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When the ‘refugee crisis’ in Calais became an issue of renewed concern in the summer of discontent in 2015, UK’s reticent stance towards the crisis was captured through its measured approach. A notable riposte from the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, was to send in yet more security fencing to fortify the borders in Calais to assuage the disaffect from the truckers and the public. Dubbing this as UK’s ‘razor wire humanitarianism’, the paper examines how the material artefact of the razor wire is implicated in the aesthetic of violence towards the refugee and migrant bodies in the camps of Calais. Designed as a biotechnology to cause injury and trauma and to equally enact a material boundary against bare life (collapsing distinctions between animal and human) the paper utilises the razor wire as a lens to document UK’s treatment of the ‘precarious body’ where it is consigned to deaths and accidents invoking the border as a spectacular of necropolitics of the ‘living dead’.

Jean Raspail’s controversial 1973 novel The camp of the saints predicts mass migration to Europe that will destroy European civilization. Decades later, the book has accurately predicted the hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving in Europe annually, prompting a continent-wide crisis. From Lesbos and Lampedusa to the Canary Islands and Calais, no one seems to know how to stem the flow of humanity. Borders are being resurrected, despite Schengen and European Union (EU) agreements, in an effort to control the movement of populations. European governments disagree on how to proceed and some are suggesting that the EU could be torn apart by differing approaches to the problem. But does this have to be the response to the migration crisis? This paper compares the predictions of The camp of the saints to events in Europe today and critiques the book’s conclusions with regard to what is an ancient phenomenon: movements of migrants from surplus to deficit labor settings. The paper will also evaluate the response to migrants in the United States under its populist president, Donald Trump, and will review related issues in other parts of the world: Turkey, Russia, and Canada. Contrary to Raspail’s predictions, world leaders will need to accept what has already become a de facto reality: large scale admission of migrants and refugees to the EU and North America, as full citizens, will be the only realistic way to preserve prosperity in the years to come.

This paper examines how racial violence underpins the European Union’s border regime. Drawing on two case studies, in northern France and the Balkans, we explore how border violence manifests in divergent ways: from the direct physical violence which is routine in Croatia, to more subtle forms of violence evident in the governance of migrants and refugees living informally in Calais, closer to Europe’s geopolitical centre. The use of violence against people on the move sits uncomfortably with the liberal, post‐racial self‐image of the European Union. Drawing upon the work of postcolonial scholars and theories of violence, we argue that the various violent technologies used by EU states against migrants embodies the inherent logics of liberal governance, whilst also reproducing liberalism’s tendency to overlook its racial limitations. By interrogating how and why border violence manifests we draw critical attention to the racialised ideologies within which it is predicated. This paper characterises the EU border regime as a form of “liberal violence” that seeks to elide both its violent nature and its racial underpinnings.

This paper investigates legal and political advocacy of lawyers and civil society organisers in the United Kingdom on behalf of unaccompanied children seeking international protection. In 2015, civil society activists and lawyers in London partnered to assist children in Calais, France, who made the harrowing journey to reach Europe in the hopes of reuniting with family residing in the UK. By turning to the UK courts and engaging in public advocacy, lawyers and activists united hundreds of unaccompanied children with their family members, achieving remarkable legal mobilisation success, despite the country’s antagonistic environment for asylum seekers. Drawing on socio-legal scholarship and empirical studies of effective legal mobilisation, this paper explores whether partnership between lawyers and civil rights activists makes overcoming structural and cultural barriers to accessing courts, winning in court, and attaining practical policy change more likely. It highlights the benefits of lawyer-civil society collaboration and identifies the hazards of invoking unaccompanied children’s vulnerability as a means to achieve far-reaching political change.

