Routing the Camp: Experiential Authority in a Politics of Irregular Migration

Naomi Millner

Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Home address: 47 Chelsea Park, Bristol, BS5 6AH

Tel.: 07792 098230 Email: naomimillner@gmail.com

Routing the Camp: Experiential Authority in a Politics of Irregular Migration

Often approached through Giorgio Agamben’s work, the camp-like spaces

associated with asylum-seeking and refuge in Europe have been portrayed

as sites of abjection to a predatory sovereign logic. Nongovernmental and

humanitarian agencies in the European Union have been seen to

‘ethicalise’ issues of asylum and refuge, foreclosing debate over who or

what counts as a ‘citizen’ through their invocations of universal rights. In

this article I claim this reading overlooks the forms of authority in play at

such sites, and set out to rethink the ways that spaces and subjects of

asylum and refuge might be critically conceptualised. Revisiting the

migrant squatter-camps at Calais, destroyed in 2009, I emphasise

experiential forms of authority through which subjects are already ‘taking’

and remaking the meaning of citizenship (Honig 1998, Isin & Nielsen

2008), and which introduce political disagreement over the ‘givens’ of

political community. Reading Hannah Arendt’s account of the decline of

traditional authority through Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of politics and

sense, I argue that the task of discerning productions of experiential

authority within new geographies of movement is a crucial political task of

our time.

Keywords: Authority; irregular migration; ethics; experience

Introduction

Forming the point of departure for this investigation is a moment and site of contention

in which ethical responses and responsibilities toward irregular migrants were being

phrased in new ways. This is the French port of Calais in September 2009, when the

squatter camps known as 'jungles' were being flattened under the Sarkozy

administration, with the tacit approval of British and European commentators (see

2

Rygiel 2011). 'Irregular' migrants in this context are those who attempt to travel or

remain, without the legal documentation to do so (De Genova 2011, Huysmans 2006).

This article attempts to ‘route’ Calais as a camp-like space in the two senses of the

word: firstly, by setting the site - often portrayed in terms of exclusion or abjection - in

the context of a history of movement; and secondly, by rupturing (from within) the

geographies of knowledge and experience commonly associated with it.

For Calais summons images of squalor, riot police patrols, scabies outbreaks,

human trafficking, and rights violations in the public mind. In the mainstream media the

port-town has symbolised the 'tide' of immigrants and asylum-seekers threatening

Britain's national and spatial integrity, and has evidenced the pressing need for citizens

to fight illegal and economic migration, as part of a protection of ‘community’ interests

(Bigo 2007, Coureau 2011, Walters 2008). Meanwhile, Calais is frequently invoked by

human rights activists to remind states of their obligations toward the stateless (Laacher

2002, Rygiel 2011) – obligations clarified by post-war Human Rights Acts, and, in

advocates’ account, neglected by European states (Malkki 1996). Calais is also a key

referent within European Union (EU) 'Security and Justice' policy documents, which

describe the necessity of synchronising forces against 'border crimes' – and align

asylum-seeking with terrorism (Bigo 2007, Walters 2004). The squatter camps at the

port-town have, as such, been called an epitome of the twentieth-century ‘camp’

theorised by Giorgio Agamben: a space of indeterminacy or of ‘bare life’ stripped of the

basic dues of citizenship (Bigo 2007, p.27, Fassin 2005). In this article I set out to

demonstrate how the conceptual resources offered by Jacques Rancière’s rereading of

Hannah Arendt on the refugee and contemporary politics enable us to ‘route’ the camp

at Calais in the two senses mentioned. I suggest we can understand it in terms of a

history of creative political acts - a site of the generation of new definitions of

citizenship, and new articulations of collective belonging. This will contribute on the

one hand, to our understanding of how new forms of authority over social life are being

produced within new geographies of irregular movement, and on the other, to an

appreciation of what, in these experimental productions, can be regarded as ‘political.’

The camp to be routed in Calais therefore also takes on a double meaning: It is a

specific place associated with new EU regimes of movement, and also a particular

trope, or diagram, being used to analyse such geographies. Associated with ideas of

government and security dating back to the eighteenth century (Foucault 2007, Walters

2002, 2004, Bigo 2002), these regimes (and the forms of resistance they give rise to)

had been significantly transformed by post-war efforts to manage unprecedented

numbers of the internationally displaced, whilst also attempting to rebuild the

infrastructure of states (Berg & Houtum 2003, Christiansen et al. 2000, Zaiotti 2007,

Zielonka 2006). In this context, hospitality toward the stateless took on a new

significance within new forms of (secular) authority (Dillon 1999), and the government

of citizens (Arendt 1951, 1958, Diken 2004). Acts like the 1951 Geneva Convention

Relating to the Status of Refugees required states to legislate for exception, as part of

the foundation of an international community of human rights, whilst placing on states

the responsibility to judge who or what counted as an ‘exception.’ In this context, the

power to accept or refuse citizenship rights has been called (in some accounts) the

defining act of sovereignty (Agamben 1997, 1998).

But rather than portraying the camp-like spaces of Calais as sites of abjection, I

focus on the acts and associations through which alternative understandings of

citizenship and collective belonging have been, and are being asserted. In doing so, I

seek to demonstrate how theoretical attention to the kinds of ‘experiential authority’

being produced at sites like Calais can open new avenues for their politicisation. This

4

argument is staged in three movements. First, I follow how an emergent, ‘autonomy of

migration’ literature has already begun to rethink irregular migration as a polemic space

of disagreement, through a focus on migration and demonstration as ‘acts of

citizenship’. Second, I follow a re-reading of Hannah Arendt’s account of authority

through Jacques Rancière’s politics of aesthetics. Here I suggest that the ‘ethicalisation’

of asylum can also be politicised through attention to the simultaneous production of

new forms of authority based in embodied experience – a point which leads us, thirdly,

to consider how the multiplication of ideas about citizenship and collective belonging

can introduce ‘dissensus’ (Rancière 1999) over what counts a part of the political

community. In concluding I work show how this alters how we – as academics, but also

as activists, or migrants - approach recent ‘spectacles’ of protest enacted in Calais.

Rather than focusing (exclusively) on the new forms of abjection being produced there,

I emphasise how new forms of belonging emerging at the site form a key resource for

the introduction of political dissensus into substantive definitions of citizenship rights.

