Deterritorialising the Jungle: Understanding the Calais camp through its orderings

Abstract

Research on refugee camps and camp-like institutions has gained momentum over the last few decades, as camps have been spreading everywhere in Europe under the impact of the massive increase of migrants stuck at border zones. While early conceptualisations are based on the paradigm of the exception, some scholars have recently posited camps as socio-political spaces which are negotiated and reproduced by the everyday entanglements of the multiple bodies that contribute to their making. This article aims to make a contribution to this strand of literature by understanding camps as the temporary result of spatial and material processes of ordering. By grounding my reasoning on fieldwork in Calais, I explore the countless negotiations and the attunement of multiple rhythms that organised and segmented the Jungle. I focus on the territories built by aid groups, the state and stuff, namely the supplies that flew into the encampment, how their assembling produced orderings and control, and how those orderings shaped the political space of the camp. This territorial account aims to stress the role of the affective and the material in mediating encounters that may produce new orderings while opening up to lines of flight and the configuration of political matter.