This paper focuses on the “grey area of migration governmentality” by dealing with modes of border violence which are opaque and remain under the threshold of political visibility and that, however, highly disrupt and hamper migrants' lives and movements. It starts by conceptualising the notion of “grey area” by building on scholarship that questions the biopolitical formula “making live/letting die” highlighting modes of governing migration through choking and injuring. Building on that, the paper shows that the grey area consists of heterogenous political technologies that choke migrants and disrupt their infrastructures of liveability. In light of that, it moves on by analysing how migrants across Europe are contained and governed by being choked and cramped, with a specific focus on Calais and Ventimiglia. The third section shows that to be disrupted are not only migrants’ but also their infrastructures of liveability: migrants are hampered from building collective spaces of life. In the last part, the article comes to grips with opacity as a constitutive feature of the grey area of governmentality, analysing how this is played out both in local decrees and through police tactics.

PurposeIn total, 90,000 of the 1.26 million people applying for asylum in the EU in 2015 were unaccompanied children. The Dublin III Regulations provided a unique legal situation where unaccompanied young people in the Calais Jungle potentially had the right to be reunited with family in the UK. The purpose of this paper is to explore the substantial challenges presented by carrying out medico-legal assessment of this group in the Calais Jungle.Design/methodology/approachThe authors consider the refugee crisis from a mental health and legal perspective. The authors provide two case examples to contextualise and describe the work. The authors draw from the observations and the literature to discuss the impact of living in the Calais Jungle on young people, the challenges the authors overcame to carry out the assessments and the needs of refugees following settling in the UK.FindingsThe authors conclude that the Calais Jungle was a toxic environment not suitable for young refugees’ continued emotional development or recovery from trauma. The current legal process to relocate a young person to the UK is time consuming and labour intensive. The authors note that these concerns are not unique to the Jungle, nor have they ended with its demolition. The difficulties young refugees face with mental illness continues following their arrival to the UK.Originality/valueThis was the first successful attempt since the Dublin III Regulations to seek a legal route to bring unaccompanied refugee minors from France to the UK. This paper was co-written by both the legal and mental health professionals involved in the cases providing a broad opinion across both disciplines.

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.

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The ongoing emergency for refugees is having profound and hidden health consequences for thousands of displaced persons who live in informal ‘makeshift’ camps across Europe. This interdisciplinary paper reports the results of the first environmental health assessment in such a location, in what was Europe’s largest informal refugee camp in 2016, in Calais, northern France. We detail the lack of facilities for sanitation, safe provision of food, water and shelter, demonstrating how conditions fall short of agreed international standards for formal refugee camps. Rather than the notion of migrants being the cause of health problems, this paper critically reveals the hidden materiality of bodily injury caused by poor health conditions, where the camp itself produces harm. Drawing upon theories of biopolitical exclusion, the paper concludes by (i) emphasising the empirical and conceptual themes that tie refugee politics and biologies together and (ii) makes a call for increased attention to makeshift camps as key sites of health exclusion in Europe and beyond.

This paper presents the evolution of public transport contracts in France and the historical and legal contexts which led to their reorganisation. We first examine the evolution of the territorial distribution of institutional powers in transportation mainly for passengers. A focus is made on the regional passenger railway reform in France that allowed the 20 French metropolitan regions to become transport organising authorities following a first experiment by seven volunteer regions. The Nord-Pas de Calais region is taken as an example. Then the urban public transport contracts are analysed focussing on different possibilities of contract and finally, the specific case of transport organisation in the Paris Île de France region is studied.; Cet article présente l'évolution des contrats de transport public en France et les contextes historiques et juridiques qui ont conduit à leur réorganisation. Nous examinons d'abord l'évolution de la répartition territoriale des compétences en matière de transport pour les passagers. L'accent est mis sur les réformes régionales des chemins de fer en France qui ont permis aux 20 régions métropolitaines françaises de devenir des autorités organisatrices des transports pour le TER après une première expérience de sept régions volontaires. La région Nord-Pas de Calais est prise comme exemple. Ensuite, les contrats de transport public urbain sont analysés en mettant l'accent sur différentes possibilités de contrat, en particulier la Délégation de Service Public, et enfin, le cas spécifique de l'organisation du transport dans la région parisienne de l'Île de France en France est étudié.

