces that organize the Jungle, which distinguishes it from being a generic and interchangeable refugee camp. Tropicality was a vital conduit for producing the Jungle as a space where individuals are deemed spatially and historically foreign to Europe. The extra-legal and collective punishment approach to policing reflected a broader post-1990s securitization of migration in France, which tasked itself with assigning non-citizens as a threat to national integrity (Bourbeau 2011).

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CHAPTER 3

The Right to the Jungle

Abstract Recent scholarship has posited refugee camps as socio-political spaces of domination and resistance. This chapter adapts existing approaches to political subjectivity in order to uncover ‘the right to the Jungle’. This right is discussed as an assemblage of refugees, aid workers and objects that constitute the Jungle. The chapter examines how this assemblage shaped a space of relational political subjectivity that contested authorized sources of mobility capital. Drawing upon this discussion, this chapter problematizes Eurocentric understandings of citizenship. The chapter concludes that the right to the Jungle is an important, albeit transient, prism for witnessing a struggle over who can belong to Europe and what counts as political subjectivity in Europe. Keywords Political subjectivity · The right to the city · Citizenship · Assemblage theory · Autonomy of migration

Introduction Roughly a decade ago, refugees from Afghanistan supposedly referred to the improvised squats on the outskirts of Calais as dzhangal (forest in Pashto) (Trilling 2018). Dzhangal became ‘jungle’ as the word circulated © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Z. Nahaboo and N. Kerrigan, Migrants, Borders and the European Question, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75922-3_3

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amongst Calais’s refugee population, with ‘ironic reference to the squalid conditions’ they found themselves living in (Harker 2016). By late 2015, it was commonplace for refugees and citizen-volunteers to use a definitive article—the ‘Jungle’—in reference to the largest migrant squat in France. The fact that refugees gave meaning to the Jungle, by conveying their stories of indignity and journeys/aspirations (Godin et al. 2017), hints at a borderland that failed to be defined by discourses of tropicality (outlined in Chapter 2). The Jungle’s multiple sources of signification and enactments require further consideration. The following section outlines the current frameworks that revealed political subjectivity in the Jungle. Struggles for mobility through/against migration management are shown to generate political subjectivity apart from its authorized expression (i.e. citizenship as status or habitus). The second and third sections build on these accounts by exemplifying a right to the Jungle. In part, this refers to how the Jungle was enacted through assemblages of humans and non-humans. It probes these configurations to give an account of how autonomy within, and from, humanitarian securitization was enacted. Later, the focus shifts to refugee relations with shipping containers in, and around, the Jungle. Section four draws upon these discussions to explain how the right to the Jungle elides certain Eurocentric registers of political subjectivity. This chapter is not concerned with imagining the right to the Jungle as progressive or regressive according to an ethical criterion. Moreover, it does not aim to recover subaltern voices, which in turn shifts the scale of the political onto questions of a subject’s intention or desire. Instead, assemblages of humans and objects are focused on how they extend our understanding of rights enactments in, and for, the Jungle. These ‘spaces of representation’ (Soja 1996, 67) become acts that fleetingly disrupt who is authorized to be present in Europe and what counts as political subjectivity in Europe.

The Space of Political Subjectivity in the Jungle Living in the Jungle’s self-built tented areas, along with the development of meagre communal amenities (with the assistance of charities), exemplified an escape from, and refusal of, the British-French and EU regulation of immobility/mobility (King 2016). When the Jungle is perceived as a site of relative autonomy, it presupposes an antagonistic relation with the state (King 2016). To make sense of this, Natasha King (2016) frames her observations of the Jungle in 2015 through the autonomy of migration

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(AoM) concept. Although host to a diverse set of meanings, common to AoM is a reading of unauthorized presence or mobility as an (unintentional) challenge to a border regime’s ability to regularize the government of those it produces as irregular migrants (Tsianos and Karakayali 2010, 377–378). Such moments are contingently related to an intentional or desired protest against borders. A methodological individualism, which conflates agency and resistance, is rejected (Scheel 2013). AoM signifies the co-constitution of securitized subjects and the problematization of their authorized subjection. It characterizes an instance when migrant practices exceed a border regimes’ attempt to steer the conduct of its surveilled and disciplined bodies in predictable ways (Scheel 2013). Consider how a migrant’s navigation of the EU’s border regime—a ‘visible-knowable-governable’ disciplinary gaze—can realize a subversive political gesture (Ansems de Vries et al. 2017, 95–96). I.B (pseudonym) presented himself as a ‘good refugee’ during an asylum interview in Calais (Lakraâ 2017, 12–13). He withheld the complexity of the violence he experienced, disdain for state borders and desire to move (which far exceeded the issue of persecution). I.B weaved a more simplistic narrative that would satisfy the local bureaucracy by saying he was attacked by gun wielding assailants in his country of origin (Lakraâ 2017, 12–13). The ‘(in)visibility’ afforded by migration management (Ansems de Vries et al. 2017, 95–96), in this case the selective process of presenting oneself as a refugee without contradictions, transformed compliance into critical appropriation. Debating the ethical dimensions of AoM and measuring political efficacy through the fulfilment of migrants’ personal objectives are of undeniable importance. However, for the purpose of this chapter, what concerns us is the impact migrancy has upon politics. Jacques Rancière’s (1992, 58–59) memorable distinction of ‘policy’/police and ‘politics’ offers a guide for examining political subjectivity as a rupture from legislated citizen/non-citizen relations. Police operate through the institutional management of conflicting interests, which is oriented towards assessing the degree of alignment between a state agenda and those who are counted as part of a political community (e.g. citizens) (Rancière 1992). Politics, for Ranciere, refers to a demand and enactment of equality in the name of a wronged group who are not counted as part of the polity (Rancière 1992). An aggrieved identity is not recovered or re-signified. Instead, politics is the introduction of a gap between juridical categories: ‘the political subject exists in the interval between identities,

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between Man and citizen’ (Rancière 2010, 56). This leads him to argue that the political subject is the moment of reconceptualizing democracy apart from institutionalized practices that follow authorized ruler-ruled dynamics. The demos is the moment of appearing as a people who are not representative of, or represented by, a polity (Rancière 2010, 30–33). Studies of Calais’s jungles have explicitly drawn upon Rancière’s understanding of political subjectivity as disruption and claimed equality, so as to identify a constitutive moment of the people (see Millner 2011; Rygiel 2011; Rigby and Schlembach 2013; King 2016; Sanyal 2017). Political efficacy need not be measured by these disruptive enactments of equality. In a subtle departure from Rancière, an analytics of acts of citizenship refocuses attention to the moment when the meaning of a right is transformed (Isin 2012). These ‘acts’ are neither derived from an existing ‘status (law)’ nor are they equivalent to routinized ‘habitus’, both of which rely upon prior statist scripts of who can be recognized as holding or practising citizenship (Isin 2012, 153). Acts of citizenship are disruptive moments that inaugurate or transform a right beyond codified statuses or authorized practices; it is the ‘deed’ (the act), regardless of legal status, that produces the ‘doer’ (the political subject) rather than vice versa (Isin 2012, 153). King draws upon an ‘acts of citizenship approach’ to argue that moments of ‘no border’ politics can delink a right to dwell from territoriality, in turn evincing tentatively ‘liberated subjectivities’ (King 2016, 45–49). She goes on to state that the Calais Migrant Solidarity protest for ‘no borders’ tenuously generated citizens and refugees without a differentiated legal/illegal position in the moment of protest (however, this also bore power relations of speaking for all refugees) (King 2016). Similarly, a vigil for Youssef, a former resident of the Jungle who was killed in a lorry hit and run, produced informal ‘plaintiffs’ (Sanyal 2017, 28). Justice for Youssef was inscribed in slogans of appeal to the UN; refugees informally claimed a juridical subject position beyond their status as legal/illegal subjects (Sanyal 2017, 28). Through citizen-refugee joint demands for a repeal of migration control, and refugees’ dismissal of being exclusively counted as migrants, binaries of citizen/non-citizen were fleetingly deconstructed (Sanyal 2017). The politics of the Jungle cannot be romanticized. State bordering practices and abandonment overwhelmingly decided refugees’ fate (see Chapter 2). Nevertheless, studies of the Jungle canvassed in this section

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are important for inviting an alternative understanding of political efficacy: the ephemeral moment when a rights claim generates unauthorized and transformative expressions of political subjectivity. From the above studies, it is clear that the political arose in the Jungle (or surrounding area) via creative disruptions to, or subversions of, authorized expressions of political subjectivity. Yet we still lack sufficient insight into how the political arose through the very materiality of the Jungle. To work towards redressing this, a slight modification of the right to the city is needed. When Henri Lefebvre introduced the concept of the ‘right to the city’ he had in mind the urban as ‘more or less the ouvere of its citizens’ (Lefebvre cited in Butler 2012, 143–144). The city is a heterogeneous work in progress that emerges through (1) ‘spatial practice: the ‘process of producing the material form’, its outcome and the experiential perception of this form (Soja 1996, 66); (2) ‘Representations of space’: the imposition of designs to produce or order space via abstractions wrought by ‘spatial knowledge’ (Soja 1996, 66–67); (3) ‘Spaces of representation’: the ‘lived’ semiotics of space that combine the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ while embedding the impossibility of deciphering a singular meaning to space (Soja 1996, 67). When articulated as a right to the city, this triad is ideally mobilized in concert to recast lines of equality. For Lefebvre, the right to the city is an anti-capitalist practice of common space that would reduce alienation from the city, while also redefining what counts as public resources (Butler 2012). Such goals would shore up the limits of participation in authorized decision-making and market-driven uses of space (Butler 2012). Lefebvre stressed the importance of the right to the city as a ‘right to difference’, a displacement of centralized control and homogenization (Soja 1996, 35). The right to the city would be a continually performed aesthetic project of rendering space liveable (Soja 1996, 35). It is produced through a groundswell of collective action. In essence, the right to the city hones in on the tethering of infrastructural demands to the creation of publics. Building upon elements of this tradition, David Harvey (2012) argues that the right to the city surpasses a demand for public goods and need not emanate from a pre-constituted collective. The right entails the creation of publics that transform the city according to collective interests, whereby one also becomes inextricable from the change being inaugurated (e.g. commune living) (Harvey 2012). A right to the city may, therefore, involve acts of citizenship. When those of irregular status