Routing the camp: Autonomy of migration

From a concept of city-belonging to national-belonging (Arendt 1951; Balibar 2004),

citizenship has remained a site of struggle since the foundation of the Greek and Roman

political communities which underpin definitions of the modern state (Isin 2009). The

discipline of citizenship studies and related geographies and sociologies have long

tended to emphasise the status and habitus of citizenship to attend to patterns in the

reproduction of inequality (Isin 2008), as part of efforts to problematise underlying

power relations. But new research trajectories within studies of irregular migration have

broken with this tradition. Rather than documenting the stratification of subjects

through state design or the social construction of privilege, those affiliating with the

'autonomy of migration' approach (De Genova 2011, Mezzadra 2011, Mitropoulous

2007, Moulier Boutang 2008, Walters 2008) prioritise the study of irregular migration

as a form of escape which precedes state control, and perpetually redefines citizenship

(Papadopolous et al. 2008). I outline here how this approach problematises Agamben’s

camp as an analytical tool, locating as a political resource the acts and demonstrations

of non-citizens.

‘Autonomy of migration’ is a lens which asks us to acknowledge that, besides

being constrained by proliferating forms of mobility control, refugees and migrants are

emerging as major protagonists in political struggles (Isin and Neilson 2008, McNevin

2006). Further: that irregular migrants, and those in solidarity with them, are actively

engaged in constituting new forms of citizenship and belonging through their polemic

movements and claims (see Nyers 2003 for a list of recent examples). From hunger

strikes in Australia, to the self-organisation of non-status Algerians in Montreal, and

huge marches for immigrant rights in US cities, the rights-claims of particular

demonstrations and movements have thus provided an exciting new resource for critical

thought, enabling scholars of irregular migration to engage and politicise an immanently

produced form of authority.

‘Irregularity’ here is understood as a tense and agonistic process, always shaped

by multiple forms of political investment, and a key stake in contemporary struggles

over capital and belonging (Mezzadra 2007). As a mass phenomenon, irregular

migration – and the tactical navigation of efforts to control it – is therefore regarded as a

key resource for thinking a polemic politics of the stratification of mobility, according to

logics of capital, national identity, or state. Autonomist perspectives prioritise the lived

practices, desires, expectations and behaviours of migrants over the legal processes of

states, as a means to interrogate forms of the conduct of conduct which don’t rely on

coercive, capitalist, or state-centric influences on subjectivity (Mezzadra 2011). From

6

this vantage, non-sanctioned forms of migration are reconstrued as political and creative

acts; first, as the generative forces which security and political-economic must strive to

keep up with (Mezzadra & Neilson 2008, Papadopoulos et al. 2008), and second, as the

embodiment of experiential forms of knowledge, with their own authority to speak to

ongoing political practices (Isin 2009).

In referencing irregular migration it is important to note that literatures focusing

on camp-like spaces through Agamben’s work and from the autonomy of migration

perspective are both situated by a new intertwining of citizenship politics with the

government of asylum. For was also across this region and historical period of Europe

after 1945 that the concept of the 'asylum-seeker' acquired currency – first in relation to

the international declarations described above, and then to the conceptions of

transnational mobility and riskiness articulated by the multilateral coalitions (like the

European Union and the Schengen acquis) which accompanied Europe's integration

(Bigo 2002, Dikeç 2009, Huysmans 2006). At this time, security practices became

increasingly reinterpreted as mechanisms for pre-emptively calculating and ensuring the

health of an 'inside' population, through the location of internal threats (Adey 2009,

Bigo 2002, De Goede 2008). Meanwhile, between 1945 and 2009, new forms of

political organising developed which also shared this rationality, working to make

asylum-seekers ‘appear’ as legitimate refugees in particular state contexts, rather than

‘risky’ elements like economic migrants or traffickers. The rise of international

humanitarian organisations, as also of new transnational non-governmental advocacy

organisations, was situated by this new focus on governing ‘life’ across state boundaries

(Edkins 2000, Sharma 2005).

Whilst EU securitisation measures, humanitarian activism, and British tabloids

differ in their advocacy of sympathies and antipathies toward asylum-seekers, a

common moral code of judgement can therefore be identified in their government of

collective conduct. Those who move without documents are either to be received as

vulnerable victims, whose future depends upon the hospitality of a state; or as risky

outsiders, against whom global citizens must be protected (Bigo 2002; Walters 2008).

Ethnographer Didier Fassin (2005), after Agamben, calls this a form of 'compassionate

repression.' For him, the transformation of asylum into an issue of moral sympathy

marks the extension of a project of state territorialisation beyond national borders.

Diverting attention from asylum claims as polemic interventions into the fabric and

ungainly histories of international relations plays a role in reinforcing the power of state

sovereignty to accept or to exclude (see also Bagelman & Squire, forthcoming).

The reappropriation of individual stories in humanitarianism has fallen under

particular criticism through such analysis; its framing of the suffering of distant

strangers to advocate support is considered not only to produce refugee subjects as

passive recipients of care (Tyler 2006), but to inform an ahistorical basis for the further

incorporation of asylum-seekers’ bodies into state agendas (Fassin 2005). Ticktin (2006)

goes so far as to consider humanitarianism itself an instrument of state power which

forces the refugee to compromise biological integrity in order to secure state assistance

(see also Lippert 2006, in a non-European context). Ticktin describes how pressure from

advocacy groups led to the introduction of the 'humanitarian clause' in French law, but

she links this with an increasing depoliticisation of asylum-seeking bodies.Diken

(2004:90) too,humanitarianism, as part of the administration of asylum, functions as

'pre-emptive risk management', ensuring that such a 'gesture of politicisation is

foreclosed,' - or, that 'politics' does not take place.

But, in aligning with the autonomy of migration perspective on the political

issues at stake, I share a challenge to the influential social-scientific narrative

8

underpinning Fassin’s analysis – and hence, to this construal of non-governmental

forms of advocacy. Especially influenced by Giorgio Agamben’s (1995, 1997, 1998)

essays of the 1990s, scholars have located the ‘camp’ as a specifically twentieth-century

phenomenon1, where new categories of non-citizens are produced as part of the

extension of a logic of sovereignty beyond state territoriality (eg. Bhandar 2004, Diken

2004, Darling 2009, Edkins 2000, Rajaram & Grundy-Warr 2007, Perera 2002). Across

recent decades, the camp-like spaces configured within emerging mobility regimes have

been analysed as sites of biopolitical abjection (Agamben 1997; Edkins 2000, Ek 2006),

or places of 'indistinction' (Agamben 1998), where migrants' political claims to asylum

are converted into matters for moral sympathy (Darling 2009; Ticktin 2006).Such sites

are understood as ‘spaces of exception’’2 – spaces apart from the law, whose exclusion

from the political community legitimises sovereignty as a power to ‘ban’ from

belonging (see also Perera 2002). These may be ‘extra-territorial’ spaces which can exist

between national boundaries, but are more often bounded spaces within one nation

where citizens’ rights are suspended (as in prison), or ‘inter’ spaces of encampment

under multiple jurisdictions (Edkins 2000, 2003, Isin & Rygiel 2007). In Europe, where

borders have been synchronised to form complex layers of citizenship rights, scholars

have explored how the power of the ban can also be understood as the power to consign 1 Agamben’s concern with the camp was to comprehend its function within a broader reconstitution of

sovereign power, and, correspondingly, the subjects of power. In his essays through the 1990s, his idea of the ‘camp’ is inextricable from the historical practices of the Nazi concentration camps first built to contain refugees, and later adapted for the Jews (see Bauman 1989). Deriving from the 20th century Spanish campos de concentractiones in Cuba and the British camps for Afrikaner in Boer War (Perera 2002), the concentration camp is important because it exposes the power to exclude from the political community, which Agamben claims modern sovereignty is based upon. It therefore reveals the paradox underlying the foundation of the law - what Dillon (1999, p.114) calls the ‘scandal of the human as such.’

