Bordering through domicide: spatializing citizenship in Calais

Travis Van Isacker

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This paper examines domicidal practices against illegalized border crossers in Calais, France as a technology of citizenship and migration governance. It addresses recent calls to include actions and interventions which restrict citizenship in the context of illegalized migration within critical citizenship studies literature. Studying the state violence upholding and spatializing normative citizenship allows for a deeper understanding of citizenship’s implication in the European border regime, and raises questions on the concept’s continued application to theorizations of migrants’ political movements and spatial manifestations. The paper proposes anti-citizen politics as an alternative before arguing that the presence of this politics within the city’s squats and jungles, more than the physical occupations as such, is what the French state seeks to eradicate through acts of domicide. Working from empirical examples, the article describes a ‘carrot-and-stick’ domicide currently at work in Calais where the eviction and destruction of autonomous forms of migrant inhabitance is combined with a simultaneous offer of state managed accommodation. These tactics operate together to drive migrants out of the city of Calais, away from the UK border, and ultimately into a determination of their detain/deport-ability via citizenship’s scrutiny.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)608-626
Number of pages19
JournalCitizenship Studies
Volume23
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 25 Jun 2019

Bibliographical note

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Citizenship Studies on 25/6/2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13621025.2019.1634422

Keywords

  • Calais
  • France
  • anti-citizenship
  • domicide
  • spatial inhabitance/segregation
  • technologies of citizenship

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