ARTICLE IN PRESS

Political Geography (2015)

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Political Geography
j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s e v i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / p o l g e o

Guest Editorial

Geography, migration and abandonment in the Calais refugee camp

Keywords:
Migration
Calais
Refugees
Abandonment
Necropolitics

Notes from the new jungle in Calais

From Lampedusa in Italy to Calais in France, a constellation of camps
has spread across the continent. With the Mediterranean migration crisis
continuing to unleash privation and mortality on the bodies of countless migrants, the camp is fast becoming Europes unocial answer;
a de facto solution to European political inertia. Having witnessed the
birth of one such refugee camp the new Jungle in Calais this editorial asks how we can respond to the prodigious and increasingly
necropolitical (Mbembe, 2003) realities of the migration emergency.
On April 5, 2015, French riot police forcibly removed around 1500
irregular migrants and asylum seekers from their encampments
around the port town of Calais. As human geographers we were there
to bear witness, and walking through one of the cleared Jungle
camps a few days later we could see the destroyed remnants of a
camp forcibly abandoned. Twigs and tent poles crunching underfoot, we could see the skeletal remains of bulldozed tents, and hastily
abandoned clothes, tinned food, cutlery and shoes; an instant archaeology of the migration crisis. The discarded belongings of those
not allowed to belong. Scattered all around us in half-burnt piles
was the vibrant matter (Bennett, 2010) of displacement, a materiality infused with contested political significance (Squire, 2014).
Written on the bark of one tree in the middle of the destroyed camp,
a former resident had carved the message Fuck Europe (Fig. 1).
Having walked a mile further east of Calais, we entered the zone
that has become known as the new Jungle. French authorities have
now forced almost all of Calais migrants onto a single derelict site
on the edge of the towns boundary. Situated on a former industrial dumping ground adjacent to a chemical factory and motorway,
thousands of migrants now live en masse in ramshackle structures. Just one water point services the entire population of the
growing camp, forcing migrants to drag trolleys of water up to a
kilometre through sand dunes back to their self-built shelters. A local
charity provides one meal a day for those it can, but beyond that
the migrants survive on scant donations of tinned food. This new
camp, in all its impoverished and deliberate indignity, can be seen
as part of a matrix of politics and practices designed to force migrants back along their pathways of expulsion (Rygiel, 2011, 5).
I bet Obama and Cameron dont have showers like this joked
Dawud, a Pakistani participant from the Swat Valley, as we sat in
his camp drinking tea. He had just shown us his rudimentary

Fig. 1. In the forcibly abandoned old Jungle camp near Calais a former resident of
the encampment has carved a political message on a tree. Photograph by Thom Davies.

washing area made from salvaged wooden crates and plastic sheeting (Fig. 2). Its all very well giving us towels explained another
migrant from ISIS-controlled Iraq, holding his hygiene-pack donated
by Mdecins du Monde, but we dont have anywhere to wash.
A lack of sanitation poses a real threat to public health, with many
residents of the camp forced to defecate close to where they sleep
and prepare food. Doctors working for NGOs report having detected cases of tuberculosis and gangrene as well as widespread

Fig. 2. One of the many self-built washing structures in the refugee camp in Calais.
Photograph by Thom Davies.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.08.003
0962-6298/ 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: Thom Davies, Arshad Isakjee, Political Geography (2015), doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.08.003

ARTICLE IN PRESS
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Guest Editorial/Political Geography (2015)

scabies and claim that French medical professionals are refusing

to treat injured migrants.
A cheek by jowl campzenship (Sigona, 2015) has emerged in
the increasingly overcrowded encampment. This has fostered political solidarity and togetherness, but also created tension. There
was a big fight last night said an Afghan participant one morning
in the camp, rubbing his eyes from lack of sleep. He described a brawl
between Eritreans and Sudanese residents: There were too many
stone throwings, too many, he continued. For the first time, all nationalities have been forced into one camp, creating conflicts over
scarce resources.
Violent abandonment
Since our first visit to the so-called new Jungle camp in April 2015,
the population had more than doubled to over 3000 residents by
June. Indeed, the Mediterranean migration crisis shows no sign of
abating. In the first half of 2015, an estimated 137,000 migrants have
successfully made their way into Europe (UNHCR, 2015), with thousands of others perishing on desert roads and mountain passes,
before they even reach the deadly seas along the boundary of
Shengens soft underbelly (Pastore, Monzini, & Sciortino, 2006). With
Italian and Greek authorities unable to provide for the staggering
numbers of arrivals, Europe is seeing thousands of migrants travelling every month through its borders. Around 1% of those who
seek refuge in Europe end up at Calais.
For many of the migrants we interviewed, Calais represents the
apogee of more than 6 months of border crossing, danger, and the
ever-present violence of transit. Yet it is only a momentary pause
on an onward journey of informal mobility leading towards the UK.
For others the camp has become a seemingly permanent halt to mobility, with some migrants having lived informally around the port
town for over a year. In interviews, stories of kidnap, torture, murder
and the huge financial and bodily cost of irregular migration sit
alongside the hidden violence of abandonment within the camp
(Davies & Polese, 2015, 38). For others, this was the second arduous
journey into Schengen space, having had their previous migration
cut short by the disciplined mobility (Moran, Piacentini, & Pallot,
2012) of compulsory deportation. For everyone interviewed however,
violence has transmuted over space, and the camp in all its official and informal forms has been a constant presence.
These camps are a stark reminder that the phenomenon of the
Mediterranean migration emergency is a more-than-maritime crisis.
The struggles that migrants face do not stop at the shores of Europe.
Instead, the Mediterranean journey is merely one phase of migrants struggle. From our research we know that migrants who have
come to Europe and applied for asylum through ocial channels
have often ended up without provisions of food or shelter. There
are instances of migrants being denied access to healthcare to which
they should be entitled, being prevented from travel despite having
correct documentation and not being protected by police when assaulted by racist thugs all within EU countries. The violence
wrought on migrants in Europe starkly recalls Mbembes (2003)
notion of the violence of letting die a situation in which individuals are not activity made to die, as in the case of genocide (Gilbert
& Ponder, 2014) but are suffering a violent abandonment through
political neglect. As a result, migrants and refugees who are forced
to navigate the labyrinth of camps as they journey throughout Europe
are exposed to conditions that consign large numbers of people to
lead short and limited lives (Li, 2010, 3).
The role of geographers
The situation that has led to the conditions in Calais should be
of particular concern to political geographers, who are well placed