2 In a short essay, Agamben (1997, p.108) describes the camp as the spatiality constituted when this power is extended into an enduring form, or:

the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule. In it, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporal suspension of the state of law, acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that, as such, remains constantly outside the normal state of law.

This space of exception is to be understood a space of 'indistinction', where subjects are excluded from state juridical and political rights, yet remain immanent to the order of citizenship (Isin & Rygiel 2007).

subjects into a permanent space of immobility - or indeed, to a permanent conditions of

forced mobility (Bigo 2007, Engberson 2005).

The most important problem with viewing irregular migration through the camp

is how particular spaces and subjectification processes become emptied of contestation.

The new circuits of information and coordination, which link border police, detention

centres and EU agencies like Frontex together (see Andrijasevic & Walters 2010), are

cast this reading as a newly global, neo-imperial form of state power, which produces

the 'bare life' it relies upon at an increasing distance from the polis (Bloch & Schuster

2005, Kanstroom 2007). But rather than being seen as sites of struggle within this

process, refugee camps and detention centres are recast in terms of state authority over

biological life, or ‘sovereign’ jurisdiction (Isin & Rygiel 2007, Rygiel 2011). Advocacy,

humanitarianism, and activism are reduced to agents of a state rationality for governing,

within the production of a supple, healthy body of state power (a particular reading of

the 'biopolitical' subject). Such interpretations allow little space to consider the changing

ways that notions of citizenship and collective belonging are also constituted through

experience and experiment.

Experiential authority: Acts of citizenship

This reading of the camp is strongly influenced by Hannah Arendt’s (1951, p.276, 1958)

earlier, influential accounts of the refugee as a central figure of modern times, and her

association of the internment camp with the founding of human rights acts. Arendt

claims this gesture of founding exposes the misguided assumption of law: that rights

can ever proceed from some conception of inborn dignity or ‘natural’ rights. For her,

politics must begin with a situated staging of the 'right to have rights', a polemic form of

struggle, which problematises who or what is counted out of the political community

within a given configuration of laws. After Arendt, Agamben (1998, p.75) elaborates on

10

the refugee as ‘a limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental

categories of the nation-state’, and whose ‘bare life’3 makes manifest the exclusion

which sovereignty depends upon. However, as Isin and Rygiel (2007) claim, Agamben

misinterprets Arendt’s central point about the origins of totalitarianism – that without a

political context or a ‘right to have rights’, the declaration itself is meaningless (see also

Deranty 2004). Agamben's own conception of citizenship as a ‘fiction’ leads not to the

specific scenes of political appearance Arendt imagines, but to an account of the camp

as a kind of ‘diagram’ of power, like Foucault’s panopticon (Lemke 2005, Panagia

1999). The camp here figures instead as a spatial manifestation of the inscription of life

into the biopolitical order, and ‘the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity’

(Agamben 1998, p.123).

I argue that analysing migrants’ movements and claims to right through a lens

like the camp is what lends the narrative of abjection its power. The problem of finding

the diagram of the camp everywhere can be connected to the ‘predatory’ relation

between sovereign (state) power and bare life, with which De Genova (2011, p.46)

associates Agamben’s theoretical approach. In Agamben's account the struggles of

irregular migrants are always figured as part of an ‘excluded’ remainder, proving again

and again the logic of a transhistorical form of sovereignty over life. For Papadopolous

et al. (2008), casting the moment of the suspension of rights as the crucial moment of

3 Since the founding of the classical polis, Agamben argues that sovereign power has always demanded the production of ‘bare life’ (zoé), since the legal order of inclusion is only made possible by the exclusion of some who may not become full subjects of law. The figure of zoé is homo sacer, the banned figure from Roman history, whose death counts neither as murder nor sacrifice, whilst its defining opposite, bíos, refers to the political life of citizens. Zoé is not, however, to be understood as an a priori natural life which lies underneath cit-izenship rights, but a social production, artificially concealing social markings and distinctions (Lüde-mann 2003). The separation of this produced 'bare life' from the political life of bíos is therefore loc-ated in the ‘ban,’ which constitutes the original 'political relation' (Agamben 1998: 181). However the ban is understood to be newly constituted in political modernity, in the founding of universal human rights. This radical act of inclusion draws zoé from the margins of political life to its defining centre. It is the camp which exposes the bare life reinscribed by human rights as the founding act of modern sovereignty: it points toward new sites and subjects of indistinction in a new order, without clear ter-ritorial boundaries.

state power is an easy temptation, given the intensification of mobility controls and

security practices. Yet overemphasising this moment produces a false picture of what is

being produced. It results in a conceptual framework which ‘cannot grasp’ irregular

migrants’ involvement in immanent processes of social change' (ibid., p.7, see also Isin

& Rygiel 2007). The ‘authority’ to govern social conduct is placed solely with state

sovereignty, with the result that even attempts to critically engage with EU mobility

regimes dismiss (and risk defusing) oppositional notions of citizenship which are also

being set forward. Inscribing the migrant without papers as an abject remainder erases

the names and associations of other political subjects who travel without citizenship

status, and contributes toward a historiography which only reproduces a particular

diagram of forces (Rancière 1999, 2004). The acts and spatialities of non-citizenship are

emptied of their polemic content, and of the work they may do to singularise (as

opposed to universalise) specific rights claims.

