Paper details

Paper authors	Victoria Tecca
In panel on	Everyday violence and resistance in Europe’s ‘migration management’ during the Covid-19 pandemic
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Makeshift migrant camps in Europe’s borderlands are sites of contestation where global political regimes are both observable and embodied in affective and sensorial ways. Through clandestine border crossings, camp residents negotiate alternatives to the state’s monopoly on determining who can and cannot enter. Yet, the very need for irregular crossings reveals the inescapability of the border regime, and camp residents’ illegalisation overwhelmingly colours everyday life. European states use a variety of measures to ‘manage’ these migration flows. One such mechanism is deportation, either through physical force or coercion to join ‘voluntary’ state-assisted return programmes. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, put a halt to many of these flights and programmes, leaving returnees to wait indefinitely. This interruption highlights the way in which returnees sometimes use these programmes as the only way to escape the structural and mundane violence produced by state practice and policy.

Dunkirk, France is home to one of these informal tent settlements. The settlement is continuously built and re-built by Kurdish undocumented migrants as they attempt to reach the United Kingdom to seek asylum. In early 2019, Soma, a 60-year-old Iraqi Kurdish woman, had been trying to cross with her three children for 8 months. After weeks of deliberation, they decided to separate – two of her children crossed to the UK and Soma returned to Kurdistan with her youngest son using a state-assisted programme. This paper engages with the emotions involved in specific moments in her return process, focusing on their materiality and spatiality. In a state of anticipation, Soma swings back and forth between confidence in her decision and anxiety for her future, depending on both her material-affective environment and that of her children as they cross borders simultaneously, but using different pathways. By engaging with the emotions involved in Soma’s process, her case illustrates how state-assisted returns are the final stage of a system of migration management, while at the same time offering a ‘way out’ for many of those subject to everyday forms of state violence.

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