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successfully demand social housing, a rights regime cast along prior citizen/non-citizen lines is deconstructed (Maestri 2017). In a connected vein, the act of illegalized bodies taking to street protests realizes a civil right without legal possession (Nyers 2010). In turn, combined with formal lobbying, a ‘no one is illegal movement’ can generate a ‘municipal foreign policy’ at odds with the state (Hobbs cited in Nyers 2010, 138). Without discounting that status-based understandings of rights are necessarily bound with logics of inclusion/exclusion, the conceptual uptake of the right to the city in English academia has often equated it to a struggle for justice (Revol 2014). The right to the city gathers meaning as: mobilization for economic redistribution; contestation of ‘socio-spatial injustice’ (segregation); enactments or demands for ‘participation’ that redefine the subject of urban politics (equality for previously subaltern identities); an ‘appropriation’ of a place that reveals and breaches dominant norms (or normativity) of use (Revol 2014, 24–31). Given that the city is an undecided and ephemeral space of representation, its work in progress can drift towards ‘precarious urbanity’; the right to the city is a constellation of mobilizations (i.e. lobbying and street protests) to harness control (Trimikliniotis et al. 2015, 83–87). These analytical trends circulate through reflections on the Global South. Samara et al. (2013) note how cities of the Global South are remoulded into attractive places for investment from the Global North and living for security-seeking (local) middles classes. An elite cosmopolitanism is both physically and sociospatially enforced through democratic deficits in urban planning and the privatization of welfare (Samara et al. 2013). Their collection of chapters engages with spaces of representation that produce separation and segregation, whereupon the right to the city heralds counter-governance strategies (Samara et al. 2013). Contemporary analytics of the right to the city risk conflating the ‘right’ and the ‘good’. It is undeniable that the right to the city is an intended and purposive attempt to mitigate vulnerabilities. Equally, the right to the city does not preclude incommensurable or opposed conceptions of the good life. What looms large over existing discussions on the right to the city is the third space. Edward Soja places emphasis on Lefebvre’s ‘spaces of representation’ since it contains the triad of ‘perceived, conceived, and lived’ space (Soja 1996, 68). That focus on ‘thirdspace’ is given prominence by Soja as a ‘political choice’: the ‘lived space as a strategic location from which to encompass, understand, and potentially

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transform all spaces simultaneously’ (Soja 1996, 68). For it is reflection and practice upon what one deems real-imagined spaces that induce contestation and modification over a settled ordering of, or positioning in, space. The phrase ‘the right to the Jungle’ bears affinities with the aforementioned demands or enactments of ‘the right to the city’. However, this turn of phrase is needed in order to capture a slightly distinct situation, which extends to more than a difference in locale. What renders social space political in the right to the Jungle are enactments of transient human-infrastructural interdependencies. The right to the Jungle, which decentres without displacing the human subject, need not have an underlying ethical motivation. It emerges as a conflict over a space of representation, securitization-desecuritization and occupation-escape, whereby its enactment problematizes the now diffuse city-citizen linkage. The following sections elaborate and exemplify the right to the Jungle. This sets the scene for an account of how the right to the Jungle arises through human, non-human and kinetic relations that fracture a Eurocentric notion of political subjectivity.

Assembling the Political (I): Crafting a ‘Liveable’ Space Refugee camps can exhibit an ‘ordinary cosmopolitanism’ whereby the experience of being in an ‘in-between space’ tentatively disrupts prior us/them cultural identifications; the camp is a flipside to a transnational elite’s cosmopolis in that the navigation of shared abjection can ferment deracinated solidarities that transgress nationalized cultures (Agier 2016, 78–79). The Jungle exhibited a ‘sociétié’ divided along ethnic lines due to linguistic diversity, as well as a ‘communs’ through daily commerce and emergent public spaces (Agier et al. 2018, 101–133). Resident and citizen-volunteer cooperation fostered ‘community life’ (Ibrahim and Howarth 2018, 30). This manifested through congregations in restaurants, shops, schools, a library, a nursery, a theatre, an art school, a mosque and a church (Agier et al. 2018, 101, 121–123). The Jungle grew into a precarious self-governing space of abjection, commerce, welfare, criminality, multicultural communal divisions and multiculture. Conditions remained dreadful and there was no single charity or IGO in charge of managing the Jungle (Gentleman 2015). Despite calls from

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frontline organizations to address deteriorating conditions and adherence to the Common European Asylum System, the French government did not officially acknowledge ‘the need for refugee protection’ under a UNHCR mandate (Sandri 2017, 5). It was left to grassroots charities to ensure needs were met. Volunteers for Help Refugees/L’Auberge des Migrants and Help Calais distributed the ever-mounting donations stocked in a Calais warehouse to the Jungle (Gentleman 2015). Within the Jungle, refugee and citizen volunteers cooperated to secure tents, build amenities and facilitate an internal economy (Mould 2017). Crisis management went beyond reactive attempts at alleviating absolute poverty. For example, the Jungle Books library marked a collaboration between citizens and refugees, ‘English and French lessons [were] available along with free Wifi’ (Rosello 2016, 102). Moreover, these spaces were also transformed beyond their ostensible function. Jungle Books became a ‘community hub’ for connecting refugees and voicing material needs to aid workers (Bausells 2017). A similar attempt to induce elements of normality was attempted by Play4Calais, which designated areas for sporting activities (McGee and Pelham 2018). These developments may testify to a circulation of a neoliberal ‘resiliency humanitarianism’, whereby INGOs and refugees are made responsible for welfare (Ilcan and Rygiel 2015). Yet in the context of the Jungle, it was through humanitarianism that protection and activism became blurred (Sandri 2017). Alongside its securitized operation, humanitarianism emerged as a subversive practice of shaping the Jungle. Bruno Latour (2005, 71) argues that objects are ‘participants in the course of action waiting to be given figuration’. They are not inert matter, merely props for mediating actions or the fabric for semiotics. Sharon Krause takes this kernel of Actor Network Theory to reconceptualize the matter of political subjectivity. She notes that agency is a ‘socially’ and ‘materially distributed’ phenomenon that induces a change, without having this effect produced by either mechanistic notions of causality or an individuated/group-based sourcing (Krause 2015, 22). By moving away from the sovereign subject, who claims more or less mastery of the world, to the diffuse elements that shape agency, constitutive moments of political subjectivity need to be understood through human and nonhuman relations; the accountability and location of an enacted right are diffused through networks rather than traceable to a purely human source (Krause 2015).

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Setting aside the rationales underpinning volunteers and refugees activity in, or for, the space, its developing infrastructure is itself constitutive of a right to the Jungle. In contrast to a space of exception infused by tropicality (see Chapter 2), the Jungle became a lived space that contested bare life. Autonomy arose through security practices. In January 2016, authorities ‘evicted a one-hundred-meter strip of the “jungle”’, which enabled a better vantage point of the settlement and created a ‘buffer zone’ (Ansems de Vries et al. 2017, 96) between the Jungle and the motorway route to the port. Yet the space partially lost this function when appropriated by children as a field for playing sports (Ansems de Vries et al. 2017, 96). A right to the Jungle, understood as a demarcation of place that subverts the security gaze, was the unintentional effect of land use in conflict. This aspect of the right to the Jungle surfaces with the ebb and flow of French demolition crews. To sustain ‘autogestion’, refugees and citizens rallied to move structures and tents when a demolition order was issued by the police (Mould 2017, 11–13). The constant re-crafting of the Jungle marked ‘an on-going cycle of home-making, unmaking and re-making that acts to continually destabilise the lives of the people who try to call it home’ (Mould 2017, 2). The right to the Jungle has thus far been conceptualized as an enactment without a necessitated desire. This is not to discount the fact that some refugees expressed an ambivalent attachment to the Jungle, beyond sheer resignation (Godin et al. 2017). They also engaged in intentional protest to resist evictions and draconian policing (Mulholland 2016a). However, the right to the Jungle was a struggle for lived space that emerged through a relational and distributed agency. The right to the Jungle was its own enactment; it arose from refugees’ sociality and building work, volunteers’ collaboration and the semi-permanent structures—each aspect of the Jungle facilitated the other. The destruction of infrastructure became a route for denying its enactment. To elaborate on these features of the right to the Jungle, while giving greater emphasis to how it was expressed through oscillating practices of occupation and escape, we can return to the maligned container accommodation.

Assembling the Political (II): Regenerating Mobility Capital Who is entitled to move? What means of travel can be taken without state prohibition? When can movement take place? These questions are

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often answered through various deployments of ‘mobility capital’ (Sheller 2014, 797). For the international migrant, the ‘physical, social, and political affordances for movement’ (Sheller 2014, 797) are validated and redeemed through a security dispositif. A security dispositif is a sought after alignment of state, social, material and virtual practice that works through ‘a fantasy of homogeneity and seeks the end of any resistances or struggles’ (Bigo 2008, 109). Its articulation also involves a future-oriented anticipation of threat through ‘technologies [of] monitoring’ (Bigo 2008, 109). In the context of securitized migration, this enables a border regime to naturalize, assess and regulate an individual’s spatial-legal positioning and (predicted) lines of movement. The discipline and surveillance that facilitate the movement of some, and hinder the movement of others, occur through a spatially diffuse regulatory power. Dominant British-French and European bordering gave the condition of possibility for casting the Jungle both within, and outside, Europe (see Chapter 1). Although the Jungle was made into a political hot potato for French/UK responsibility, when it came to security borderwork there was a concerted effort to police ‘at a distance’ (Bigo 2007, 31). In October 2016, French officials working in Kent prevented volunteers, who were destined to shape the Jungle with aid, from travelling to Calais (Worley and Bulman 2016). Police messages proclaimed negligible UK state welfare for irregular migrants (Ministère de l’Intérieur and Home Office 2015). The creation of a joint UK-France ‘command centre’ purposed with intelligence gathering, and cooperation with African states through information centres, aimed at dissuading the journey to Europe via hazardous sea routes (Ministère de l’Intérieur and Home Office 2015). More than lending further credence to how the Jungle was shaped as a space of exception (see Chapter 2), the multiplication and mobility of borders also need to be understood as a practice that resists a security dispositif. Bordering practices within the Jungle drew lines of conflict. Irit Katz (2017, 10) maps the 2016 Jungle as split between a ‘selfbuilt makeshift camp’ and ‘purpose-built institutionalized camp’ (i.e. the containers). Katz (2017, 13) reads these mutually constitutive domains as testimony to refugees’ subjection to a ‘biopower’ that refigures life into a manageable form of governance. She also notes a ‘power of life’: the heterogeneous quotidian ways of living that are responsive to a borderland in constant flux (Katz 2017, 13). This dynamic borderland raises questions of how personal ‘agency’ is created and constrained (Katz 2017,

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11–14). Equally, it offers a point of departure for examining how the right to the Jungle enacted borderwork via an assemblage of refugees and tents in opposition to state-sanctioned accommodation. The introduction of converted shipping containers in the Jungle marked the imposition of humanitarian securitization (see Chapter 2). The French authorities contracted Logistics Solutions (a construction firm with a portfolio of temporary civilian and military shelters) to build the containers. Despite a budget of e20 million for the task, the disparity in quality between Logistic Solutions’ prior work on military accommodation and the Jungle containers suggested that the outsourcing of international protection duties was subject to little independent oversight (La Parisienne Libérée 2016). Although certainly more secure than refugee/charity or the UNHCR tents, the containers did not fulfil the needs of long-term settlement. There was no running water or cooking facilities in the containers (La Parisienne Libérée 2016). NGOs claimed they were ‘inhumanie’ due to a lack of privacy (Rescan 2016). Between January and March 2016, protests erupted in response to the partial destruction of the Jungle. Vehicles on the edge of the Jungle were set ablaze and the newly installed containers were tagged with ‘F--- Cameron and F--- government’ (Mulholland 2016b). Tents were burnt in remonstration against the evictions (although some of the fires were allegedly caused by police tear gas) (Mulholland 2016a). For certain refugees, the project to usher the doubly-displaced refugees into containers was symbolic of their further tethering to the Jungle (BBC 2016a). Conversely, resistance to the containers stemmed from an anticipated forced mobility beyond the Jungle. The required palm-print registration system was (falsely) perceived by certain refugees to activate Dublin Regulation III (Fairs 2016). The assemblage of mutually shaped zones in conflict can, of course, be analysed to further our understanding of the Jungle as a space of exception (see Chapter 2). However, the connection between humans and infrastructure assumed a political gesture. To grasp this, we can first briefly elaborate on the role of infrastructure in the formation of political subjectivity. As disability, critical race and feminist theorists have long recognized, the seemingly natural condition of going for a ‘walk’ can become a right in need of affirming: freedom from harassment and/or freedom to move by creating a non-discriminatory public infrastructure (Butler 2014, 138). Though all bodies require material infrastructure for movement in public, the separation of bodily movement from the

