7 research outputs found
Resisting bare life : civil solidarity and the hunt for illegalized migrants
While European governments have pursued illegalized migrants for decades, the techniques through which they do so have taken a more radical turn since 2015. Focusing on the particular case of Belgium, this paper documents how its Federal government has increasingly tried to âpoliceâ migrants into the European refugee regime, while migrants and citizens have continued to resist these efforts through a series of âpoliticalâ actions. Drawing on ethnographic work with the Brusselsâbased Citizen Platform for the Support of Refugees, I pursue two aims: first, I demonstrate how the Belgian state has consciously produced a humanitarian crisis as part of a broader âpolitics of exhaustionâ; and second, I explore the specific forms and types of humanitarian action that emerge from citizensâ response to these policies. I do so by describing three moments in which these opposing logics of policing and politicization conjure
The Politics of Exhaustion and the Externalization of British Border Control. An Articulation of a Strategy Designed to Deter, Control and Exclude
In response to contemporary forms of human mobility, there has been a continued hardening of borders seeking to deter, control and exclude certain groups of people from entering nation states in Europe, North America and Australasia. Within this context, a disconcerting evolution of new and increasingly sophisticated forms of border control measures have emerged, which often play out within bilateral arrangements of âexternalisedâ or âoffshoreâ border controls. Drawing on extensive firstâhand field research among displaced people in Calais, Paris and Brussels in 2016â2019, this paper argues that the externalization of the British border to France is contingent upon a harmful strategy, which can be understood as the âpolitics of exhaustion.â This is a raft of (micro) practices and methods strategically aimed to deter, control and exclude certain groups of people on the move who have been profiled as âundesirable,â with a detrimental (un)intended impact on human lives
Hobbes, war, movement
While informed by Foucault's understanding of power in terms of war and circulation, this article challenges Foucault's static reading of Hobbes. Contextualising Hobbes's political thought within the scientific ideas that he was inspired by, this article reveals that there is more to Hobbes than the static, depoliticising image of the contract. Hobbes's political thought is premised upon an ontology of movement; that is, his account of political order pivots on a double movement in which war constitutes the very possibility of social and political relations as well as of their continued reproduction via circulation. It is this conceptualisation of order that makes Hobbes's liberal political thought genealogically significant. And it is the model of a play of (re)productive movementsâin certain respects close to Foucault's own conception of powerâthat can be used productively for thinking about governance and resistance today
Migrantsâ displacements at the internal frontiers of Europe
Martina Tazzioli engages with displacement as a political technology for governing migrants at the internal frontiers of Europe. The chapter deals with measures of displacement that have been implemented by state authorities, for regaining control over unruly migrants by keeping them on the move. It starts by taking into account critical analyses on displacement that have politicised the notion, beyond mere spatial dislocation. Then, it draws attention to internal displacements at the FrenchâItalian border and in Calais, demonstrating that displacement measures generate migrantsâ hypermobility. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the consequences that stem from thinking displacement through mobility: it highlights the effects of containment produced by migrantsâ forced hypermobility and questions the nexus between freedom and mobility which sustains liberal political thought