In part, this effect can be linked with a particular reading of Arendtian and

Foucauldian biopolitics. Agamben’s work on the camp derives from his readings of

Foucault’s (2007, 2008) expositions of biopolitics in his lectures of 1977-79, as well as

from his reading of Arendt’s earlier work. Foucault, ‘biopolitics’ is a rationality of

power whose emergence marks a shift in broader conceptions of government toward the

problem of governing biological life, as against a formerly more prevalent ‘sovereign’

form of power: the power to ordain death. Foucault (1979, p.143) the emergence of

‘biopolitics’ marks the threshold of political modernity, placing transformations to

bodily life at the centre of political order (see Lemke 2005). Agamben does not follow

Foucault in tracing this same decline of sovereign forms of power within an increasing

focus on life as an object of government, and on experience as its immanent ground

(Lemke 2011). For Agamben, ‘biopolitics’ refers to the state's assumption of

12

responsibility for the care of the nation, and a highly particular inscription of ‘bare life’.

This he regards as an intensification of sovereignty, not its displacement: a new work on

what remains when life is stripped of all social locations (De Genova 2011). According

to Agamben, therefore, and in contrast with Foucault’s definition, ‘politics is always

already biopolitics’ (Lemke 2005, p.4). The critical point about the productive capacity

of power in Foucault is, in contrast, that the future remains open – power is reciprocal

and not merely an effect of control (Gill 2010).

The implications of this different emphasis is clear in Agamben’s work: the

spaces and subjects of irregular migration are sites of ‘abjection’, as against Foucault’s

insistence on the perpetual production of ever-new forms of power, and of radically new

ways of being a ‘subject’ under the conditions of biopolitics. Human rights and ethics

remove the space for politics for Agamben, whilst for Foucault they call upon us to

develop new ways of situating and associating our selves, and constituting ethical

conduct. Drawing from, and against, Agamben’s reading, autonomy of migration

scholars revisit the camp as a site of struggle over meaning, and a locus of the

production of experimental and provisional forms of authority (Mezzadra & Neilson

2008; Papadopolous et al. 2008). These form a ‘groundless ground’ for new kinds of

claims over citizenship rights.

In their introduction to their 2008 collection, Isin and Neilson (2008) explain the

rationale for a shift toward ‘acts’ to address questions of citizenship and migration.

Instead of treating citizenship as a form of individualised territorial identity, or as part of

a broader regime of control, Isin and Nielsen want to explore how groups and

collectives constitute themselves as citizens, often in defiance of legal or socio-political

frameworks. ‘Acts’ from this view are different from ‘practices’ – the social, political or

cultural habits which orient belonging, and reproduce a sense of national or political

community. Acts entail the creation of a ‘scene’ – ‘which means both performance and

disturbance’ (Isin 2009, p.379), and a new beginning out of what is already in motion.

The act emphasises the deed, rather than the doer (Isin & Neilson 2008, p.2) and the

rupture over the socio-historical patterns, and its performance establishes the conditions

for alternative senses of belonging:

to perform a 'deed' means politically and aesthetically to anticipate and thus partly

shape the possibility of a rejoinder. (ibid., p.4)

Unlike daily ‘actions’, the act involves accomplishments and builds on other

acts; it is immanent to social processes and inescapably dialogical, but defined by a

unique, creative and purposive (although not always intentional) performance (Isin

2009, p.380). This emphasis marks a further break with the citizenship literature of the

last two decades, shifting from ‘liberal’ notions of the citizen in relation to formal

entitlements (or, ‘how an order holds’, Isin 2008, p.26), toward rights as the constitutive

performances of those ‘who present themselves as subjects to whom rights are due’

(ibid., p.18).

In my argument, the rearticulation of asylum in terms of morality and state

beneficence which Agamben and others pick up on, does however, reflect a crucial

observation about how such a polemic politics of irregular migration is policed away

from view in our historical moment. I link this phenomenon not with sovereign power

but with the idea of 'universality' which emerges against sovereignty’s decline (Foucault

1997a, pp.47-48; Rancière 2007a, pp.1-2) – a new notion of the continuity that exists

between individuals which replaces former emphasis on transcendent or divine notions

of community. Universality is a naturalised code of ordering produced through the

configuration of international rights documents against state law, which frames the self-

conduct of citizens and states against the background of a community without an

14

outside (eg. the community of universal human rights). Naming 'the community' as the

community is, in this reading, the gesture of foreclosure: it precludes in advance the

question of whose part is not included in the part of the 'common', and maintains the

illusion of universal stakes and values (Rancière 2003, 2004). A community’s idea of

itself grounds 'ethical' practices such as hospitality, and the rehabilitation of vulnerable

non-citizens, but proves robust against the 'polemical particularisation' of claims (2009,

p.178). Such a particularisation is the voicing of a part of the social, whose presentation

would disturb an underlying order itself (Rancière 1999).

But, unlike the Agambenian account of sovereign territoriality, this way of

approaching the ‘ethicalisation’ of the asylum issue also acknowledges the simultaneous

production of other forms of authority over social life, besides that of sovereign

jurisdiction. Not only traditional, ‘foundational’ mediators of authority like church and

state, but also narratives and testimonies bearing the expertise of lived experience can

take on a defining role in the conduct of social conduct, and can give rise to a

multiplication of ways of being a political subject – beyond the existing bounds of

citizenship. The ‘act’ is not only a rupture in relation to an order, but 'a rupture that

enables the actor (that the act creates) to remain at the scene rather than fleeing it' (Isin

2008, p.27). Isin and Rygiel (2007) therefore reframe a politics of irregular migration a

politics of 'surplus names' – names which set out a question or dispute about who is

included in their count. The ethicalisation of politics can therefore also become the

politicisation of ethics, where embodied experience takes on a new role in determining

or disputing the truth of a situation.

In terms of ‘routing’ the camp, this analytical approach shifts us from a

‘negative’ to a ‘positive’ critique (see Foucault 1997b): we revisit sites like Calais to

explore how new sensibilities and new associations within a specific governmental

context are being assembled as part of new expressions of subject-being. This demands

as part of scholars seeking to establish a critical ‘politics’ of irregular migration a shift

in sensibilities; a shift in attention following an acknowledgement that people don’t

passively follow the jurisdictions of states, but constitute populations and routes which

are the conditions of possibility for the definition of citizenship. In the following

sections we consider how an awareness of the role of ethics and ideas of universality in

contemporary political fields can also become the basis for a politicisation of ethics –

through the location of experiential forms of authority.

A politics of irregular migration: Rancière’s thought

One point to emphasise in the above trajectory of thought is that to alter sensibilities and

the means by which we come to know the world is political. Learning is political.