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political becomes impossible for certain populations. To borrow Nancy Fraser’s (1995, 69) terminology, the issue is one of ‘redistribution’ and ‘recognition’. At stake is the struggle to address the unequal allocation of mobility capital, and the very terms of constructing-facilitating a mobile subject whose movement is recognized as legitimate. This struggle played out within the Jungle. Through the co-constitution and clash of zones, the right to the Jungle surfaced as the demand (refugees dissenting the containers), claim and enactment (the partial endurance of the self-governing Jungle) of autonomy. These aspects of the right to the Jungle initiated an intervention into the field of mobility capital. In the early months of 2016, the politics of this assemblage arose at the very moment of increased vulnerability. The tents (refugees did not have to leave in the evening), its expanse, international media coverage and lack of a comprehensive relocation programme are what enabled a degree of permanence. A policy of total annihilation was not implemented in early 2016. In other words, refugees’ control over stillness and mobility within the Jungle was interdependent with a precarious infrastructural autonomy. This aspect of the right to the Jungle therefore highlights a situation parallel to what Judith Butler (2014, 126) terms an ‘infrastructural good’. In the milieu she describes, the street is an ‘infrastructural good’ that is politicized when conditions of emergence on the street are themselves threatened (i.e. when appearance in public becomes subject to police detention and violence): ‘we find that sometimes the fight is for the platform itself’ (Butler 2014, 126). However, if ‘mobility is itself a right of the body…it is also a precondition for the exercise of other rights, including the right of assembly itself’ (Butler 2014, 138). In the context of the Jungle, the wrestling of mobility capital from governmental regulation did not simply contest the authorized terms of stillness or movement within the Jungle. Another facet of the right to the Jungle was its preconditioning as a site to escape from, in line with the objective of reaching the UK. Initially, this appears to suggest opposition to the right to the Jungle. Moreover, escape might simply reveal an ‘unprocessed’ refugee practising a right to flee. However, the right to the Jungle (when understood as the attempt to determine the course of departure) is neither reducible to an internal contradiction nor the exercise of a prior human right. Rather, escape is imbricated within the development of makeshift living. This becomes apparent when we set aside contemporary border studies and become attuned to the Jungle as a spatial organization that uncannily parallels an earlier namesake.

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Nels Anderson’s study of ‘jungles’ in 1920s Chicago focused on hobos’ transient dwellings. Needless to elaborate, this class position and sociolegal status differ wildly from contemporary refugees in Calais. However, his ethnography distils an ideal type of the hobo’s jungle that is of relevance. He notes that ‘accessibility to a railroad is only one of the requirements of a good jungle… it is well that the jungles be not too far from a town, though far enough to escape the attention of the natives and officials’ (Anderson 1961, 17). Stepping back to this historic context helps capture an enduring feature of unauthorized makeshift transit zones. The dynamics of proximity and distance resonate in the present. If the right to the Jungle is predicated on a refusal to be terminally present, one needed to develop a space to facilitate an onward journey that was beyond the watchful eye of authorities. Personal possessions such as secure waterproof tents, sleeping bags, food from the town supermarket, mobile phones, along with social and charity support are a few items and relations that facilitated improved well-being (Welander 2020). The objects and practices, which contributed to mental and physical health, are not recognizable as conventional mobility capital. Yet within the Jungle, rest became a resource for organizing movement and solidarities (Agier et al. 2018). The police employed strategies of internal displacement by destroying tents, deterring movement (e.g. confiscating footwear) and disrupting sleep (Welander 2020). These ‘acts of dispossession’ and a ‘politics of exhaustion’ (Welander 2020, 7) illustrate how attempts to destabilize the transit zone were used to undermine the generation of informal mobility capital. If the right to the Jungle is a precondition for mobility beyond the Jungle, then one cannot ignore a line of movement that has gathered the most infamy. Gaining access to lorries passing through Calais to Dover is a widely commented upon route to UK entry (see Seeberg 2016; Oxfam et al. 2017; Ibrahim and Howarth 2018). When attached to lorries bound for the UK, shipping containers are re-signified from their marker of state authority and immobility in the Jungle. Yet for the French Ministry of Interior and UK Home Office, the freight route and lorries are part of the border regime. In recent years, there has been an increase in CCTV along the motorway leading to the Port of Calais, the construction of a concrete wall (BBC 2016c), stowaway identification technologies (e.g. carbon monoxide detectors) and incentivized outsourced border policing (a £2000 fine issued to lorry drivers for each stowaway found) (BBC 2016b).

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These mobile containers hosted a co-constitution and conflict between irregular migration and security responses. To briefly recall, freight containers are one of the most important conduits of global capitalism. They traverse state-authorized routes for circulating commodities and raw materials (Martin 2016). Equally, they can enter into a troublesome relationship with state borders: a vessel for subverting borders when host to illegalized migrant labour (not the outputs of labour) (Martin 2016). Aside from contesting the wider re-signification of containers into objects of stasis (i.e. state accommodation in the Jungle) by enacting a demand to cross state lines on one’s own terms, stowaways also politicized the motorway route. These attempts at migration may not be intending to create a supply chain risk. Yet the disruption to traffic frustrated the just-in-time economy, while the goods also became compromised due to freight seals being broken (Yarr and Smith 2016). In turn, the General Confederation of Labour, Calais’s farmers, and hauliers, protested at the continuation of the Jungle by blockading the motorway route to the Port of Calais (Samuel 2016). The struggle to migrate with unauthorized bodies and means enacted a right to travel. Modern cities are made ‘legible’ (Scott 1998, 53–63). These unruly sprawls are rendered objects of abstraction and uniform measurement, which is produced by, and in service of, top-down urban planning (Scott 1998, 53–63). Although the Jungle was not subject to centralized urban planning or cartography for the intended purpose of creating enduring public–private spaces or long-term socio-economic development, its governmental reorganization marked a similar process of spatial administration. The piecemeal introduction of state accommodation and bulldozing in early 2016 was a spatial practice that carved lines of governance and abjection. However, in this section and the previous one, a right to the Jungle was made visible through assemblages of humans and non-humans that facilitated relative autonomy. The right to the Jungle challenged the boundaries of who deserved control over bodily movement, thereby contesting its reservation for European citizens. What is perhaps implicit is how the right to the Jungle problematized what can be recognized as an expression of rights in Europe. This is elaborated in the following section.

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Contesting Eurocentric Political Subjectivity The idea of ‘Western’ citizenship has been spatialized since its inception. The ‘polites ’ (Ancient Greek) or ‘civis ’ (Roman) were ‘members’ of the ‘polis ’ or ‘res publica’, respectively (Pocock 1995, 31). The etymological co-constitution of citizenship and cities was indicative of a distinctive political relationship. The Ancient Greek notion of citizenship specified a ruler-ruled relationship based on active consent; citizens could directly deliberate and decide public affairs (Pocock 1995). The latter depended on articulating the civic as irreducible to heterogeneous private affairs. This is classically illustrated through the durable distinction between the oikos and polis —in turn inaugurating political debate about what should fall within either realm (Pocock 1995, 34). Although citizenship in European nation-states differed wildly from Ancient Greek city-states, modern citizenship was narrated as part of its lineage. Max Weber’s writings typified the view that there was an underlying continuity: a figure who was both ruler and ruled under conditions of political equality with fellow men, capable of casting aside sectional personal interests when engaging with questions of a public good (Isin 2002). Central to this narrative was citizenship as Western development sui generis, which in turn depended upon positioning an East as a constitutive outside—whose cities hosted subjects incapable of forging the ‘synoecism’ and civic bonds required for citizenship (Isin 2002, 7). This orientalist narrative was not innocent. Casting the non-West as a space of absent citizenship historically served to legitimize the domination of populations through the dispossession of land and effacement of equal dignity (Pateman 2007; Bhambra 2015). Twentieth-century citizenship marked the globalization of the nationally rescaled occidental city. Nation-state citizenship became a route for contesting the injustices of its geopolitical, cultural, racial and legal exclusivity. Yet new figurations of citizenship also substantively transformed rights regimes away from its solely universalizing form and towards a differentiated formation (Young 1989). Feminist (Lister 1997; YuvalDavis 2007) and multicultural (Parekh 2000; Kymlicka 2011) citizenships arose within, and outside, European academia. Alongside these critiques of liberal Eurocentric citizenship, nation-states in the EU lost exclusive juridical dominance in defining rights. EU institutions created new lines of political, civil and social right accountabilities that were irreducible to the nation-state form (Soysal 1994; Nash 2009; Menéndez and Olsen 2020). Non-citizenship would continue to be normalized

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within the borders of nation-states. Yet the post-1980s growth in differentiated and so-called postnational citizenship would, at times, extend to those traditionally cast as non-citizens. These developments complicated the boundaries of where rights can be legally assigned while also deconstructing boundaries of the private/public. However, status and practice-based frames for identifying rights in Europe were unperturbed. A reconsideration of rights through AoM and theories of political subjectivity compel one to identify how enactments of rights can precede their routing through citizenship status. Current studies of the Jungle exemplify these approaches by focusing on enactments of rights that, as previously suggested, issued fleeting deconstructions of citizen/noncitizen binaries. The right to the Jungle takes its cue from these critical approaches by problematizing the locale of rights. In doing so, it subtly disrupts one of the enduring foundations of Eurocentric political subjectivity. A Eurocentric citizenship (now globalized) remains wedded to the idea that rights claims or demands lead an individual to a public, even if the latter is immanent to collective action. This presupposes an individual and group-derived notion of rights. The right to the Jungle unravels this aspect of Eurocentrism through a slightly modified understanding of acts of citizenship. The right to the Jungle, traced in the previous two sections, disrupts the notion of rights as formed through individual possession or social practice. As previously argued, the right to the Jungle was diffused through networks of human and non-human connections. The right cannot be tracked to an agentic subject. The uptake and defence of infrastructural affordances for stillness or mobility manifested this right. This was contingently related to an unauthorized claim to justice. Nevertheless, the features of the right to the Jungle discussed in the sections above enact a convention of doing rights that is unrecognizable to a Eurocentric individualist/collectivist reductionism. It recomposes our understanding of rights as a material enactment.