Riassunto L'articolo prende spunto dalla vicenda della jungle di Calais per interrogare i margini e le condizioni di un agire migrante nell'orizzonte europeo. Riferendosi al celebre articolo di Spivak “Can Subaltern Speak”, il contributo vuole considerare il processo di neutralizzazione (giuridica e esistenziale) che investe il migrante nelle sue varie fasi e situazioni di accesso alla società di “accoglienza”, e il suo impatto sulla soggettività migrante, prima di illustrare alcune declinazioni di un agency che cerca di smarcarsi rispetto al dispositivo in essere. Abstract Starting from Calais jungle's events, this paper investigates the margins and the conditions of a migrant agency into the European horizon. Referring to the famous Spivak's paper “Can Subaltern Speak”, this contribution means to consider the neutralization process (in a juridical and existantial pov), investing the migrant in different phases and steps in order to yield to the “host” society, and the impact that all of this has on the migrant's subjectivity. In its final part, the paper describes some examples used by an agency which tries to avoid this capture and neutralization dispositive.

L'articolo prende spunto dalla vicenda della jungle di Calais per interrogare i margini e le condizioni di un agire migrante nell'orizzonte europeo. Riferendosi al celebre articolo di Spivak “can subaltern speak”, il contributo vuole considerare il processo di neutralizzazione (giuridica e esistenziale) che investe il migrante nelle sue varie fasi e situazioni di accesso alla societa di “accoglienza”, e il suo impatto sulla soggettivita migrante, prima di illustrare alcune declinazioni di un agency che cerca di smarcarsi rispetto al dispositivo in essere. Starting from Calais jungle's events, this paper investigates the margins and the conditions of a migrant agency into the European horizon. Referring to the famous Spivak's paper “Can Subaltern Speak”, this contribution means to consider the neutralization process (in a juridical and existantial pov), investing the migrant in different phases and steps in order to yield to the “host” society, and the impact that all of this has on the migrant's subjectivity. In its final part, the paper describes some examples used by an agency which tries to avoid this capture and neutralization dispositive.

Media are intrinsically implicated in constructing and framing space as well as in the imagination of communities. This paper examines how media through the spatial construct of the ‘jungle’ premises the discourses of migration between the borders of UK and France. We argue that newspapers impose a cartography by invoking a social imaginary of a bounded community sustained through imagined boundaries. Metaphors such as the ‘jungle’ function as spatialisation techniques to not only renew the sacrosanct boundaries of a nation-state, but they also become instrumental tools in invoking fear, anxiety and the visceral in migrant discourses. Conceptually, the paper argues that media sustains ‘an imagined community’ by techniques of spatialisation which encode politics of space in migrant discourses. These discourses are central in sustaining and enacting a social imaginary, where space framing and construction become tools to imagine and locate communities and to exclude the ‘other’.

Cette contribution interroge le statut des langues (arabe, français, anglais) dans l’espace d’entre-deux de la frontière Calais-Douvres. Dans « espace frontière » spécifique où des tensions se manifestent constamment entre la survie et l’urgence à Calais et l’espoir de (re)construire un foyer en Angleterre, les langues interagissent et une langue-frontière émerge entre les langues, les imaginaires et les expériences d’exil. Dans cet entre-deux, comment le chercheur (re)pense-t-il son rôle, ses positions et ses pratiques (linguistiques) ? Cet article se concentre également sur l’utilisation de la traduction tout au long de la procédure d’asile au Royaume-Uni comme un outil politique et violent pour dissuader les demandeurs d’asile. This contribution questions the status of languages (Arabic, French, English) in the in-between space of the Calais-Dover border. In this “border-space” where tensions constantly arise between survival and emergency in Calais and hope to (re)build a home in England, languages interact and a border-language emerges between languages, imaginaries and exile’s experiences. In this in-between, how does the researcher (re) think his/her role, positions and (language) practices ? This paper focuses also on the use of translation throughout the UK asylum process as a political and violent tool to deter asylum seekers.