Politics is a question of addressing the production of a configuration, or surplus of

objects thrown up by experience, as opposed to shaping a cause for marginalised

subjects (Nyers 2003). The assumptions that have guided many of the attempts to

critically politicise irregular migration across recent decades can be productively

rethought from this position. One prerequisite for doing this will be a means to address

sites between shared affects or fields of embodied experience, and the forms of visibility

and statements which invest them with political significance. Such is the emphasis of

Jacques Rancière's (1999, 2006) political theory, which, like post-democratic

philosophies of Badiou, Agamben and Nancy, is specifically concerned with how the

‘common’ of common sense of experience might be productively rethought. We now

turn to examine Jacques Rancière’s re-reading of Hannah Arendt, which I find useful for

clarifying how the ‘ethicalisation’ of asylum – problematised both by Agamben and by

autonomy of migration scholars - is in fact intimately linked with the production of new

forms of authority based in experience. This leads us to alter what we call, and where

16

we locate, a ‘politics’ of irregular migration.

In Rancière (1999, 2006), the self-authorised interventions enacted by

collectives like the Paris sans-papiers, who demonstrated for their rights in the 1990s,

can be linked with a particular idea of what ‘politics’ is. Politics for Rancière is an act of

political 'disagreement': it marks the appearance of a collective which isn’t counted a

‘part’ of the social (like an idea of citizenship) and the assertion of a polemically

different version of rights (‘what counts as citizenship for you isn’t the same as what

counts as citizenship for us.’) The disagreement involved is hence the production of a

dispute over the ‘givens’ of an idea important to government, like citizenship. Rancière

calls this situation of disagreement ‘dissensus’ - it means the bringing to presence of a

claim to rights in such a way as to trouble a general sense of what rights are and who

has them. Politics is not just spectacle or any old claim to equal rights, but specifically

one which exposes an embedded idea of the ‘common’ – who or what is counted a part

– yes, in legal definitions of citizenship, but more importantly, in our time, in common

sense and experiential modes of governing the social.

This politics takes place on the level of the 'aesthetic'4– where 'givenness'

becomes framed according to a historically particular 'distribution of the sensible'

(Rancière 2006, p.13); or, where what can be perceived, seen or heard of a community

is invested with political significance. The ‘ethicalisation’ of asylum is not, therefore, to

be linked wither with the extension of state sovereignty beyond its territory, or with the

manifestation of a new inscription of bare life. Instead an ethicalisation of politics is the

4 In terms of the way it is employed in the analysis of collective politics and an ('ethicalised') back-ground to politics, aesthetics may be understood as a framing, or structuring, of sensible experience – although it retains a second sense which pertains to a specific regime for the identification of the arts (Rancière 2006, p.82). In its broader definition, then, aesthetics – for Rancière, and for those who fol-low his thought in their social analysis - is a form of framing which articulates a common domain of seeing, speaking and knowing personal experience (Caspão 2007, p.139). This framing, or condition-ing of the senses, reflects a particular ordering of what it is held in common between particular com-munities, or indeed, can be thought of as the very basis through which communities come to sense and feel 'in common'.

same thing (or a better theorisation of the thing) that Arendt (1951) describes as the ‘rise

of the social,’ in her account of the evaporation of traditional forms of authority. It is to

be linked with the way that a history of the critique of traditional forms of authority (as

associated with tradition, the state, and church) gives rise to new ways of ordering

experience, which make an ambiguous place for politics (Rancière 2009). Let us turn to

consider the nature of this ambiguity.

For Arendt (1951, 1958), traditional authority was the means by which a

polemic politics might be opened in the context of social life. Rather than exerting

coercive force or a uniquely sovereign form of power, authority governs conduct

through an appeal to an ‘outside’ beyond the individual’s knowledge; a continuity which

bears the weightiness of the past or of divine will, unlike economic or technical

efficiency. Consequently, the instruments (or ‘technologies’) which augment particular

structures of individual experience (such as the testimony of the forefathers), and which

help them endure, are invested with the capacity to open 'a kind of theater in which

freedom can appear' (ibid., p.154). Traditional authority constitutes a domain other than

the social, through which to make substantive the promise of an idea of justice.

In Arendt’s account this sphere of appearance has lost its role in western social

life, as the traditions underpinning foundational authority have been demythologised or

rationalised. She hints that the decline of traditional authority therefore also marks the

rise of a totalitarian 'saturation' of the social sphere – a diagnosis which, in The Human

Condition (1958), she frames as an eviction of polemic moments, through a full

immanence of the social order (see also Nisbet 1975). For her, the foundation of

universal rights mark a crucial point in this history, signalling a point where human

community bases notions of justice in what is immanent to itself, rather than in

something beyond its bounds.

18

But I am arguing that, rather than marking the end of authoritative relations, this

shift marks the proliferation of forms of authority, based not in traditional foundations,

but in continuities forged through technologies which work with ideas of what is on the

‘inside’ of the community (like biological life, or experience of limits) in new kinds of

ways. Connecting life not with transcendent lines of continuity, but with immanent

conceptions of life, in all its vitality and processual dimensions, we might call these

‘non-foundational’ forms of authority, or experiential (as opposed to traditional) forms

of authority.

Rancière’s theory takes us further on exactly this point. Rancière’s point with

aesthetics, in my reading, is to emphasise how, as modalities of knowing and

experiencing the weightiness of the world (he focuses especially on notions of ‘art’)

shift and change, so too must the way in which we locate its politics. If we are primarily

governed through affective and immanent techniques, rather than through reference to a

social inventory of appropriate forms, then this, too, is the stage on which a dispute over

who or what is included needs to take place.

In our moment, we can understand how a register of the ‘ethical’ has become a

key means through which communities act and feel in common. An appeal to

experiential knowledge, know-how or experience of the extremes will have contagious

effects amongst those with a background of shared experience. Such an awareness

certainly yields important tactics through which to affect others with political concerns

(see Roelvink 2010, Hynes & Sharpe 2010). Yet it is precisely through the ethical

register that we have noted that asylum is evicted of its polemic moments. Invoking the

ethical appeals to sensibilities which imply universal notions of community or of rights,

but which are in practice necessarily partial. International rights documents work

through specific ideas of states, belonging, and citizenship – and to address these, we

need to engage them on the level they are made.