Conclusion Caroline Koegler (2017, 2) argues that collectives in the Jungle might be viewed as (unintentionally) ‘performing the urban’ in the sense of citing, misappropriating and re-signifying a city-citizen link. A right to the city is problematized through refugees’ claims to ‘humanity, entitlement, dignity, and legitimacy’ (Koegler 2017, 10). After all, the Jungle was not

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a designated city slum, with a corresponding population deemed nominal citizens. However, as noted in this chapter, the right to the city need not require sourcing from those with citizenship status. The right is immanent to the assembly. Yet we needed to introduce the phrase ‘the right to the Jungle’ in order to demonstrate how political subjectivity arose through its unique form of spatiality. The right to the Jungle was not used as an activist slogan in this chapter. Rather, it highlighted diffuse assemblages that were fleetingly constitutive of the right. This problematized a Eurocentric ontology of where to locate rights, by resituating it as a transient and material space of representation. In addition, the right to the Jungle enacted an alternative mobility capital in Europe, which fleetingly broke free from a state-sanctioned form.

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CHAPTER 4

Calais mon Amour

Abstract Previous chapters examined the Jungle as a space of exception and a space that subverted the EU bordering regime, while also problematizing Eurocentric citizenship. This chapter demonstrates how intimate life arose as a practice subjected to the border regime and a set of everyday actions, which were immanent to the contestations of securitized borders. Taking a literary geography approach, we examine Béatrice Huret’s novel: Calais mon Amour. Through an analysis of the love story between the two protagonists (Béatrice and Mokhtar), the chapter demonstrates how affect and routine became acts of citizenship that challenged FrenchEU bordering. In contrast, these bordering practices remain durable for formally and informally regulating what kinds of intimate acts are allowed to be performed and by whom. Keywords Critical Literary Geographies · Calais mon Amour · Intimate Bordering · Spatial Practices · Acts of Citizenship

Introduction According to Robert Tally (2017), topics of space and spatiality are nothing new to literature; the social lives of literary characters are © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Z. Nahaboo and N. Kerrigan, Migrants, Borders and the European Question, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75922-3_4

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performed in specific places. Distinctive locales, regions, landscapes and other geographical features are often crucial to the meaning of literary works, particularly character development. These features project the spatial in the mind of the reader, which is then intended to help guide the reader through the story world. Furthermore, even when the text itself is not directly referring to space or place, the reader(s) will project forms of spatiality upon it. This occurs when a given narrative’s linear structure, the narrative voice or framing devices are recognized. Sharon Marcus (1998, 1259) argues this is because we ascribe certain attributes to text when really ‘we are inventing spatial relations that do not actually exist in it’. In other words, spatiality is part of literature and the literary form. The relationship between people and place has been a motif of writing on borders and migration. This is especially true of literature concerning the city—a significant amount of which takes the viewpoint of the newly arrived migrant as a literary device for exploring the human condition within the metropolis (Keating 1984). There are resonances when we turn to literary representations of citizen-refugee relations in, and beyond, refugee camps. This chapter will analyse Calais mon Amour, a French non-fiction novel written by Béatrice Huret (2017). It adopts a literary geography lens to examine how themes of resisting borders are enacted through and within the intimate life worlds of the novel’s two protagonists. It is important to note that our use of extracts from Calais mon Amour has been translated as close to the original French as possible. This might make reading cumbersome in place, but it helps keep the lexicon and style (though colloquialisms have been preserved). At the time of writing, there exists no official English publication of the novel. The focus of this chapter centres upon how practices of love and intimacy become ‘technologies of power’ (Foucault 1980, 215) through which the European migration regime disciplines movement. Technologies of power regulate individual conduct. By controlling borders, the state can steer individuals to govern their future action in a continuous and durable manner. These borders are more diffuse than territorial lines. The border regime can regulate who is authorized to enter into intimate relationships based upon citizenship status. Alongside this governmentality of everyday life, love and intimacy can become a technology that is used to redefine

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the parameters of irregular migrants and ‘host’ citizens’ freedoms. Calais mon Amour is a non-fictional memoir that captures this struggle.

Critical Literary Geographies The question of ‘where’ in literature has come to occupy centre stage for many social scientists over the past thirty years (Blair 1998; Hone 2008; Thacker 2017). Refocusing on the spatial question in literature informed new literary geographies by the end of the twentieth century (Hampson 2005). It drew upon cultural geographers and spatial theorists such as Henri Lefebvre (1974), Walter Benjamin (2006), Michel de Certeau (1984) and Michel Foucault (1986) to explore the multiple ways in which literary writings came to represent and engage with notions of social space in, for instance, the depiction of cities, landscapes and architecture. These works led to the development of new theoretical approaches to literary texts that foregrounded space and spatiality. For example, Tally’s (2014) geocriticism examined the mutually productive relationships between space, place and literature. Bertrand Westphal (2011, 112) maintains that this approach allowed for examination of the relationships between actual and imagined geographies, shifting attention from ‘the writer to the place’ and making the spatial referent found in literature the focus for critical analysis rather than the positionality of the author. Tally’s claim that space needs to be considered as shaping literary narratives echoes Lefebvre’s (1974) notion of space as an active force. Lefebvre’s (1974) The Production of Space outlined how social space is never simply a blank canvass upon which daily life is acted out. Rather, it is produced by human activity and is an active force in shaping human societies. The opposition of space and place is frequently used in literary analysis. Geographers often employ this opposition to understand the complexities of landscapes, broadly distinguishing between an alienating sense of (abstract) spaces such as the city and more affective, personalized places, such as ideas of ‘home’ and community. De Certeau’s (1984) distinction between the tour and the map is one example of this space/place binary. For de Certeau (1984, 115), ‘every story is a travel story – a spatial practice’ and all stories ‘traverse and organise places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them’. According to de Certeau, these spatial stories always oscillate between discourses of the map and those of the tour, between a mapping of place

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that stresses stability and fixity, and a tour discourse that stresses how spaces are associated with movement and lived experience. This then explains the central task of critical literary geographies: to unpack the social, cultural, historical and political representation of spaces in literary texts. Critical literary geographies offer a strategy of reading that foregrounds textual attempts to navigate representational spaces, spatial practices (Lefebvre 1974) and third space (Soja 1989). Such an approach to literary texts aims to do justice to depictions of forced migrancy. The emotive licences afforded by literature, and the affect it can produce, bring to the fore the ethical commitments of writing. The story of refugees’ or volunteers’ plight in camps can, perhaps, be better grasped by the aesthetics of their own tale than a chronicle that quantifies the situational ‘facts’. The collection of refugee narratives in Voices from the Jungle (Godin et al. 2017) gives testimony to the banal aspects of life prior to the Jungle, the political contexts they escaped from, as well as personal reflections on processes of uprooting and placemaking in the Jungle. It is through this text as well the play, The Jungle at the Young Vic, which ran between June and November 2018, that memory of everyday life and trauma can reach wider publics. This chapter offers a different focus by turning to the largely ignored novel Calais mon Amour. It seeks to elicit its engagement with space. Doing so draws explicit attention to the way Béatrice Huret (2017) uses aspects of literary realism to examine how the intimate life world of a voluntary aid worker and a refugee living in the Jungle challenges the European/non-European distinction in European bordering practices.

Calais mon Amour Calais mon Amour is a French novel that tells the story of a former Front Nationale sympathizer, Béatrice, who lives with her son and mother 20 kms from the Jungle. One evening, on her way back from work, she drove past a teenaged Sudanese refugee boy who asked her to drop him off at the Jungle. This encounter was life altering for Béatrice. She later became a voluntary aid worker supporting refugees in the Jungle, bringing food and clothing there, as well as enlisting friends and family members to help. Slowly she got to know the camp and the recipients of aid.

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In February 2016, while Béatrice was helping out in the Jungle, her eyes connected with Mokhtar, a 34-year-old former teacher who fled Iran. There, he faced persecution and ostracism by his own family for having converted to Christianity. She met Mokhtar when he and other refugees sewed their lips together in protest over the French authorities’ apathy towards improving the living conditions of the Jungle. A romantic relationship soon began. Béatrice offered to put Mokhtar and some of his friends up in her house, ignoring advice from her friends. Béatrice knew of her lover’s goal. Mokhtar had already tried to get to England by hiding in the back of lorries and now he was about to try a different route. He and two friends gave Béatrice e1,000 and got her to buy a small boat for them. In June 2016, Béatrice towed the boat with her car to a beach near Dunkirk. Once there, the refugees, none of whom had ever manned a boat before, set off to cross the English Channel in hope of achieving asylum status and secure employment in the UK. Béatrice was later arrested and charged with people smuggling in August 2016. She was also deemed a potential threat to the security of France. The central motif of Calais mon Amour is one of a love story. A romantic tale of how a former Front Nationale supporter and refugee living in the Jungle embarked on an intimate relationship. However, the novel is more complex than a generic love story. It intertwines themes of romance with practices of political subjectivity and the contestation of European bordering practices. The sections below read the intimate life world of Béatrice and Mohktar as a site of regulation and resistance. While not explicitly telling someone who they can and cannot love, European bordering practices unwittingly impact people’s intimate lives through authorizing what people are and are not allowed to do. In this context, EU policy is constructed as non-discrimination and does not formally police who can and cannot enter into relationships. However, the biopolitical strategies of the EU used to demarcate the boundaries around what is European/non-European limit illegalized refugees’ ability to fully participate in intimate life (or more precisely, acts of intimacy, e.g. shopping with your partner, enjoying a meal together and so on). This is because intimate life is inherently tied into citizenship rights. It is through the informal and indirect policing of who can count as properly European that the EU border regime evinces what Foucault (2003) terms ‘state racism’. State racism is the way in which dividing practices, such as class or race, become a technology for aligning a classical notion

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of sovereignty—a power over life and death—with biopolitics (see Fiaccadori 2015). Facilitating the life of some comes to depend upon leaving others to die. Such forms of governmentality are played out through a ‘domopolitics’ whereby the state (but also other social agencies) attempts to construct discourses of ‘home’ as a basis for doing politics (Walters 2004, 241). An individual’s right to citizenship, in this context, operates as a dividing line for their authorized access to intimate life. As we shall see, the intimate relationship between Béatrice and Mokhtar and their actions committed out of love, within Calais mon Amour, throws them into acts of citizenship (see Isin 2012). Such acts of citizenship contest the ‘technologies of power’ present in the identity formations around being European/non-European and challenge the bordering practices of Europe more generally.

Intimate Geographies: Love, Spatiality and Contesting European Bordering Practices Hannah Arendt once argued that love was an antipolitical force. Love, according to Arendt (1998, 242), is: unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with his [sic] qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings, and transgressions. … Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.