to unpick the structural and political dynamics that have created

the circumstances witnessed in the new Jungle and other migrant
camps of the growing enforcement archipelago (Mountz, 2011, 118).
Indeed, this is evidenced by the 91 migration-related articles previously published in Political Geography, as well as the recent Virtual
Special Issue of this journal (Kuusisto-Arponen & Gilmartin, 2015).
Political geography is uniquely positioned to uncover the political, economic and cultural structures that expose vulnerable groups
to the realities of de facto abandonment. Excellent critical scholarship also abounds in related sub-disciplines such as camp studies
(Millner, 2013; Minca, 2015; Ramadan, 2013; Sigona, 2015), which
continues to highlight the contested political agency of those forced
to dwell in camp spaces, or carceral geography (Moran, 2015; Moran,
Gill, & Conlon, 2013; Mountz, 2011), which reveals the increasingly punitive way that informal migration is managed. Studies of
mobilities (Adey, 2006; Gill, Caletrio, & Mason, 2011; Martin, 2011)
and borders (Loyd, Mitchelson, & Burridge, 2013; Millner, 2011; Rigby
& Schlembach, 2013; Vaughan-Williams, 2015a) are also central to
understanding the global migration crisis and processes of displacement, and provide firm foundations upon which advancement
of knowledge can take place. These are often paired with theoretical engagements with Rancire, Arendt, Mbembe, de Certeau,
Foucault, and the ever-present Agamben.
On his treatise on the geographies of the camp, Minca rightly
suggests that academics must demonstrate genuine political commitment, good critical theory and substantial and provocative
empirical work (Minca, 2015, 8). This call is one we would all
support. Yet sitting in the squalor of the Calais refugee camp we
made another observation. Our effort to witness the unfolding situation was one of a number of activities taking place. Aid agencies,
under resourced and dependent on volunteers, were struggling to
attend to injured migrants most basic needs; state institutional
power was being spatialised through the construction of barbedwire security fences to restrict migrants onward mobility; journalists
were attending the camp to write stories to advocate for or denigrate. And out of view from all in the camp, political discourses were
being operationalised, resulting most notably in the UK Prime Minister describing residents of the camp as a swarm, contributing to
the zoopolitical framing of irregular migrants through less-thanhuman metaphors (Vaughan-Williams, 2015b). But what were we
doing there?
Standing in the new Jungle camp in Calais, outside a church
made of scrap plywood and tarpaulin sheets (Fig. 3), an NGO

Fig. 3. The old church in the new Jungle refugee camp in Calais, made of donated
and scrap material. This church has since burnt down, and has been rebuilt by volunteers and members of the Eritrean community in the camp. Photograph by Thom
Davies.

Please cite this article in press as: Thom Davies, Arshad Isakjee, Political Geography (2015), doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.08.003

ARTICLE IN PRESS
Guest Editorial/Political Geography (2015)

volunteer, on learning that we were geographers, remarked: Its

all very well doing your geography-landscape-survey thing, but we
need your shoes! The volunteer may have misunderstood the
breadth of our discipline, but succeeded in making us confront a
timely challenge. What role can we as geographers play in this crisis?
Conflict of interest
No conflicts of interest.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Dominique Moran, Surindar Dhesi, Colin Lorne
and Phil Emmerson for comments on an earlier draft, and to James
Sidaway and Phil Steinberg for encouraging us to write this editorial. This collaborative research is supported by the ESRC via an
Impact Accelerator Account [ES/M500446/1]. We are grateful for the
assistance of Emmaus and Doctors of the World. Initial ideas for this
thought piece were presented at the Political Geography Workshop at the University of Birmingham in June 2015, organised by
Adam Ramadan. All names of research participants in the editorial have been changed to protect their identities.
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Thom Davies *, Arshad Isakjee

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University
of Birmingham, UK
* School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences,
University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK.
Tel.: +44 (0)121 414 3282.
E-mail address: davies.thom@gmail.com.

Please cite this article in press as: Thom Davies, Arshad Isakjee, Political Geography (2015), doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.08.003

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