Through Rancière I want to suggest that experiential forms of knowledge and

authority form vital resources for politicising the ethicalisation of asylum. Rather than

invoking a universal community of belonging, experiential forms of authority create

new kinds of continuity and commonality which assert a dispute over who or what

counts as citizenship in a specific space of common investment. Rancière (1999, 2006)

argues that, whilst modern politics has always taken place in an aesthetic domain, holds

that critical reflexivity directed toward traditional rules of appearance (in art as well as

the social world) has worked to ‘liberate’ sense experience from these particular fields

of organising5.. Unlike Hannah Arendt, Rancière (2009) does not bemoan the loss of the

traditions of aesthetic production (he calls them 'mimesis') which formerly dictated an

autonomous space for political appearance. But he does locate in their erosion a unique

difficulty in differentiating the appearance of collective political subjects. The

dissolution of foundational referents for formally arbiting affected being (aisthesis) is

buried beneath a sensory indistinctness - which is what Rancière terms 'ethics.' It is

indistinct, because it asserts an irreducible heterogeneity of the world (the 'global

community') in which everyone is supposed to be counted (of ‘universal human rights’)

(ibid., p.115). This fosters a ‘consensual’ regime of appearance – a background against

which any disturbance on the level of visibility (eg. a claim over rights) is interpreted as

5 The two historically specific regimes of aesthetic perception Rancière claims were dominant in west-ern society prior to the late modern era are linked by with first a 'moral' rule of appearance, and second a 'representative' rule. The first is associated with Plato's thought and orients political judge-ment around a rule of appearance based in the avoidance of dissimulation, where the ‘model’ of an ob-ject is a direct ethical performance, rather than an attempt to produce a copy. The second is shown to have developed out of Aristotle's philosophy, and became most prevalent in eighteenth century Europe. Unlike Plato’s allergy to the copy, here a legislative code called mimesis regulates creative production (poesis), judging form and action according to a canon of rules about the appropriate form, materials, and techniques for mediating affected being (aesthesis). However, in the contemporary western world, the 'knot' of mimesis (or, of productive, sensible and legislative natures) is here under-stood to have become undone through a process of its own self-perception (Rancière 2009, p.7).

20

confirmation of the existence a social order in which anyone can speak. Meanwhile,

there no longer exists a clear outside arbiter besides state law, whose first object is not

‘justice’ but the government of citizens.

So the transition to the articulation of social justice issues like asylum in ethical

terms can be considered a collapse or quenching of the 'political'; h, my point is that in

Rancière this indistinction leads to elimination of polemic appearance, but to its

resituation in the domain of sensible experience (Rancière 2009, p.55). Ethical

discourses may be seen to bear a similar weight to tradition, or strict images of the

moral life, in other periods - in the sense that they cultivate agreement, whilst also

forming a social basis through which to establish a sense and a practice of justice.

However, ethical discourses augment shared practices by appealing to the testimonies of

experience and expertise, rather than a historical act of foundation or the will of the

forefathers. As such they draw on an experiential form of authority. What is distinctive

about this form is that it is constituted through experiments with or interrogations of

singular combinations of sense. Hence its corresponding forms of knowledge

(‘experiential knowledge’) are based on tests established through relations forged with

experience, and on ideas about right method. Whilst we can argue such tests and

methods can be identified throughout traditional forms of government, I am arguing

firstly, that experiential forms of authority take on an increasing weightiness in

producing new forms of life, and secondly, that these enduring forms can serve to

singularise rather than universalise the ethical basis upon which a claim to citizenship is

made, or takes hold. They present forms of knowing and grounds for acting in common

which assert a way of feeling a part, which isn’t currently recognised in a legal or

generally accepted sense. As such, experiential forms of authority offer a crucial

resource in critically problematising irregular migration.

Conclusion: New routes

In this paper I have argued that the constitution of experiential forms of authority makes

for an ambiguous space for politics. On the one hand, the valorisation of ethics as a

discourse of justice directed toward immanent experience renders political appearance

indistinct from a background of the ‘common’ in which we all supposedly appear. This

forecloses moments of dissensus by reinserting collective articulations of rights as

confirmations of a universal community of justice, holding states to account, rather than

making evident the partial ways in which this ‘universality’ is in fact materialised. On

the other hand, the constitution of new forms of authority based on experience as an

immanent ground also renders possible enduring means and methods for singularising

particular rights claims – for bringing to presence forms of shared experience which

escape ‘common sense’ categories. These are what Rancière (2007b, p.10) calls acts of

translation - artistic works to transform barely perceptible networks of sensing into

shared form, placing politics strongly in the hands and mouths of active spectators. To

conclude, I revisit Calais through William Walters’ (2008) study of Sangatte, the Red

Cross centre which was open for eighteen months near the port-town, and which

preceded the Calais jungles. My point with this move is to emphasise how a style of

research attentive to the forms of authority I have been talking about can be thought of

as an opening of a politics around irregular migration in Europe – an aesthetic politics.

Finally I offer two recommendations for future research within the field.

Walters conducts his study in a context where new kinds of precarity fostered by

transformations to the EU, including the rise of smuggling networks and the increasing

necessity of forging dangerous passages to make a successful asylum claim. However,

in the light of the analysis of migrants’ survival tactics there, Walters suggests that

Sangatte can also be thought of in terms of new forms of creativity - the production of

22

new forms of knowledge, and in particular, new forms of critique. Rather than focusing

on an explanation of what causes forced migration, however, these creative moves can

be considered to engage the level of the aesthetic, altering what can be seen and said of

borders, and how citizenship is conceived (Nyers 2010). Walters (2008) focuses on the

An Architektur collective’s work on Sangatte to draw out this point. The An Architektur

collective are a group of ‘critical architects’ founded in Berlin in 2002, and influenced

by Lefebvre and John Harley (a historical geographer of 1980s). Otherwise using their

mapping practices to investigate the everyday spaces of the naval base Guantanamo bay

and of urban spaces, the collective’s second issue ‘Grenzgeografie Sangatte’ [2002]

draws on on-site observations, news reports, Red Cross and refugee orders to document

the space of the refugee reception centre. Whilst emphasising the activity of this

European group of designers, Walters’ point is to use the alternative maps produced of

the facility they to emphasise the alternative fields of knowledge production in play at

Sangatte, which draw experience into the realm of political articulation.

In sharp contrast to the media coverage (see De Genova 2002 on the ‘border

spectacle’), the diagrams Walters describes are clinical and clipped. They don’t use

emotive language or commentaries, but simply bear titles such as ‘History of the

refugee camp’, ‘Ground plan of the camp’, ‘Detail, tunnel entrance,’ with numbered

annotations to mundane, but telling details. Abstract, technical and apparently neutral,

the maps hint at forms of movement they don’t display. For example, police buses are

depicted permanently parked by a rubbish bin, whilst open space is denoted 'play area

and mosque'. They model an aesthetic which signals the vanished body, as a tactic to

demonstrate what can’t be said, or risks being governmentalised in the saying. We have,

thus, a detail on ‘infrastructure and transport,’ which charts the different routes which

the migrants took from the camp in a manner ‘suggestive of a topography of escape

attempts’ (ibid., pp.199-200). Walters also draws our attention to map 8.1 ‘illegal border

crossing,' which plots shifting pathways through improvised camp. Is it for migrants, we

wonder? Or for an audience of citizens? This oblique play on maps and their possible

uses draws attention to embodied experiences of Calais which exceed their

representation in governmental discourses. For Walters, this tactic also hints at a

possible public which might mobilise such excess into new forms of collective politics,

and, by implication, the expression new forms of subjectivity.