This characterization of love as unworldly suggests it is an individually experienced freedom, a homogenizing social force that equalizes people and subsumes the entire social field (Povinelli 2006). When adding the ideology of romance and intimacy to this recipe of love, it depicts sentiment or feeling as an essential and universal truth of individuals. As Lauren Berlant (2012, 110) states: ‘feeling is what people have in common despite their apparent differences’. An implicit universalist sensibility to love assumes an equal capacity for every individual to be affective and affected, to love and be loved. However, this implies that love is simply just internally felt subjective experiences and something that is experienced through habitus (see Jackson 1993). Nevertheless, Stevi Jackson (1995) finds that love has a greater level of complexity than

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being merely a felt experience; it is set of competing discourses, meanings, rules and practices which help give shape and form to intimate experiences, subjectivities and relationships. Love can also be a site of resistance and subversion. What is interesting in Jackson’s (1995) critical account of love is the use of the word practices. Practices can be something which is done socially—that love is performed through the everyday routines of the lovers performing it—but practices are not without an element of the spatial. Spatial practices, according to Lefebvre (1974, 38), are the personalized deciphering of space. They are practices that occur because of the outcome of choices and routines in space. For instance, the spatial referent of the home becomes the domestic sphere of intimate life because of the routinized patterns of love performed in it—a place where communication happens, meals are shared, and love is made. There is now a growing body of literature that explores geographies of intimacy. Within the context of borders, David Bell and Jon Binnie (2000) note that love and intimacy can reveal sedimented dividing practices, but also open possibilities for contestation. In a slightly different vein, Joe Turner (2020) demonstrates how European bordering practices sustain racialized divisions forged during colonialism via multiple state regulatory policies that pervade the intimate life worlds of refugees, such as family visa regimes, the policing of ‘sham’ marriages and integration policy. Likewise, Megan Daigle (2019) examines the stories of Cuban citizens and international visitors’ pursuit of romance, love and sex, which make visible the international bordering of intimate life. Daigle highlights how bordering practices assert themselves in multiple ways, both externally (travel restrictions) and internally (social and economic divisions between Cuban citizens and international visitors). However, these intimate entanglements can disrupt the formal and informal policing of who can enter into sexual relationships. One way in which to conceptualize how love and intimacy disrupt and resist borders is through acts of citizenship (Isin 2012, 120). Routine citizenship actions such as ‘voting, paying taxes, fulfilling jury duty, volunteering for non-profit organisations, donating for charitable purposes…running for political office’ can become acts of citizenship depending on the context of articulation (Isin 2012, 127). That is to say, the regulation of who is authorized to exercise a right can be disrupted, challenged or transformed when enacted by those who are not permitted to do so, or when they misappropriate its usage. Nowhere is this clearer than when,

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and where, Rosa Parks sat on the Montgomery bus. In the context of intimate life, certain act(s) of love can also arise as ‘acts of citizenship’. One does not choose to love. It is a deed that precedes intention. To love is a process of recomposing oneself as an ethical subject towards the other (Badiou 2012). To act out of love, performing and constructing spaces of intimacy, can subvert established bordering practices, especially when the someone who is loving or being loved is not legally and politically authorized to do so. Here, a situation of resistance can arise without a purposive drive or explicit ethical demand. Love, in the context of our discussion, can become formative of the political subject when mundane expressive and declarative illocutionary acts become an unauthorized rights claim. For instance, in Calais mon Amour, Béatrice’s act of love involves helping retrieve a boat to assist Mokhtar and other refugees in their crossing of the English Channel: Joe was waiting for us, his wife on the doorstep to say goodbye and wish good luck to the boys. We hooked the trailer to my car and left with Joe, without having time for a coffee. Above all, we mustn’t waste time. It was 4am when we arrived near the small beach still plunged in darkness. At the time of boarding, Joe had not noticed that it was necessary to descend a few meters of sandy road to reach the edge of the water, which was inaccessible by car. On foot, the five of us managed to drag the trailer. In a corner, we saw two fishermen. Though we were afraid of alerting them to our suspicious activity; it was too late to turn back. They took no notice of us: I think they did not guess what was being prepared. A little naively, we had put fishing rods on board the boat, so that in case they were spotted the three Iranians would pass themselves off as fishermen. Mokhtar had even learned in French the sentence that would ensure his salvation if the French police approached: “Piss off, I’m fishing!” All with an Iranian accent! He sometimes still uses it and laughs. We laughed less at that moment, of course. The boat floated. The time had come. Mokhtar said “See you soon,” as if to force fate. I was obliged to repeat after him “See you soon”. We said “I love you”. I did not cry. I did not scream. Reflecting his look. (Huret 2017, 188–189)

Béatrice’s actions in the extract above demonstrate that what she was doing in support of Mokhtar’s border crossing is out of love. Her loving actions were themselves political gestures that disrupted who is authorized to move. The expression of love becomes an act of citizenship

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at the shores of the English Channel, challenging a citizenship privilege while also using this to contest the lines of who has a right to mobility. Yet states are able to regulate the intimate spatial practices of intimacy. One example of these ‘technologies of power’ (or ‘technologies of love’; see Scheel 2017, 402) is the denial of the rights of citizens. By denying access to housing, for example, the state can control who can and cannot have a family in physical proximity. Not only does this exclude irregular migrants from formal structures of citizenship, it also makes love (with its unruly potential for enacting an unauthorized right to intimate life) the ‘target and object of governmental calculations’ (D’Aoust 2014, 320). Such ‘technologies of power’ regulate the socio-spatial practices of irregular refugees and citizens. Specific acts of citizenship performed out of love by citizens can rupture the borders of rights, while also being criminalized and regulated to securitize the borders of Europe. This is explored within the context of Calais mon Amour. The following begins with a discussion of how Béatrice’s love for Mokhtar facilitated a moral duty to help refugees living in the Jungle and sought the enlistment of wider community support.

Caring for the ‘Other’: ‘Agape’ Love, Collective Action and Moral Duty One theme presented in Calais mon Amour is the way in which love can encourage someone to act in a moral capacity to support and provide care for others. Chris Philo (1991), in the conference proceedings for the Institute for British Geographers—New Words, New Worlds —reflects on ideas of everyday moralities. According to Philo (1991, 16), geographies of morality are defined as: the different moral assumptions and supporting arguments that particular peoples in particular places make about “good” and “bad”/“right” and “wrong”/“just” and “unjust”/“worthy” and “unworthy”.

Geographies of everyday moralities suggest that issues of space, place, environment and landscape are built into the heart of moral arguments and assumptions individuals make. Marc Augé (1998) argues that discourses on the constructions of otherness require a sensitivity to care for the ‘other’ (see also, Tuan 1999). Just as cruelty and contempt

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between social groups produce uneven power relation, so to do individuals facilitate ethical connections between themselves and ‘others’. For many human geographers (see Cook et al. 2000), these moral and ethical geographies have been historically linked to spirituality and theology. A concept used to explain a voluntary desire to help, support and care for others is known as Agape. Agape is an inspired love which directs people away from focusing on the individual and towards creating and sustaining a sense of community by helping others in need. Agape can disrupt tensions between different groups and produce modes of togetherness and relational networks of support. Paul Cloke (2002) recognized the theoretical and empirical potential of Agape love outside of the domains of spirituality and theology. Cloke’s argument is that feelings of love can connect and commit people to act in a moral capacity, making them do a range of political, ethical and social activities. Agape, in this context, is more than a commissive speech act. It is a successful performance. The active work of love creates different sets of community and social relations. Agape love is evidenced in Calais mon Amour through the way Béatrice’s first meeting (from afar) with Mokhtar laid a basis for her attempt to connect with others. To work towards this account, we can return to the first several pages of the book. They are swiftly oriented around her impression of Mokhtar. The reader does not begin their entry into the Jungle through a detailed spatial representation. The singularity of the desired other becomes the focal point, a cornerstone and genesis of the narrative. The initial encounter is desire for a man who has stitched his lips in protest against the partial bulldozing of the Jungle. Her infatuation accompanies a witnessing of activism through trauma. She expresses overwhelming ‘distress’ (Huret 2017, 13), which goes beyond sympathy. As Huret moves to the border of the Jungle she contemplates: ‘What is needed is a good typical French person to make a spectacular gesture!’ (Huret 2017, 15). This narrative device is both foreshadowing (the facilitation of Mokhtar’s travel) and synecdoche of how justice is expressed beyond the physical Jungle. The scene is set for her experience of how romantic and agape love becomes entwined. Yet a brief cesura occurs. One cannot ignore how the punctuation of a linear narrative is pivotal for narrative development. Shortly after her encounter, she briefly attempts to temper the affect caused by Mokhtar. In reflecting upon her simmering feelings:

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“And then it would serve nothing.” I gave up, but I only thought of them, the Iranians. I say “them”. My sweetheart, I got him out of my mind because I’m rational: “Don’t be delirious.” This guy is a migrant, he’s got his life, he’s going to England. You live yours. He’s much younger than you! (Huret 2017, 16)

In this passage, the rationale for essentializing overtones is given as a means of distancing oneself from desire for an individual. Towards the end of the above passage, the root of that distancing from Mokhtar is seemingly resolved through the way borders dictate love. The passage highlights how anticipated territorial borders and trajectories are used as a means of avoiding love. As we know, she does not acquiesce to the effects of these borders. Over the course of the narrative, the presentation of affect (that had begun in tandem with feelings of refugee injustice) becomes embroiled with a broader commitment to support refugees living in the Jungle. This commitment circulates through her networks: There was no official media, only bloggers or communities that I did not know. I ‘liked’ her posts, I commented on some. Apparently, Julie, an assistant for a high school, spent her weekends, her evenings, and her holidays to help in the jungle. I put “I like” on one of her Facebook subscriptions […]. There were one or two critical reviews like “we would rather help our homeless people”, but more “super!” or “I will ask my brother, my mother, to empty their wardrobes”, etc. Some of them have direct messaged me, including Cindy, a friend of mine, who wrote to me: “It’s great what you do, I too am going to help, and it seems that there is a school?” I did not know. (Huret 2017, 33)

Béatrice’s feelings for Mokhtar were a catalyst for her to support refugees living in the Jungle. Her active support for other residents of the Jungle contests the spatial organization of the Jungle and its living conditions. This becomes explicit in her attempt to arrange events that brought residents together, with a view to create local public deliberation: I took the opportunity to organize a small debate in the crowd, to bring into dialogue a woman who is very "peace and love" and a youth from the extreme right. If no one convinces the other in this kind of conversation, or rarely, at least everyone hears another point of view. (Huret 2017, 35)

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These social networks and wider forms of support produced by Béatrice out of her feelings of love for Mokhtar extended beyond the support of voluntary aid workers and Calais residents. It also sought to educate officialdom about the lived realities of refugees living in the Jungle, albeit not successfully, as evidenced in the extract below: I had to explain to him that French law did not really apply in the jungle! Those migrants were not as well fed as he believed. Neither well treated. Nor did they have good access to housing, he knew that, because he saw this camp of misery, the ends of which had been torn off by the wind, remained as glue in the branches of the trees, all this slush on the ground, all this dirt, despite the efforts. But the conversation was short-lived. (Huret 2017, 69)

Moreover, Béatrice was not just facilitating networks of support from Calais residents. Her love for Mokhtar also made her want to change the attitudes and feelings towards refugees and the Jungle within her family as well. The lengthy passage below highlights Béatrice taking her mum to the Jungle. She showed her the harsh living conditions for refugees while also challenging the ‘threating migrant’ narrative her mum had towards residents of the Jungle: When my mother saw that I did not branch off for downtown, but took the motorway the A16, she asked me: - Well, why do you go this way? - Because it is the direction of the port and I still have things in the boot. She exclaimed: - Oh no, I’m not going to the jungle! - You’re not going to the jungle because you will not get out of the car, I promise. This time I did not take Zymako on the way but I went in with the car, as promised. The locals recognized it and all clustered around before I went round to open the boot. My mother turned to me, pale, and whispered: - Look, someone’s tapping on the window. He was tall, hard-looking and tanned, with a turban on his head. - Well, he won’t bite you! He is saying hello, so that we can come out! Say hello! - Oh! He scares me! […]

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Well, this poor fellow who was tapping on the window, I could have given him 10 euros. (Huret 2017, 86) […] Capucine, was another volunteer whom I liked…When I returned from work, I found my mother had already befriended Capucine. - She’s so polite, that girl! I should have anticipated my mother’s penchant for Capucine - a nice girl, it’s true - but she did not have the same opinion of Ingrid. - And Capucine, she comes from Belgium to help? - Yes, of course mum! There are even those who have come from London, you know, especially now, to try to reorganize the mayhem of the northern zone, it is never too much. - Ah, that’s good, it’s really good... My mother was fascinated by the solidarity of the people. She did not help at the jungle because she was seventy-five, but was reassured that we were not leaving the migrants in the mire. She had, so to speak, attached herself to their fate by hearing me speak of it. (Huret 2017, 106)

Béatrice’s caregiving to refugees, and attempted cultivation of wider systems of support, resonates with the concept of Agape. These agape forms of love produced ethical practices, which challenged the spatialized representations of the Jungle and state master narratives concerning the ‘threatening migrant’. Béatrice’s mum became welcoming towards refugees. And state officials stopped and listened to Béatrice’s concerns about the living conditions of the Jungle, albeit with limited effect.

