‘They tell us to keep our distance, but we sleep five people in one tent’: The opportunistic governance of displaced people in Calais during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

When COVID-19 hit France, over 1,000 migrant people were living in insalubrious encampments in the northern city of Calais. A national lockdown was declared in March 2020, and in the face of the health risks the virus posed, it seemed the ongoing struggle between police and displaced people at this border might come to a halt. This article however argues that rather than appeasing tensions, the state leveraged the exceptional mobility regimes the pandemic brought about to strengthen its border deterrence. Drawing on 5 months of ethnographic research in Calais in the first half of 2020, and on interviews with displaced respondents and humanitarian workers through 2020 and 2021, I conceptualise the biopolitical mode of governance mobilised by the state against displaced people during this period as one of necropolitical opportunism. The lockdown period saw displaced people’s survival at the border compromised by continued attacks on their encampments and access to services, as well as on the work of autonomous humanitarians seeking to hold the state accountable for its violence. This article contributes important new insights to debates on border biopolitics and the specific necropolitical agenda pursued by the French state at its northern frontier.