The politics of exhaustion and the imaginary of the UK border

Guest post by Dr Marta Welander. Marta is a critical border and migration scholar and activist. This is the fourth post in the Border Criminologies themed series on 'UK Borderscapes’, organised by Dr Karen Latricia Hough and Dr Kahina Le Louvier.

While internal dimensions of the UK’s immigration control and treatment of asylum seekers receive ample attention and are subjected to widespread criticism, the external dimensions found in the extraterritorial space in northern France are more seldom discussed. Nevertheless, these constitute an equally harmful, and oftentimes violent, response to human mobility, inherently incompatible with the most basic human rights standards, whilst also failing to adequately respond to the situation at hand. The external, or ‘off-shored’ aspects of UK immigration policy therefore merit the same levels of scrutiny and critique as the notorious domestic ‘hostile environment’ itself.

During the so-called Calais ‘Jungle’ camp and in its aftermath until the time of writing, it is evident that insidious, temporal, and corporeal technologies of bordering are unfolding at the UK border – understood here as a ‘politics of exhaustion.’ It arguably constitutes a strategic approach seeking to curb autonomous migratory movements, influence decisions, and manage intent through the physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion of people on the move. As one person on the move explained:

‘They are trying to make us give up our goal. […] They [would do] everything they can to make us give up. For example, beating people, taking their clothes off […] or taking shoes from people to make them walk for more than two hours without shoes in the winter.’ (Sudanese man, Calais)

An unrelenting ‘politics of exhaustion’

The ‘politics of exhaustion’ could be understood as consisting of seven distinct yet interlinked aspects. Firstly, people on the move in the borderzone are typically subjected to various forms of recurring direct violence, including but not limited to beatings, tear gas exposure, and pepper spraying on a regular basis. Individuals sustain broken limbs, and display scarred faces and hands, broken teeth, smashed glasses, and eyes tearing up from tear gas or pepper spray. Direct physical violence and police brutality in the Calais area have been well-documented by groups including Human Rights Watch, Refugee Rights Europe (2016, 2017, 2018), and Human Rights Observers.

Humiliation, dehumanisation and ‘active neglect’  

Another aspect of the politics of exhaustion is found in practices leading to the humiliation, dehumanisation and racialisation of people on the move, who report experiencing verbal abuse, including racial slurs, shouting, heckling, and otherwise abusive or degrading language, delivered both by state officials and members of the local population. Dehumanisation and humiliation are also experienced through acts such as shoe confiscation, shoving, and through manifestations of power and control by demanding obedience with seemingly nonsensical routines during evictions.

Another inherent component of the politics of exhaustion is found in the denial of humanitarian aid and adequate living conditions. In addition to denying access to state care, third sector alternatives are also hampered. This contributes directly to the production of additional, and avoidable, vulnerabilities among the displaced people in the area - deliberately abject conditions which resonate with the notion of ‘active neglect,’ elaborated by Loughnan and the notion of state inaction as a method to control by inflicting suffering, as elaborated by Davies et al.

Dispossession, evictions and shrinking of space

A further component of the politics of exhaustion is found in acts of dispossession, when the authorities regularly destroy and evict living spaces, which also entails the confiscation and/or slashing of tents and sleeping bags as well as blankets, along with other basic necessities such as drinking water, mobile phones, and paperwork, or anything else that may have been left behind in the shelters.

In addition to carrying out evictions and demolitions of living spaces as a means to uproot people from the Calais area, state authorities also continuously seek to shrink people’s access to space in the first place. Fences, razor wire, and spikes have been installed across Calais, specifically targeting people’s existing communal spaces, food distribution points and sleeping spots, signalling that these spaces are no longer inhabitable.

Forced (im)mobility and undercurrents of threat

The politics of exhaustion at the UK-France border moreover comprises the technologies of immobility as well as forced mobility.  The former typically takes the shape of capture during attempted border crossings, to prevent individuals’ access to UK territory or through arrests and detention; often leading to short periods spent in detention in the short-term holding facility in Coquelles or in the police station. In regard to forced mobility, some individuals would be caught by police and released again in remote locations, left to make their way back to the area by walking for hours. This resonates with the work of Tazzioli, who argues that migrants across Europe are facing containment through forced mobility; their geographies are ‘diverted and decelerated’ and thus they are controlled and excluded.

There is moreover an element of constant uncertainty, confusing and contradictory police routines, and undercurrents of threat and violence. Migrants’ daily lives are therefore permeated by the harms of anxious waiting and uncertainty, even in the absence of physical violence. Another prevalent underlying threat is the omni-presence of potential death. Individuals witness or hear of others drowning in the port, dying in road accidents, suffocating or being crushed to death by the cargo load whilst hiding in a UK-bound lorry.

The ‘politics of exhaustion’ and the imaginary of the UK border 

More than six years on from the demolition of the Calais ‘Jungle’ camp, the insidious and deeply harmful politics of exhaustion is as pervasive as ever in the UK borderzone. As demonstrated, the politics of exhaustion comprises an array of separate yet intertwined tactics and harmful practices. Taken together as a whole, the politics of exhaustion could be understood as a strategy devised to render migrants’ life governable and pliant, and bodies docile, with the premeditated intention of negating autonomy, wellbeing, and self-efficacy. Understood in this way, the politics of exhaustion seeks to curb autonomous migratory movements, by influencing decisions and exercising what Weber and Pickering referred to as ‘intent management’ and what Fassin et al coined as ‘auto-expulsion’ – through the physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion of its subjects.

Arguably, the externalisation of the UK border to French soil, and the accompanying politics of exhaustion underpinned by extortionate amounts of UK funding, allow the UK Government to uphold an imaginary of legitimate and morally correct border politics. This is done through the displacement of responsibility firstly from the UK to France, and subsequently invisibilisation of the intent to cause harm through the transfer of responsibility from the perpetrators of violence onto the bodies and minds of people subjected to the exhaustion. This subtle yet sustained schema of violence and harm enables the invisibilisation, sanitation and depoliticisation of state violence and of suffering at the UK’s border.

By conceptualising the daily practices in the borderzone as a ‘politics of exhaustion,’ it is easy to articulate how violence and harm are constitutive of, and play a crucial role within, the UK’s bordering technologies, but are invisibilised, sanitised and depoliticised.

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