What such nuance demonstrates is the need to cultivate approaches to research

which are appropriate to the moment in which irregular migration is policed, not

primarily on the level of sovereign jurisdiction, but in the domain of ethics. Had Walters

repeated an invocation for sympathy with the plight of those stuck in Sangatte, we

might simply have echoed his sensibilities, thinking mainly of our obligation as citizens

to respond. Yet the focus of his attention leads us to rethink the site as a locus of

experimental movements, knowledge production, and particular claims to presence. The

basis of our citizenship is perhaps at stake, whilst the foundations invoked by border

controls derive their force begin to wobble. Which ‘us’ do they work to protect? Which

‘them’ do they not recognise? What other forms of association and stages of politics are

already taking place?

For a future agenda of research which further builds from this ethos toward a

critical politics of irregular migration, there are three important strategies to take hold

of. The first is to follow the analytical shift from the camp to the act, so embodying a

corresponding shift from negative to positive critique. Rather than primarily following

the new forms of constraint which accompany new kinds of governmental rationality,

this means locating, and taking part in, a work on the forces which constitute us - as part

of a multiplication of ways of being a political subject. As, furthermore, an experiment

24

in the production of a critical ethos, whose object and ground is that of experience

(Lemke 2011). In the context of my argument, this means specifically locating

multiplications emerging in ways of being a ‘citizen’, and of experiencing or asserting

collective belonging.

The second strategy is to pay attention to dissensus on the level of the ethical, as

we participate in this effort to multiply. Many invocations of Rancière’s theory simply

call our attention to visual ‘spectacles’ of protest, but this does not help us problematise

the notions of the ‘common’ which are at stake. Moreover, it can lead to an unhelpful

fixation on contingency, rather than drawing to the foreground the key ways in which

ideas acquire their ‘grip’ or ‘stickiness’ in our particular moment. Instead we might

attend to the ways in which our own backgrounds of common sense are being forged,

highlighting in our research interventions those moments where disagreement is

successfully introduced over who or what counts a part. Noting in particular where our

notions of ourselves are particularly implicated, as opposed to the sovereign, the

humanitarian, or the wake of tradition.

References

Adey, P., 2009. Facing airport security: Affect, biopolitics, and the preemptive securit-

isation of the mobile body. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27, 274-

295.

Agamben, G., 1995. We refugees. Symposium, 29, 114-116.

Agamben, G., 1997. The camp as Nomos of the modern. In: H. de Vries and S. Weber,

eds., Violence, Identity and Self-Determination. Stanford: Stanford UP, 106 -118.

Agamben, G., 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stan-

ford University Press.

Andrijasevic, R. and Walters, W., 2010. The International Organisation for Migration

and the international government of borders. Environment and Planning D:Society and

Space, 28, 977-999.

Arendt, H., 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovan-

ovich.

Arendt, H., The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press.

Bagelman, J. and Squire, V., forthcoming. Taking not waiting: Space, temporality and

politics in the City of Sanctuary movement. Chapter draft received by personal commu-

nication.

Balibar, E., 2004. We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bauman, Z., 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. New York: Cornell University Press.

Berg, E. and van Houtum, H., eds., 2003. Mapping borders between territories, dis-

courses and practices. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Bhandar, D., 2004. Renormalizing citizenship and life in fortress North America. Cit-

izenship Studies, 8(3), 261–278.

Bigo, D., 2002. Security and immigration: Toward a critique of the governmentality of

unease. Millennium, 27, 63–92.

26

Bigo, D., 2007. Detention of foreigners, states of exception and the social practices of

control of the banopticon. In: P.K. Rajaram and C. Grundy-Warr, eds. Borderscapes:

Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's Edge. Minneapolis and London: Univer-

sity of Minnesota Press.

Bloch, A. and Schuster, L., 2005. At the extremes of exclusion: deportation, detention

and dispersal. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28(3), 491-512.

Caspão, P., 2007. Stroboscopic Stutter: on the not-yet-captured ontological condition of

limit-attractions. TDR: The Drama Review, 51(2), 136-156.

Christiansen, T., Petito, F., and Tonra, B. 2000. Fuzzy politics around fuzzy borders:

The European Union's 'near abroad.' Cooperation and conflict, 35, 389-415.

Coureau, H., 2011. 'Tomorrow Inch Allah, chance!' People smuggler networks in

Sangatte. Immigrants and Minorities, 22(2), 374-387.

Darling, J., 2009. Becoming bare life: asylum, hospitality, and the politics of encamp-

ment. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27, 183-189.

De Genova, N., 2002. Migrant ‘illegality’ and deportability in everyday life.” Annual

Review of Anthropology, 31, 419–47.

De Genova, N., 2011. The deportation regime: Sovereignty, space, and the freedom of

movement. In: V. Squires, ed. The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Ir-

regularity. London: Routledge.

De Goede, M., 2008. The politics of preemption and the war on terror in Europe.

European Journal of International Relations, 14(1), 161-184.

Deranty, J., 2004. Agamben’s Challenge to Normative Theories of Modern Rights [on-

line]. Borderlands, 3(1). Available from: http://www.borderlandsejournal.ad-

elaide.edu.au/issues/vol3no1.htm [Accessed: 10 May 2011]

Dikeç, M., 2009. Guest editorial: The 'where' of asylum. Environment and Planning D:

Society and Space, 27,183-189.

Diken, B., 2004. From refugee camps to gated communities: Biopolitics and the end of

the city. Citizenship Studies,8(1), 83-106.

Dillon, M., 1999. The scandal of the refugee. In: D. Campbell & M. J. Shapiro, eds.

Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics. Minneapolis: Minnesota Univer-

sity Press, 92-124.

Edkins, J., 2000. Sovereign power, zones of indistinction and the camp. Alternatives,

25, 3-25.

Edkins, J., 2003. Humanitarianism, humanity, human. Journal of Human Rights, 2(2),

253-258.

Ek, R., 2006. Giorgio Agamben and the spatialities of the camp: an introduction. Geo-

grafiska Annaler, 88B(4), 363–386.

Engbersen, G., 2001. The Unanticipated Consequences of Panopticon Europe: Resid-

ence Strategies of Illegal Immigrants. In: V. Guiraudon and C. Joppke, eds. Controlling

a New Migration World. London: Routledge, 222–246.

Fassin, D., 2005. Compassion and repression: the moral economy of immigration

policies in France. Cultural Anthropology, 20, 362-387.