In response to contemporary forms of human mobility, there has been a continued hardening of borders seeking to deter, control and exclude certain groups of people from entering nation states in Europe, North America and Australasia. Within this context, a disconcerting evolution of new and increasingly sophisticated forms of border control measures have emerged, which often play out within bilateral arrangements of “externalised” or “offshore” border controls. Drawing on extensive first‐hand field research among displaced people in Calais, Paris and Brussels in 2016–2019, this paper argues that the externalization of the British border to France is contingent upon a harmful strategy, which can be understood as the “politics of exhaustion.” This is a raft of (micro) practices and methods strategically aimed to deter, control and exclude certain groups of people on the move who have been profiled as “undesirable,” with a detrimental (un)intended impact on human lives.

This paper explores the large map as an innovative visual art tool in a frontline art therapy project with refugees. In a volatile and hostile setting on the France-UK border at Calais, inhospitabl...

While European governments have pursued illegalized migrants for decades, the techniques through which they do so have taken a more radical turn since 2015. Focusing on the particular case of Belgium, this paper documents how its Federal government has increasingly tried to “police” migrants into the European refugee regime, while migrants and citizens have continued to resist these efforts through a series of “political” actions. Drawing on ethnographic work with the Brussels‐based Citizen Platform for the Support of Refugees, I pursue two aims: first, I demonstrate how the Belgian state has consciously produced a humanitarian crisis as part of a broader “politics of exhaustion”; and second, I explore the specific forms and types of humanitarian action that emerge from citizens’ response to these policies. I do so by describing three moments in which these opposing logics of policing and politicization conjure.

This paper explores how a multimodal narrative methodology can open a creative, relational and safe space, in which refugee-storytellers negotiate their positioning within racialised power imbalanc...

International audience; This article aims to explore the legal consciousness of migrant children in transit at the France-UK border. Based on the secondary analysis of legal measures to help ensure child protection, and on ethnographic fieldwork in Calais, this paper shows that the legal consciousness of migrant children is shaped by several factors such as their experience of migration, their previous interactions with public institutions in Europe, their living conditions in transit areas, the police strategy of harassment, the influence of migrant peers, and by their own migration plans. We will show that the combination of these elements deeply impacts on the legal consciousness of unaccompanied minors, and consequently both their (non-)claim of protection and (non-)use of legal tools. From a methodological point of view, we will also show the importance of adopting a child-centred approach in doing ethnographic research to highlight discrepancies between policy aims and children’s needs.

The Calais canal is located in the north of the France. It is used for navigation but mainly to discharge the excess water volumes that are issued from the Wateringues. The Wateringues are lowlands in maritime plains below high sea level (polders). The water in excess in the Wateringues are pumped to the canal, routed to the sea outlet and then discharged by gates during low tide and by outlet pumps during high tide. The management of the Calais canal is based on a Logic Control (LC) based regulation. It consists in keeping its water close to an objective by discharging water in excess to the sea and by limiting the use of outlet pumps. This management mode can be compared to more elaborate methods coming from the Automatic Control domain. This paper aims at presenting the current state of a simulation tool dedicated to the design of these control methods. The simulation tool aims at reproducing the dynamics of the Calais canal keeping the required properties for the design of control methods. The proposed simulation tool implements the LC approach allowing to better understand the management rules, to replay scenarios and in a close future to compare these methods with more elaborate control approaches.