Béatrice and Mokhtar: Romance and Family Life as Acts of Citizenship The second theme observed in Calais mon Amour is performances of romance and domesticity that problematized the British-French-EU regulation of public/private life. Turner (2020) argues that domesticity needs to be understood as a form of state governance whereby social relations are constructed out of systematic violence to create a ‘domestic sphere’, which regulates and controls what family life is supposed to be. Under this pretext, family life is not only part of the wider political economy. It

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is ordered in such a way that family life is based around systems of governance whereby the state can decide who is included and who is excluded from producing domesticities (Turner 2020). In Calais mon Amour, Mokhtar is controlled by French bordering practices that indirectly tell him what activities he cannot perform in everyday life—such as going shopping or forming romantic relationships within one’s authorized home. These activities are indirectly reserved for those who hold a more regularized status. Although a ‘full’ citizen, Béatrice is regulated in terms of her interaction with refugees. From the late 2016 onwards, the French government’s ‘hébergementcitoyen (Citizen Accommodation)’ illustrates the general practice of stipulating terms of becoming a hosting family, along with state-sanctioned refugees who can qualify (Ran and Join-Lambert 2020, 3). Ostensibly common to varied EU member states’ refugee integration policies is a politics of hospitality. This rallies against far-right populism as much as it establishes the home as a space of monitoring who assists refugees and how. Authorizing ‘good’ French citizens to shelter ‘good’ refugees is, however, an aspect of a broader pedagogical state racism, which assigns ‘bad’ figurations. The post-2009 French L.622-1 law lumped French NGO volunteers who assisted irregular migrants with traffickers (Taylor 2019, 43). Their ‘crimes of solidarity’ were at odds with the 2002 EU Council Directive exempting ‘helpers who do not seek financial gain’ (Taylor 2019, 43). Although this French law was rescinded by 2015, ‘acts of solidarity’ were heightened as a national threat under Nicolas Sarkozy’s ‘securitarian frenzy’ (Taylor 2019, 50). Alongside the formal regulation of a home space, societal securitization hinged on the disposition of existing families’ opinions about illegalized migrants or refugees. Against this backdrop, Béatrice was formally and informally regulated in terms of whom she could invite into her home. However, because of intimacy’s ability to empower people to act out of love, domesticity and its relationship to state governance are often unravelled through performing routinized patterns of family life. This is shown in the extract below where Mokhtar was invited to Béatrice’s home: Mokhtar and my family hit it off straight away, because he has a twinkle in his eye, he always looks happy, even without words […] In the evening we had a barbecue with two good friends, John and Rick. The weather was magnificent. My mother was busy between the garden and the kitchen to set the table while I was busy with the barbecue. Immediately, Mokhtar

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and Dara tried to make themselves useful. They went to pick up the wood, helped me to move furniture back inside so that I advanced the work of the living room that my mother was impatient to reinstate after decorating. (Huret 2017, 126)

What is implicit in the above extract is the way in which citizenship as status is contested. The intimate bond between Béatrice and Mokhtar meant that citizenship became performed through acts, making themselves politicized subjects by the things they did as part of their intimate life world. She was resisting what it means to be a ‘good’ French citizen. Love and intimacy were not simply habitus. Rather, they were mundane acts of citizenship, an everyday routine, which disobeyed the bordering practices of the EU. The so-called private sphere that liberal feminists have long made a space of the political is, here, not a matter of taking a struggle ‘public’. To announce oneself in public is to risk a security gaze that is linked to deportability. Instead, in the extract above, it is the everyday that becomes a declarative act of claiming belonging in Europe. For example, the cited passage below describes a quotidian experience of intimacy—a couple food shopping and enjoying each other’s company. Superficially, this interaction is interpreted as the everyday habits and lives of lovers. However, when analysed through a lens of acts of citizenship, the act of food shopping becomes a way in which to disrupt the regulation of intimate life by the state: Mokhtar immediately proposed to accompany me to the supermarket, not for sentimental reasons, or not only. He loved to help. Mokhtar would spontaneously give a hand, pull the broom out of my mother’s hands after the meal, wash the dishes, while Dara was the dominant male who waited to be served with one exception, coffee, which he had made his specialty, his deed. He went to prepare it in the kitchen and always held out a cup to my mother, speaking in his Iranian accent that had the reverent tone with which one would serve the Queen of England. (Huret 2017, 131)

Another way in which acts of citizenship are done within the domestic and intimate spheres is through sex. According to Daigle (2019), sex can subvert bordering practices of international governance. Affective bonds and embodied pleasures between individuals can challenge the unstated intimate borders between citizens/non-citizens:

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- Madam… Every time, it would make us laugh. And then, I said to myself: “Béatrice it’s now or never, don’t be an idiot, don’t you ever want anyone. You are completely in love with this bloke. It is the only valid reason to sleep with somebody.” And he looked so unhappy … I just came to my senses, or I lost my mind, and mimed the scenario: he climbed up, he waited for Dara to fall asleep, and we met up in the basement, taking great care not to make a noise in order not to wake my son in the room adjoining his. I suddenly saw stars in Mokhtar’s eyes and a huge smile. - True? I can? - Yes! Defeated. (Huret 2017, 137)

These intimate acts between Béatrice and Mokhtar not only contest and resist the bordering practices of the EU, but also historical constructions of domesticity facilitated by state authorities (see Turner 2020). This resistance is done by making themselves (although implicitly) politicized subjects through the enactment of citizenship (e.g. engaging in romantic quotidian performances without the ‘official’ authorization to do so). However, the biopolitical governance of love and intimacy is still very much present, even when political subjectivities are performed as counterhegemonic practices to the EU migration regime. These ‘technologies of love’ (Scheel 2017, 402) are discussed in the next section.

Border Crossing(s) and Intimate Transgressions: Criminalizing the Spatial Practices of Love A final theme discerned from Calais mon Amour is the EU migration regime’s regulation of intimate life. Love becomes the target of indirect governmental control to securitize the borders of the nation-state from perceived external threat and danger (see D’Aoust 2014). This is made apparent when, on securing a boat to facilitate the crossing of the English Channel for Mokhtar and other refugees, Béatrice reflects on the legality of assisting in their border crossing:

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I suspected that what I had done was not very legal, even though it was perfectly moral, the only thing that mattered to me. I contacted him indirectly because I had deleted his mobile number and had removed him from my Facebook contacts…. (Huret 2017, 263)

Béatrice captures an interplay between morality and illegality. She occupied a liminal space between habitually acting out of love and being reflexively aware of the political nature of her actions. This can be seen in the way she deleted Mokhtar’s contact from her phone and contact details and acquaintances from social media. More importantly, the extract also evidences how governments can informally regulate the spatialized practices (Lefebvre 1974) of love through the internalization of doubt in the doers actions. Put another way, emotions like love navigate questions of how to be a responsible subject of the European border regime. Moreover, there was also an explicit process of criminalization. Béatrice’s act(s) of love were escalated into a security threat: They [border agents] seemed suspicious, although they had proof by my messages that I had no connection with them. They still did not believe me. Three hours of interrogation is long … I asked if I could have a cigarette and a coffee. The nice guy gave me a cigarette, but apparently I did not deserve the coffee. You must have fun, considering the content of our exchanges … It is more intimate than terrorist, isn’t it? The brute then pricked me to the quick: “Ah, he’ll be having a good time with the little English girls!” I had only one thought: “England is fucked for this weekend. Mokhtar must have died of uneasiness, waiting for me, and it will take me eight days more. All this time before you see him again, be positive, in a week at this time you will be on the ferry!” He continued: - You will go to court for questioning at your first appearance before the examining magistrate on Saturday morning. (Huret 2017, 230)

While the criminalization of Béatrice’s actions was not necessarily about love per se, notions of love and intimacy fed into these processes of securitizing borders. Béatrice’s act(s) of love invited accusations of criminalization, with the fear and risk of her involvement with terrorism being cited as evidence to restrict some of her own mobility rights:

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I could not even go to the mall to have a drink in a bar on Saturday night as before with my friends, not even in their homes. If they felt a bit low, I was obliged to bring them twenty kilometres to my village. I dare not mention taking the ferry in Dunkirk, I did not want to behave badly … Because the judge could have decided that it was not from England at all! (Huret 2017, 240)

Such regulatory forms of control have been described by Michel Foucault (1980, 195) as the ‘strategic elaboration’ of the security dispositif . Because informal act(s) of love are entangled with state regulatory control of borders, long-standing French citizens like Béatrice are also susceptible to bare life (Agamben 1998). This is because the state informally regulates what act(s) of love are permissible for citizens and what can be sanctioned under the rhetorical guise of securitizing borders.

Conclusion This chapter offered a starting point for further inquiry. It demonstrated how the analysis of Calais mon Amour through a critical literary geographical lens can portray the materiality of the European migration regime in relation to the informal policing of intimate life. The novel is a useful literary text to explore the material realm of the intimate— romance, love and sex—between Béatrice and Mokhtar. Huret (2017) tells a personal story of resistance towards the bordering practices of Europe. Love and intimacy become a routine social and emotional practice that contests what citizens and refugees can and cannot do, within and across the boundaries of nation-states. Here is where Lefebvre’s (1974) notion of spatial practice was most helpful. The spatial practices of Béatrice and Mokhtar can be seen in the affective relations that impressed her to garner help from the wider Calais community to support the Jungle and its residents. Equally their affective relations, when forged through domesticity, were performative of a disruption to the border regime’s regulation of intimate life. These spatial practices of resistance only emerge as such due to their location within the border regime. Calais mon Amour also denoted how borders and bordering practices become, in the words of Scheel (2017, 402), ‘technologies of love’ where intimacy is regulated through the EU migration regime itself. This is demonstrated when Béatrice assisted the border crossing of Mokhtar and other refugees. Béatrice’s spatialized

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practices were criminalized. While official French-EU bordering practices do not tell an individual who they can/cannot love, the governmentality of securing border regulates the intimate sphere through rights of residence and mobility.

