Border struggles Segregation, migrant solidarity, and ethical politics in everyday life A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2016 Thomas Tyerman School of Social Sciences Contents Contents ................................................................................................................. 2 Abstract ................................................................................................................. 7 Declaration ............................................................................................................. 8 Copyright Statement ............................................................................................... 8 Figures .................................................................................................................... 9 Abbreviations .......................................................................................................... 9 Acknowledgements .............................................................................................. 10 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 11 1.1 Why borders matter? .............................................................................................. 11 1.2 Reading borders in everyday life: segregation in the UK and Calais ........................ 14 1.3 Research question and thesis outline ...................................................................... 17 2. Reading everyday life: (re)encountering ethical politics and border struggles ...... 21 2.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 21 2.2 Everyday life as political: Foucault, power, knowledge, and subjectivity ................ 22 2.2.1 Freedom/power: liberal subjects of government ...................................... 26 2.2.2 Everyday politics of power ........................................................................ 27 2.3 Everyday life as ethical: Butler, bringing the other back in ...................................... 29 2.3.1 Normativity, performativity, and sociality ................................................ 29 2.3.2 Vulnerability, ethical responsibility, and solidarity .................................... 31 2.3.3 An ‘experiment in living otherwise’: solidarity as struggle ....................... 33 2.4 Reading everyday life: encountering borders on the ‘rough ground’ of ethical politics ............................................................................................................................ 34 2.4.1 Wittgenstein’s critique of foundational philosophy: ‘the descent into the ordinary’ ......................................................................................................................... 35 2.4.2 The ‘rough ground’ .................................................................................... 37 2 2.4.3 Encountering everyday life ........................................................................ 39 2.5 Ethos of grammatical reading: remaining on the rough ground of ethical politics . 42 2.5.1 Line-drawing as ethical political practice: hard/soft ontologies and deep metaphysical seductions of nation-state borders .......................................................... 43 2.5.2 Remaining open to surprise: ethical politics of reading everyday life ...... 46 2.6 Reading everyday life at the border: writing from the rough ground ..................... 48 2.6.1 Writing everyday life in Calais: research failure and the rough ground ... 49 2.6.2 Privilege .................................................................................................... 51 2.6.3 Writing from the rough ground: failing to write the lives of others ......... 53 3. Deterrence, segregation, and struggle in everyday life: embodied encounters with the border in Calais ............................................................................................... 57 3.1 Introduction: ‘apartheid is alive and well’ ............................................................... 57 3.2 Encountering dangerous 'others': pictures of the Calais border ............................. 61 3.3 Race and statecraft .................................................................................................. 64 3.3.1 (Post)colonialism and neo-racism ............................................................. 66 3.3.2 Anti-immigration in the UK ....................................................................... 68 3.4 From territory's edge to everyday life: borders ‘beyond the line’ ........................... 70 3.4.1 Critical Border Studies .............................................................................. 72 3.4.2 Exporting the border: juxtaposed controls in Calais ................................ 74 3.4.3 Embodied encounters: differentiation, diffusion, and discrimination ..... 78 3.5 Encountering the border in Calais: deterrence, segregation, and struggle in everyday life ................................................................................................................... 82 3.5.1 ‘Weapons of dissuasion’: segregation, deterrence, and ‘making life unliveable’ ...................................................................................................................... 84 3.5.2 Everyday segregation: living spaces ......................................................... 86 3.5.3 Everyday segregation: public spaces ........................................................ 89 3.5.4 Everyday segregation: relations with others ............................................ 91 3.5.5 Everyday segregation: subsistence ........................................................... 93 3.5.6 Everyday segregation: encountering police violence ................................ 95 3 3.6 Conclusion: ‘this border kills’ ................................................................................... 98 4. Everyday borders and segregation in the UK: creating a ‘hostile environment’ .. 102 4.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 102 4.2 New diagrams of governmentality: globalisation, borders, and biopolitics .......... 104 4.2.1 The ‘Dial’ ................................................................................................. 104 4.2.2 Governmentality, biopolitics, and statecraft ........................................... 106 4.2.3 Managing migration: (ir)regularisation of mobility and the “banopticon” ...................................................................................................................................... 108 4.2.4 Embracing globalisation: sovereignty, territory and “domopolitics” ..... 113 4.2.5 Sovereign technologies of security: making everyday life biopolitical ... 116 4.3 Policing irregularity: criminalisation, securitisation, and segregation in everyday life ...................................................................................................................................... 119 4.3.1 Institutionalising suspicion: credibility, asylum seekers, and foreign national prisoners ...................................................................................................... 120 4.3.2 Creating a hostile environment: border policing and segregation in everyday life ................................................................................................................. 123 4.4 Sovereign seductions: everyday biopolitics as line-drawing ................................. 128 4.4.1 The seduction of line-drawing ................................................................. 128 4.4.2 The hard lines of the “generalised biopolitical border” ......................... 129 4.5 Everyday borders and opaque power .................................................................... 134 4.5.1 Deferring (sovereign) decisions ............................................................... 136 4.5.2 Enforcing everyday borders: routinisation, discrimination, and segregation ................................................................................................................. 138 4.6 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 141 5. Politics of forgetting: humanitarianism, Agamben, and the seduction of borders ........................................................................................................................... 143 5.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 143 5.1.1 Humanitarian Disaster Survey: Losing Sight of Humanity ...................... 144 4 5.2 ‘Humanity washed ashore’: reading humanitarianism as a ‘politics of forgetting’ ..................................................................................................................................... 147 5.2.1 Seeing others’ humanity ......................................................................... 148 5.2.2 Politics of forgetting ................................................................................ 150 5.3 Humanitarianism and the border: forgetting segregation in everyday life in Calais ..................................................................................................................................... 154 5.3.1 The