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 “police” migrants into the European refugee regime, while migrants and citizens have continued to resist these efforts through a series of “political” actions. Drawing on ethnographic work with the Brussels‐based 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 “politics of exhaustion”; and second, I explore the specific forms and types of humanitarian action that emerge from citizens’ 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 “externalised” or “offshore” border controls. Drawing on extensive first‐hand field research among displaced people in Calais, Paris and Brussels in 2016–2019, this paper argues that the externalization of the British border to France is contingent upon a harmful strategy, which can be understood as the “politics of exhaustion.” 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 “undesirable,” 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 movements—in certain respects close to Foucault's own conception of power—that can be used productively for thinking about governance and resistance today

Migrants’ 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 French–Italian border and in Calais, demonstrating that displacement measures generate migrants’ hypermobility. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the consequences that stem from thinking displacement through mobility: it highlights the effects of containment produced by migrants’ forced hypermobility and questions the nexus between freedom and mobility which sustains liberal political thought