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CHAPTER 5

Spatializing the European Question in the Calais Jungle

Abstract This concluding chapter deploys Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad as a frame for analysing the European Question in the Calais Jungle. This chapter draws upon this triad to reinterpret the themes discussed in this book. First, it sees discourses of tropicality as the production of territory through representations of space. Second, it draws attention to processes of assemblage that gave rise to political subjectivity through spaces of representation. Third, love and intimacy become spatial practices that have transformative effects through enactments of citizenship. In sum, this chapter demonstrates the usefulness of Lefebvre’s spatial triad for productively bringing together the book’s themes, refining our understanding of the European Question in the Calais Jungle. Keywords Henri Lefebvre · Spatial triad · Calais Jungle · European question

Introduction While scholars have drawn upon Herni Lefebvre’s writings on the production of space to explore its engagement with themes of culture, urbanism,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Z. Nahaboo and N. Kerrigan, Migrants, Borders and the European Question, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75922-3_5

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representation and practice (see Soja 1989, 1996; Shields 1999; Merrifield 1993, 2000; Simonsen 2001, 2005), there is apparently limited literature that specifically uses the spatial triad as an analytical tool (see Sin 2003; Watkins 2005; Learmouth and Hardin 2006). This chapter brings together the themes discussed throughout this book by mobilizing Lefebvre’s (1974) triad of space. This spatial lens is adapted to develop an understanding of how the European/non-European distinction is forged and deconstructed in the context of the Calais Jungle. We demonstrate how the arguments of the previous chapters map onto each element of the triad: representations of space, spaces of representation and spatial practices. This novel approach to the Jungle makes explicit the ‘trialectical’ (Soja 1996, 70) ways domination and resistance were practiced by state authorities, refugees and material objects. As a result, different facets of how the Jungle addresses the European Question are collated.

Applying the Spatial Triad to the Calais Jungle Lefebvre understands space through a triad. First in the triad are spatial practices (also termed perceived space). These encompass routine activities that testify to an individual’s use, production and reproduction of space (Lefebvre 1974, 52). Although Lefebvre did not detail forms of capital required to negotiate space, variation in social, economic, cultural, technological, mobility, racial, sexual and citizenship capital can shape ones experience of stillness within, and movement across, space. Second in the triad are representations of space (also termed conceived space). Lefebvre (1974) argues that experts—for instance state authorities, architects, planners and developers—have historically created official representations of space by producing abstractions and metonyms. Third in the triad are spaces of representation (also termed lived space). These spaces are sometimes produced by those who oppose the dominant social group (Lefebvre 1974, 38). The lived experience of space, and reflexive judgements about space, can initiate the limits and possibilities for transforming social space beyond its dominant assignment. Lefebvre (1974, 23) contends that space can never be dominated by a singular agency; ‘the rationality of the state, its techniques, plans and programmes provoke opposition…these seething forces are still capable of rattling the lid of the cauldron of the state and its space, for differences can never be totally quieted’. Through spaces of representation people develop creative

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ways to contest dominant or unfavourable conditions within that space. Sometimes contestation is unintentional. The three elements of the triad cannot be held in isolation from one another. Edward Soja’s (1996, 68) notion of a ‘trialectics of spatiality’ emphasizes Lefebvre’s point that spaces of representation contain perceived and conceived space. For instance, the performance of everyday life (perceived space) can provoke new imaginaries of how space should be organized, though this may remain a utopian dream (conceived space). It is in these moments of reflection, or action, that one opens the semiotic possibilities for reinterpreting space as laden with ‘relations of dominance, subordination, and resistance’ (Soja 1996, 68). Awareness of being enmeshed in certain power relations, or activity upon these hierarchies, can help reimagine who can use space and how space can be used (lived space) (Soja 1996, 68). In The Production of Space, Lefebvre positions himself squarely against Jacques Derrida. He charges the latter with ‘the basic sophistry whereby the philosophico-epistemological notion of space is fetishized and the mental realm comes to envelop the social and physical ones’ (Lefebvre cited in Pierce and Martin 2015, 1283). This is telling of how Lefebvre assumes the stability of his epistemological assumptions, namely that space can be understood as a totality that has autonomy from language. Nevertheless, what remains consistent across all aspects of Lefebvre’s triad is the primacy of ‘ways of knowing’ (Pierce and Martin 2015, 1285). Yet instead of interrogating what forms of knowledge produce spatial multiplicities, the Production finds space to be a ‘unitary, fused object produced through the simultaneity of these triadic interactions’ (Pierce and Martin 2015, 1286). Upon closer inspection, Lefebvre’s argument was not simply affirming a classical realism that fuses the ideational and material (however much he might have intended this). The very idea of a unitary notion of space is itself a representation of space, a way of knowing, that needs a declarative speech act (along with the various possibilities facilitated by citation and reception). Here, we are not reopening a dismissive approach to the staunchly materialist Lefebvre. The deconstructive gesture opens Lefebvre’s triad to its lack of foundations as a productive modality of thinking through space. This might initially seem cryptic. However, as the triad of space gathers political meaning over the course of this chapter, it helps retroactively heighten the significance of the indeterminant European Question. It also offers one manner of redressing Joseph Pierce and Deborah Martin’s (2015, 1286) concern:

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‘the challenge in applying Production to research is…that it offers so little assistance in constructing an epistemology of (social) space to match its ontological complexity’. In Chapter 1 the European Question was shown to lack a definite meaning. To acquire meaning, the European Question was spatialized through a project (the EU) and idea (Europe as a heading and imaginative space for incorporating-denying certain bodies or histories). Given its diversity, the issue then became: how is the European Question articulated in different locales? In response, the borderland was advanced as a perspective from which, and upon which, social relations are created. At the same time, the borderland suggests a singular and unitary place, albeit in networked relations with other places to arrive at its ‘identity’. Chapter 1 urged for a multiperspectival border studies approach to make sense of a borderland: the Jungle. A multiperspectival border studies approach was not taken as an invitation to clamber to an Archimedean point, as if to see the Jungle in all its facets. Equally, we have not suggested that the Jungle exists as a ‘unitary’ entity. Situating the Jungle in relation to the European Question emphasizes its spatial dislocation. In Chapter 1, the selective discussion on Europe as institutional form and idea in relation to bordering practices marked the Jungle as presenceabsence. That is to say, its trace (among numerous other unmentioned camps in ‘Europe’) can be found in the social and legal measures taken to align bordering practices with the government of unruly migrants. Against the backdrop of Chapter 1, the subsequent chapters focused on how the Jungle explicitly operated as an articulation of, and fragment to, the European Question. Lefebvre’s triad of space helps frame the Jungle in so far as a unifying image is unravelled. Here, the triad of space helps assume a vantage point for observing the Jungle through ‘politics on the line’ (Walker 2009). At stake in this broader register of IR is a politics that fails to succumb to binaries of ‘depoliticization’ and ‘politicization’, which are resolved through archetypes of ‘Schmittean exceptionalism’ or ‘self-righteous universalisms’, respectively (Walker 2009, 259). Instead, Rob Walker (2009) calls for attentiveness to how politics is done without reaching either pole. In our context, the triad of space shows the absence of a totalizing and programmatic depoliticizing/politicizing agenda within the Jungle. Rather, it is at these boundaries that one becomes attentive to both horrific violence and potentially liberating responses to the European Question.

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The spatialization of the European Question in the Calais Jungle occurred through (a) representations of the Jungle as space of tropicality (representations of space); (b) assemblages as political acts, which contested spatial ordering (spaces of representation); and, (c) acts of love in everyday life that contested the boundaries around what is and is not considered European (spatial practices).This typology is not intended to pigeonhole the nuanced arguments levelled in each chapter. For example, Chapter 2 implied the close relation between representations of space and spatial practices; tropicality was discursive. Equally, there were moments in Chapter 4 that illustrate what might be termed ‘counterspaces’ (an integral part of spaces of representation) (Soja 1996, 68); Béatrice Huret reflected upon and sought to address the injustice of Europe’s boundaries and regulation of mobility rights. However, placing the previous chapters within the aforementioned frames is a conceptual decision that emphasizes where depoliticizing and politicizing space become most pronounced. Therefore, it is important to note that each aspect of the triad is not a distinct way of producing space. Rather they are bound together and often occur simultaneously. Thus, while we demarcate—for thematic effect—each element has a distinctive theme. An analysis of the book’s central ideas from any of these standpoints cannot reveal Calais Jungle as a spatial totality. Just as the representation of the Jungle is driven by the iconography of an untameable tropicality, it is the people who live and work in the Jungle that sustained and transformed it into a contested political locale. The Jungle arose as a productive assemblage shaped by individual actions, (self-)regulation, and the affordances of objects, casting refugees in constant flux between insurgent rights bearers and non-citizen.

Representations of Space Lefebvre (1974, 38) explains representations of space as having three central features. First, as the visioning activity of ‘scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers…all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived’. Second, as a unitary organizing principle that arranges the built environments (Lefebvre 1974, 41). Third, as a code that is used in the practice of creating and sustaining the dominant representations of space, such as the development and redevelopment of land use (Lefebvre 1974, 45). In Chapter 2, discourses of tropicality envisioned the Jungle through

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the first element of the triad. The visioning of the Jungle as a ‘jungled’ space enabled state authorities to construct the refugee camp as something that was environmentally harmful, dangerous and inhospitable. This imaginative geography also constructed a place that was untameable, where residents were depicted as savage animals. Chapter 2 made clear that this visioning of the Jungle bore traces of imperialist colonial descriptions of jungles, which impeded European settlement. Moreover, Chapter 2, departing from Agamben (1998), demonstrated how a distinctive racializing bodies-environment discourse excluded irregular refugees from what counts as civil Europe. Finally, Chapter 2 presented the idea of the ‘Jungle’ as shorthand for denoting non-European areas that affronted a supposedly antecedent European landscape, which French citizens had a cultural right to enjoy. Such representations of space were not clear-cut systems of domination and control. Migrants were able to construct the camp as a site of ‘resistance’, through (and against) the securitization experienced. Chapter 3 demonstrated how the Jungle emerged as a political space, a space where refugees were not just held in spaces of tropicalized exception. The Jungle became a political space through assemblages that marked a struggle over its creation and regulation of mobility capital. This leads to the heart of what Lefebvre (1974) terms spaces of representation.

Spaces of Representation This aspect of the spatial triad refers to the experience of living—it involves both conceived and perceived forms of space. Spaces of representation evoke positive or negative judgements, as a result of spatial ordering or representation. It refers to an in-the-moment awareness of an individual’s involvement in the production of social space. In other words, spaces of representation see social space as both a product—something that is produced by the individuals within that space—and a resource—a way for individuals to mobilize existing representations to produce new modalities of space (Smith 1984). Chapter 3 decentred the self from spaces of representation. Resistance towards the authorized bordering practices of Europe and what counts as European emerged through assemblages. Drawing on Sharon Krause’s (2015) diffuse ontology of political subjectivity, the locale of where unauthorized citizenship rights were enacted inhered in relations between refugees, aid-workers and the material Jungle itself. These assemblages

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challenged previous representations of the Jungle as a site of tropicality. This arose against the backdrop of state-sanctioned accommodation in the Jungle, which enabled a humanitarian securitization to arise. However, drawing on Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ (cited in Butler 2012, 143), Chapter 3 maintained that through an assemblage of refugee actions and the affordances of objects, a ‘right to the Jungle’ was enacted. First, the work of assemblages upon political subjectivity was shown to challenge the bordering practices of EU migration management by reinventing the terms of mobility capital. Second, assemblages highlighted how political subjectivity was tenuously recast from its Eurocentric lineage.