Refugee camps are frequently conceived as spaces in which social and political life is reduced to biological concerns of survival or ‘bare’ life. Yet, for researchers who focus on life in the camp as it is lived, through material adaption, social negotiation and resistance, this Agambenian perspective is unsatisfactory. Instead, a relation is made apparent between practises of everyday life and the manifestation of a politics. This paper argues for the importance of Hannah Arendt's writings for a new understanding of how refugee camp inhabitants can develop and sustain political agency. First, it will highlight the relation by observations and analysis of ‘the jungle’ in Calais, France. This unofficial camp, although short-lived, has influenced a broad spectrum of research including examination of spatial political practice. Second, applying a phenomenological reading of Arendt's work, I argue that political agency emerges through the concept of world-building. World-building results from the conjunction of human activities – from the quotidian, like labour and work, to the exceptional cases of action – and their orientation towards a specific type of visibility. World-building manifests as camp inhabitants erect spaces of meaning that engage a plurality of persons, transforming them into political agents.

This paper examines transferable knowledge from the work of citizen volunteers addressing migrant needs in Europe, relevant to social work with migrants at border hotspots. The discussion is based on a case study conducted in the unofficial Calais camp in June 2016, which included semi-structured interviews with long-term volunteers; participant observation; and field and reflective notes. The inductive analysis examined volunteer experience, and mechanisms and values underpinning their decision-making at critical moments in the camp’s history. Starting from the observation that the circumstances at the border were a liminal, ‘in-between’, space (Turner, 1969) in which migrants lived in limbo between leaving and arriving, and between cultures, life styles, and identities, we examined the implications for workers who experienced this environment by proxy, and how they developed a service infrastructure in these conditions. A horizontal, contribution working model emerged in the context of a strong bond between workers, shared human experience with camp residents, and powerful intrinsic motivation informed by a sense of duty to care. Implications for social work are discussed in the context of the profession’s search for clarity of its role in addressing grand global challenges, including forced migration.

During World War Two, three unique weapons were proposed to meet Adolf Hitler’s wish for vengeance and retribution against the British which he believed would finally yield victory to the Nazi side. They all required substantial technical development of new concepts. This paper gives a broad description of the last and potentially-devastating V3, which was intended for installation in the Pas de Calais to completely destroy London.

Latapy A.; Hequette A.; Nicolle A., and Pouvreau N., 2020. Assessing the influence of changes in shoreface morphology since the 19th century on nearshore hydrodynamics and shoreline evolution in northern France: A modeling approach In: Malvarez, G. and Navas, F. (eds.), Global Coastal Issues of 2020. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 95, pp. 542–547. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.The shoreface off the coast of northern France is characterized by the presence of numerous tidal sand banks, forming linear shore-parallel or slightly oblique massive sand bodies. Digitization of historic hydrographic field sheets from the French Hydrographic Service (Shom) archives enabled to produce Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) of the seabed morphology at different dates since the early 19th century. Our analyses of bathymetry changes based on differential DEMs showed significant morphological variations across the shoreface near Calais during the 19th and 20th centuries, which are largely due to changes in nearshore sand bank morphology and position. Sand bank mobility can be partially explained by tidal current asymmetry, inducing an elongation and an alongshore migration of this sand body in the direction of the net residual tidal current. Observed changes in shoreface and nearshore morphology attempt to be related with possible variations in hydrodynamics, this paper presenting the results obtained on tidal currents. TELEMAC-2D model was used to simulate 2D velocity field and water depth during a spring and neap tidal cycle over bathymetry grids based on historical bathymetric soundings. Depending on the bathymetric setting, modeling of tidal residual currents revealed notable increases or decreases in residual current velocity during distinct time periods, particularly in nearshore areas, which may lead to seabed erosion where current strengthening is observed through time or conversely to sediment accumulation in areas of decreasing current velocity. These results are consistent with the shoreline changes that occurred during the 20th century, with a correspondence between nearshore areas of decreasing (or increasing) residual current velocity and adjacent shorelines that were affected by seaward progradation (or erosion), suggesting strong links between changes in seabed morphology over the shoreface and shoreline evolution.