28

Foucault, M., 1979. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. An Introduction, London: Allen

Lane.

Foucault, M., 1997a. The ethics of the concern for self as a practice of freedom. In: P.

Rabinow. ed. Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, Truth. New York: The New Press,

281-301.

Foucault, M., 1997b. Ethics: The Essential Works 1. London: Penguin.

Foucault, M., 2007. M. Senellart, ed. Security, territory, population: Lectures at the

Collège de France 1977-78. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Foucault, M., 2008. M. Senellart, ed. The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de

France 1978-79. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gill, N., 2010. Tracing imaginations of the state: The spatial con-

sequences of different state concepts among asylum activist organisa-

tions. Antipode, 42, 1048–1070.

Honig, B., 1998. Immigrant America? How Foreignness "Solves" Democracy's Prob-

lems. Social Text, 56 (Autumn), 1-27.

Huysmans, J., 2006. The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU.

Routledge, London.

Hynes, M. and Sharpe, S., 2010. Yea-saying laughter. Parallax, 16(3), 44-54.

Isin, E.F., 2008. Theorising Acts of Citizenship. In: E.Isin and G.Nielsen, eds. Acts of

Citizenship. London, Zed Books, 15–43.

Isin, E.F., 2009. Citizenship in flux: The figure of the activist citizen. Subjectivity, 29,

367-388.

Isin, E.F. and Nielsen, G.M., eds., 2008. Acts of Citizenship. London and New York,

Zed Books.

Isin, E.F and Rygiel, K., 2007. Abject spaces: Frontiers, zones, camps. In: E. Dauphinee

and C.Masters, eds. Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror. Hampshire: Palgrave.

Kanstroom, D., 2007. Deportation nation: outsiders in American history. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Laacher, S., 2002. Après Sangatte: Nouvelles Immigrations, nouveaux enjeux. Paris: La

Dispute.

Lemke, T., 2005. A zone of indistinction - A critique of Giorgio Agamben's concept of

biopolitics. Outlines: Critical Social Studies, 7(1) , 3-13.

Lemke, T., 2011. Critique and experience in Foucault. Theory, Culture & Society, 28(4),

26-48.

Lippert, R., 2006. Sanctuary, Sovereignty, Sacrifice: Canadian Sanctuary Incidents,

Power and Law. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Malkki, L., 1996. Speechless emissaries: Refugees, humanitarianism, and dehistoriciza-

tion. Cultural Anthropology, 11(3), 377-404.

McNevin, A., 2006. Political belonging in a neoliberal era: The struggle of the Sans-

Papiers. Citizenship Studies, 10(2), 135–151.

30

Mezzadra, S., 2007. Living in Transition [online]. Transversal, 11-07. Available from

http://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/1107. [Accessed 20 May 2011]

Mezzadra, S., 2011. The gaze of autonomy. Capitalism, migration and social struggles.

In: V. Squires, ed. The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity.

London: Routledge.

Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B., 2008. Border as method, or, the multiplication of labor

[online]. Transversal 06-08. Available from http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/mezzad-

raneilson/en. [Accessed: 10 May 2011:]

Mitropoulos, A., 2007. Autonomy, recognition, movement. In: S. Shukaitis, D. Graeber,

and E. Biddle, eds. Constituent Imagination. Militant Investigations, Collective Theoriz-

ation. Oakland: AK Press, 127-136.

Moulier Boutang, Y., 1998. De l’esclavage au salariat. Économie historique du salariat

bride. Paris: Puf.

Nisbet, R., 1975. Twilight of Authority. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nyers, P., 2003. Abject cosmopolitanism: The politics of protection in the anti-deporta-

tion movement. Third World Quarterly, 24(6), 1069–93.

Nyers, P., 2010. Forms of irregular citizenship. In: V.Squire, ed., The contested politics

of mobility: Borderzones and irregularity. London: Routledge, 35–49

Panagia, D., 1999. The sacredness of life and death: Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer

and the tasks of political thinking [online]. Theory and Event, 3(1). Available from

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v003/3.1r_panagia.html [Accessed: 29

May 2011]

Papadopolous, D. Stephenson, N. and Tsianos, V., 2008. Escape Routes: Control and

Subversion in the 21st Century. London, MI: Pluto Press.

Perera, S. (2002). What is a Camp…? [online]. Borderlands, 1(1) Available from

http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/issues/vol3no1.html [Accessed 5 May

2011].

Rajaram, P. K. and Grundy-Warr, C., eds., 2007. Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies

and Politics at Territory's Edge. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota

Press.

Rancière J., 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. University of Minnesota

Press, Minneapolis.

Rancière J., 2003. Politics and aesthetics: an interview (with Peter Hallward). Angelaki,

8(2) 191-211.

Rancière, J., 2004. Who is the subject of the rights of man? The South Atlantic

Quarterly, 103(2/3), 297-310.

Rancière J., 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Con-

tinuum: New York and London.

Rancière J., 2007a. Misadventures of Universality [online]. Address at the Second Mo-

scow Biennale of Contemporary Art, January 2007. Available from http://2nd.moscow-

biennale.ru/en/rancier_report_en/ [accessed 2 June 2011]

Rancière J., 2007b. The emancipated spectator. Artforum, March, 271-80.

Rancière, J., 2009. Aesthetics and its Discontents. Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press.

32

Roelvink, R., 2010. Collective action and the politics of affect. Emotion, Space and So-

ciety, 3(2), 111-118.

Rygiel, K., 2011. Bordering solidarities: Migrant activism and the politics of movement

and camps at Calais. Citizenship Studies, 15(1), 1-19.

Sharma, N., 2005. Anti-trafficking rhetoric and the making of a global apartheid. NWSA

Journal, 17(3), 88-111.

Ticktin, M., 2006. Where ethics and politics meet: The violence of humanitarianism in

France. American Ethnologist, 33, 33-49.

Tyler, I., 2006. ‘Welcome to Britain': The cultural politics of asylum. European Journal

of Cultural Studies, 9(2), 185-202.

Walters, W., 2002. Deportation, expulsion, and the international police of aliens.

Citizenship Studies, 6(3), 265–292.

Walters, W., 2004. Secure borders, safe haven, domopolitics. Citizenship Studies,

8(3), 237-260.

Walters, W., 2008. Acts of demonstration: Mapping the territory of (non-) citizen-

ship. In: E. Isin and G. Nielsen, eds. Acts of Citizenship. London, Zed Books.

Zaiotti, R., 2007. Revisiting Schengen: Europe and the emergence of a new cul-

ture of border control. Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 8(1), 31-54.

Zielonka, J., 2006. Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European

Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press.