Spatial Practices Spatial practices refer to the ‘medium and outcome of human activity, behaviour, and experience’ (Soja 1996, 66). In Chapter 4, intimacy became a spatialized practice of individuals, which challenged dominant articulations of the European Question in Calais. This was examined through Calais mon Amour. The novel recalls how the love experienced between Béatrice and Mokhtar, which was enacted through typical activity—trips to the supermarket, going to dinner and the sharing of household tasks—was able to fleetingly elide the bordering practices of the British-French-EU migration regime. While the migration regime does not formally regulate who can experience love, it does so informally. The everyday performances of love by Béatrice and Moktar might appear merely ‘private’. Yet through engaging in tasks like shopping and dining, Béatrice and Moktar (unintentionally) enacted rights claims that challenged the biopolitical governance of what unauthorized refugees can and cannot do in Europe. However, while love and intimacy can contest borders it does not mean an individual’s spatial practices are free from regulation. In fact, spatial practices are highly contingent upon the representations of space by state authorities, planners, architects, developers and others who produce the resources one can draw upon. Chapter 4 noted this at work in Béatrice’s presentation of her relationship. While the EU border regime was contested through acts of love and intimacy, it was still able to regulate the behaviours and bodies of the novel’s protagonists. When Béatrice helped Mokhtar cross the Channel out of love, its emergence as an act was dependent upon both the motivation and effect of the action being deemed a threat to the border regime.

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Endnote The aim of this book was to explore how the Calais Jungle navigated the European Question through processes of domination and resistance. Each of the previous chapters can be read as an essay in its own right. However, the spatial triad summarizes how the Jungle occupied the borders of politicization/depoliticization (while also supplementing and disrupting the terms through which politicization is recognized). Chapter 2 canvassed the social, political and historical constructions of jungles via discourses of tropicality. It noted how their traces worked to assert control, domination and regulation of the Jungle as a nonEuropean space. Chapter 3 examined how assemblages developed the lived space of the Jungle and fostered mobility capital that remained apart from dominant European formulations. In addition, political subjectivity was enacted in ways that problematized Eurocentric notions of citizenship. Chapter 4 analyzed Béatrice Huret’s novel (2017) Calais mon Amour to unpack how the habitus of intimate life can, informally, undo the regulation of borders. In contrast, intimate life was also indirectly policed through the European border regime. Finally, this chapter attempted to reinterpret the Jungle through Henri Lefebvre’s (1974) triad of space, distilling the construction and contestations of a European borderland. Europe’s so-called legitimacy crisis is often discussed as a matter of economic woes, democratic deficits, non-existent sovereignty over members states or the erosion of member states’ sovereignty (Schweiger 2016). These concerns have been met by calls for new federalist structures and cosmopolitan belonging (Habermas 2012). As indicative frames for discussing the European project and the idea of Europe, their themes largely exhaust the meaning of Europe today. Yet another path can be taken. The European Question can be understood at, and from, a border. The Jungle never reached a dialectical conclusion. Its meaning was never resolved, and the conditions of its emergence remain as live as ever. This is not simply due to a largely unreconstructed French-UK border and EU border regime, which continues to provide ripe conditions for the development of new migrant squats. Rather, the Jungle was a conduit for expressing and navigating the European Question. That question demanded a perspectival approach. The Jungle manifested the ongoing attempt to settle Europe as a space of abject refugees or contested these terms of belonging, via the enactment of disruptive rights claims.

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References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Chris. 2012. Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life, and the Right to the City. Abingdon: Routledge. Habermas, Jürgen. 2012. The Crisis of the European Union: A Response. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huret, Béatrice. 2017. Calais mon Amour. Paris: Kero. Krause, Sharon R. 2015. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Learmonth, Mark, and Nancy Hardin. 2006. “Evidence-Based Management: The Very Idea.” Public Administration 84 (2): 245–266. Lefebvre, Herni. 1974. The Production of Space. London: Blackwell. Merrifield, Andrew. 1993. “Place and Space: A Lefebvrian Reconciliation.” Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers 18 (4): 516–531. Merrifield, Andrew. 2000. “Henri Lefebvre: A Socialist in Space.” In Thinking Space, edited by M. Crang, and N. Thift, 167–182. New York: Routledge. Pierce, Joseph, and Deborah G. Martin. 2015. “Placing Lefebvre.” Antipode, 47 (5): 1279–1299. Shields, Rob. 1999. Lefebvre, Love, and Struggle. New York: Routledge. Simonsen, Kirsten. 2001. “Space, Culture and Economy—A Question of Practice.” Geografiska Annaler, 83 (1): 41–52. Simonsen, Kristen. 2005. “Bodies, Sensations, Space and Time: The Contributions from Henri Lefebvre.” Geografiska Annaler, 87 (1): 1–14. Sin, Chih. 2003. “The Politics of Ethnic Integration in Singapore: Malay ‘Regrouping’ as an Ideological Construct.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27 (3): 527–544. Smith, Neil. 1984. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. London: University of Georgia Press. Soja, Edward. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and Imagined Places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Schweiger, Christian. 2016. Exploring the EU’s Legitimacy Crisis: The Dark Heart of Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Walker, Rob B. J. 2009. After the World, Before the Globe. New York: Routledge. Watkins, Ceri. 2005. “Representations of Space, Spatial Practices and Spaces of Representation: An Application of Lefebvre’s Spatial Triad.” Culture and Organization, 11 (3): 209–220.

Index

A Active force, 65 Agamben, Giorgio, 20, 21–23, 80, 90 Agape love, 72–73, 75 assemblages, 12, 51–52, 89, 90–92 of humans, 42, 54 asylum, 6, 21 B Béatrice and Mokhtar, 12, 64, 67, 75, 76–78, 80–81, 91 biopolitical governance, 78, 91 biopolitics, 24, 68 bodies fusing, 20 racialized, 26–28, 34 borderlands, 4, 9–11, 13, 23, 32, 42, 50, 88 border regime, 8, 12, 43, 50, 53, 64, 80, 91, 92 borders, 4, 7–8, 11, 13, 64–65, 69, 71, 72–73, 78, 79–80, 91–93 contest, 91 intimate, 77

mobile geopolitical, 4 securitized, 12 border studies, 10 contemporary, 52 boundaries, 54, 56, 67, 80, 88 C Calais, 1–3, 12, 20–21, 28, 30, 42, 50, 53–54, 91 Calais Jungle, 2, 12–13, 28, 89, 92 Calais mon Amour, 12, 64, 66–68, 70, 75, 78–81, 91–92 camps, 2, 10, 22, 29–30, 66, 74, 88, 90 citizen-refugee, 44 citizens, 26, 27, 43, 44, 47–48, 54, 55, 64, 69, 76, 80 citizenship, 55–56, 68, 69, 76–77, 92 acts of, 12, 44, 45, 69–70, 75, 77–78 enactments of, 13, 78 status, 21, 56–57 contestations, 12, 46–47, 67, 87, 92 contesting, 4, 54–56

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 Z. Nahaboo and N. Kerrigan, Migrants, Borders and the European Question, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75922-3

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control, 52, 71, 75, 78, 90, 92 counterspaces, 89 criminalization, 79 Critical literary geographies, 65–66, 80 D De Certeau, Michael, 65–66 Derrida, Jacques, 8, 87 domopolitics, 68 E enactments, 42, 43, 46–47, 49, 52, 78 enactments of rights, 42, 56 Europe, 3, 11–13, 26, 31, 34, 42, 50, 54, 56–57, 80, 88, 91–93 borders of, 8, 71 practices of, 67, 80, 90 Europe/non-Europe, 10 Europe’s borders, 7, 13 European border regime, 79, 91 identity, 8, 32 imaginary, 13, 33 imperial expansion, 12 imperialism, 20, 26 non-European binaries, 9 non-European dichotomy, 25 Question, 3, 8, 9, 11, 86, 88, 92–93 everyday life, 64, 76, 87, 89 exception, 5, 9, 12, 20–21, 22, 28, 33, 34, 49, 50 F Foucault, Michel, 80 G governmentality, 31, 64, 68, 81

H habitus, 42, 44, 68, 77, 92 Harvey, David, 45 homo sacer, 22

I images of jungles, 12 intimacy, 12, 64, 67, 77, 78–81, 91 intimate life, 12, 67, 69, 77, 80, 92 life worlds, 64, 66–67, 69, 77 irregular migrant, 9, 29, 32, 43, 50, 65, 71, 76 Isin, Engin, 9

J Jungle, 2–4, 9–13, 19–24, 25, 27, 41–42, 44–45, 56–57, 66–67, 80, 86, 88

L Lefebvre, Henri, 11, 45, 46, 65–66, 69, 79–80, 85–87, 89–91, 92 Lefebvre’s triad, 11, 87 literary texts, 80 lived space, 11, 28, 49, 86–87, 92 love, 67–72, 74–81, 91 acts of, 9, 89 feelings of, 72, 74 spatial practices of, 78 technologies of, 71, 78, 80

M Migrant Crisis, 5, 21 migration, 21, 30, 54 regime, 78, 91 mobility, 9–11, 20, 31, 42, 49, 51, 52, 56, 81 mobilizations, 46

INDEX

N nature, 20, 23, 25, 31, 68

P political subjectivity, 4, 12, 42–44, 47–48, 51, 55, 56–57, 90–92 political subjects, 42, 70

R Rancière, Jacques, 43, 44 refugees, 2–8, 21–22, 31, 44–45, 47–52, 73–75, 78–80, 89–90 assemblage of, 12, 51 camps, 10, 21, 31, 47, 64, 90 crisis, 6 process, 7, 21 regulation, 7, 31, 42, 69, 75, 89, 90–92 representations, 23, 31, 45, 85–89 spaces of, 12, 42, 45, 46–47, 89, 90 rights, 4–5, 7, 9–11, 13, 44–46, 52, 54, 55–56, 71, 80–81 right to the city, 45, 91 romance, 67–69, 75, 80 Rumford, Chris, 11

S security, 29, 67, 77 socio-spatial practices, 71 Soja, Edward, 11, 20, 42, 45, 66, 86–89, 91

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space, 10–12, 19–21, 22–23, 26–28, 29–30, 32–33, 45, 47–48, 49–50, 63, 69–70, 76–77, 79, 85–93 conceived, 86–87 contemporary Europe’s, 23 inhospitable, 12 jungled, 90 liveable, 45 perceived, 86–87 political, 89 politicizing, 89 postcolonial, 12, 20 production of, 65, 85, 90 social, 47, 65, 86, 89 socio-political, 12 spatial, 10–12, 69 spatiality, 32, 57, 63–65, 68 spatial practices, 13, 54, 65, 69, 78–80, 86–89, 91 spatial triad, 86–88, 90 state borders, 25, 43, 54 state racism, 24, 67 T technologies of power, 64, 67–68 territory, 4, 12, 21, 32, 93 Thirdspace, 46 triad, 12, 45, 46, 85–87, 89 of space, 86, 88–89, 92 tropicality, 9, 19–20, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 32, 33–34, 89, 91 discourse of, 11–12, 20, 27, 29, 42, 89, 92 traces of, 12 tropics, 20, 23, 25–27, 32, 34