By Phoebe Malone, PhD Researcher, University of Glasgow. [Image: Phoebe Malone, Dunkerque, 2023.]
Keywords: Space, Place, Spatial Governance, Migration, Asylum, Borders, Solidarity, Resistance, Abolition, Discourse, Natural Environment, Erratic Spatiality.
—
Depending on the day, a dinghy seen approaching the Greek island of Samos may be violently pushed back toward Turkey, hauled in, or left to its own ‘fate’. For people seeking safety who do reach Samos’ shores, the camp’s location in an isolated arid valley means people must choose between long walks and missed meals, spending any cash they may have on the bus fare, or missing mandatory and life-changing appointments required to seek asylum. Some are transferred to the mainland quickly, some wait years.
In Dunkerque, northern France, one outbound dinghy to the UK may be pulled back and slashed, another waved off that same night. Regular evictions of living sites and internal transfers hyper-mobilise, whilst detention temporarily immobilises, yet most people return back to the same site soon after, ignored by the evictors until the next scheduled operation. In the Grande Synthe suburb of Dunkerque, the physical patches of earth used by people seeking safety to pin their tents into are regularly turfed up by eviction personnel, along with the removal of forest cover, making the space uninhabitable.
Outside the Home Office on Brand Street in the Ibrox area of Glasgow, the UK’s largest asylum dispersal city, many arrive for their regular reporting appointments after travelling across the city and sometimes packing up their belongings in case they are detained and leave in a van via the side exit this time. Some have had deportation orders or filed for voluntary return long ago yet are released after each appointment, whilst some are detained sporadically and without reason.
Why is the spatial presence of people seeking safety governed in such unpredictable and erratic, as well as violent and hostile, ways? How does hostile and unpredictable governance work together to push people into the harshest physical terrains? How is this widely normalised in public understanding? How does spatial governance affect solidarity and resistance efforts within, between and beyond Glasgow, Dunkerque and Samos? Finally, how can space and place be reclaimed to subvert violent, racial and neocolonial governance of people seeking safety and solidarity actors?
These questions form the basis of my PhD research, which I introduced at the Unbordering Futures Conference at the University of Edinburgh earlier this year- co-sponsored by the Social Policy Association . My PhD research will address these questions by volunteering and undertaking participant observation within solidarity networks in Samos, Dunkerque and Glasgow, all sites in which I have worked before. This will be supplemented by semi-structured interviews with migrant and non-migrant solidarity actors (‘solidarians’), as well as elite governance actors, and collaborative creative workshops within and between the field sites. The research aims to expose space and place as active agents co-opted by elites in racial capitalism, documenting and locating insidious governance in order to curate cross-border spatial resistance.
Erratic Spatiality > Exposure to the Elements > Discursive Depoliticisation
How do tactical instrumentalisations of discursive space and physical place come together to depoliticise and legitimise violent, erratic spatial governance techniques imposed on people seeking safety and those acting in solidarity with them?
Preliminarily, I propose a relationality between what I label as ‘erratic spatiality’, ‘discursive space’, and ‘physical space’ in the governance of people seeking safety and . To simplify what is a complex and multi-directional relationship between these three domains of space, themselves entangled and co-constitutive, one tactic I will further examine is as follows. Discourses of space as bounded, fixed, and derivative of ‘natural’ identity and belonging work to publicly justify erratically shifting violent spatial governance techniques performed on people seeking safety (such as pushbacks, evictions, detention, and deportation) to keep ‘outsiders’ out or constantly on the move, which then force people to take convoluted and dangerous routes to ‘safety’ through harsh and hidden terrains ‘on their own accord’. The apolitical appearance of nature and the environment then normalises and removes accountability for border deaths and injury. The constant shifting of both codified and informal tactics, as well as their hostility, force people seeking safety to relentlessly search for new ways to cross borders for safety, which become more and more dangerous and hidden. In this way, spatial governance is erratic both in the sense of its techniques and logics constantly shifting so as to be unpredictable and difficult to resist, and in its impact of convoluted and chaotic mobility imposed on people seeking safety and those acting in solidarity.
Erratic spatiality thus maintains discourses of crisis and chaos, as well as scapegoating migrants as ‘unruly’, both legitimising ever-hostile and strict policies and practices. Thus, space conceived as bounded and owned, coupled with the image of people seeking safety as disorderly invaders, legitimises otherwise widely unpalatable governance techniques which push people into spaces of ‘death by nature’. This could be the sea during pushbacks in Samos or interceptions in Dunkerque, the forests whilst avoiding detection in both Samos and Dunkerque, or dilapidated high-rises on the suburbs of Glasgow.
Further, as Tazzioli (2020) notes, by “keeping migrants on the move…forcing them to take convoluted geographies” (p.4) this works in “dividing and partitioning migrant multiplicities as potential collective subjects” (p.14). This weakens space for migrant-led activism and change, and this unpredictable spatial governance of people seeking safety also works to restrict resistance and solidarity to a purely reactive capacity, unable to develop sustainable and transformative cross-border practices as targets of resistance are continually morphing.
This is reflected in our era where ostensibly ‘humanitarian’ border infrastructures expand alongside a concurrent rise in migrant death and injury, maintaining ‘liberal violence’ and ‘humanitarian borders’ in curated endemic ‘crises’. Diverse forms of activism and solidarity outside this narrow prescribed ‘humanitarianism’ are increasingly repressed and criminalised.
These technologies of the (immaterial) ‘border’ work together as a:
“ “spatial fix” for contradictions in capitalism, racial governance, and colonialism. They create and manage crises through regimes of (im)mobility, displacement, and dispossession, ensuring the stability of racialized territorial governance and exploitable labor” (Cisneros, 2024, p.58)
Dismantling, Rebuilding
As well as the examples of violent spatial governance given in the opening vignettes, and the current entrenchment of the criminalisation of solidarity, there are also ever-resilient and adapting examples of long-term, sustained and successful solidarity across borders. These must be paid attention to, and this research hopes to build on existing activist knowledge bases to strengthen and focus such pockets of worldmaking in the long-term. Tactics to reclaim and redirect ‘space’ towards resistance and unbordering follow calls “not only for the end of borders but also the conditions that necessitate borders as a spatial and racial fix” (Cisneros, 2024, p.57) , which are entangled with a vast array of other forms of exclusion and ordering affecting us all under neoliberal governance and racial capitalism. Borders and spatial governance, as with other carceral institutions and logics, are the “causes of violence rather than their solutions” (ibid), and therefore “the only response is to dismantle these institutions and practices, not seek to reform them” (ibid).
How can the same unique discursive, physical and erratically imposed spaces of each site dominantly co-opted for governance of people seeking safety and solidarians, for example Samos’ tight knit ‘islandness’ and hidden valleys, Dunkerque’s history of defence and forested plains, and Glasgow’s divided identity politics and high-rises, be reclaimed towards resistance and subversion?
—
By Phoebe Malone, PhD Researcher in Social Anthropology and Migration, University of Glasgow, Email: p.malone.1@research.gla.ac.uk