Procedia Computer Science Volume 178 The management of hydrographical systems is still mainly based on the expertise of the managers. Although this expertise enables the efficient management of these networks under normal conditions, modifications due to human activities or climate change could lead them to manage situations that were not known until now. In addition, advances in Automation, Computing Science and Artificial Intelligence provide tools and methods to assist the managers. In particular, the use of tele-remote systems, as SCADA, allows the collection of data and the control of hydraulic devices. Today, by benefiting from the power of computers and servers, the digital twins of hydrographical networks can be designed. A digital twin aims to faithfully reproduce the dynamics of a canal. It is used to play-back past scenarios allowing feedback of applied management strategies and fast simulations with predictive and adaptive management strategies to determine their performances and giving decision aid criteria for the managers. The objective of the presented paper is to define the framework for a digital twin of the Canal of Calais.

Across European cities, migrants without access to state facilities, resort to living in ‘makeshift camps’ or squats. These settlements are usually evacuated and demolished by state authorities. Instead of discussing the state’s positive obligation to provide decent housing, this article focusses solely on the state’s negative obligations under the right to respect for a home as laid down in Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights (echr). Drawing upon the cases of Calais and Amsterdam, this article scrutinizes domestic case law about evictions from (in)formal migrant settlements and compares that to case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). We argue that the ECtHR case law provides a relevant framework that should be used to evaluate the legitimacy of evictions and destructions of (in)formal migrants’ settlements. Despite the fact that applying this framework would not entail a complete ban on evictions, it would provide some welcome (procedural and substantive) protection for migrants.

This paper follows Thomas Faist's invitation to analyse the prominence that migration issues have acquired in European and North American political discourses and public perceptions. It situates mobility, beyond usual dichotomies between voluntary and forced migration, in the increasing global landscape of exclusion that characterizes today's world. It proposes as a working hypothesis that mobility can be seen as a testimony of the immorality of the global polity and as a political act subverting classical forms of state territoriality and contesting the distribution of wealth. This general point is illustrated with ethnographic vignettes on Afghans on the island of Lesbos, the port of entry in Europe for many of them, in Friuli, on the north-eastern border of Italy, and finally in the jungle of Calais, where many candidates to asylum ended up in very precarious living conditions.

In 2016, thousands of young migrants were stranded in Calais, France, in the “Jungle” refugee camp. This paper aims to provide an overview of the British Red Cross's response and of how the organization engaged in numerous activities to secure their safety, culminating in a transfer of children to the United Kingdom.

This paper contributes to discussions on humanitarian advocacy. The European migration regime as constituted by the Dublin regulation, the EU‐Turkey deal and border deals with Libya among others, contributes to generating migration pressure points where migrants find themselves stuck and in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. Assistance and protection at these sites, inasmuch as they are available, are provided by a makeshift humanitarian arena of volunteer organizations, activists, national social welfare agencies, human rights organizations, international humanitarian organizations and UN agencies. Drawing on interviews and field research, this article analyses the relations between, and advocacy practices of, various actors within humanitarian arenas in three settings: Calais (France), Lesbos (Greece) and Libya. The article reveals how many humanitarians at these pressure points feel disempowered in the scope of their action beyond the provision of limited services, and abandoned by established agencies, especially the UNHCR. They feel that humanitarian principles are not enough to guide their actions in these cases. Emerging advocacy practices at these sites suggest that web‐based humanitarian advocacy based on actor complementarity may be a way forward, making advocacy more effective and contributing to better motivate aid workers who feel disempowered in these contexts.

In late summer 1478, a dozen married merchants challenged their bachelor brothers to an archery match. The surviving invitation, found amongst the papers of the wool merchant Cely family, provides rare evidence for mercantile socialising outside of formal feasts, and is particularly notable for its use of a sporting event as a corporate activity. As Raewyn Connell argues in her seminal book Masculinities, the ‘institutional organization of sport embeds definite social relations: competition and hierarchy among men, exclusion or domination of women…. The performance is symbolic and kinetic, social and bodily, at one and the same time’. Synthesising and expanding on the work of other prominent sociologists, she claims that organised sports play a key role in male identity formation – not just in allowing men to demonstrate individual physical prowess, but more significantly in establishing collective masculine experiences that form a keystone of hegemonic male culture.