The affective economy of ‘self-deportation’: materiality, spatiality, temporality

Abstract

ABSTRACT The increased securitisation of the borders bounding and intersecting Europe has led to the formation of makeshift tent settlements along established routes of irregular migration. Built at permeable border points, illegalised migrants live in these informal camps while they attempt to cross into a neighbouring country. One such camp, Dankix, lies on the northern French coast in the outskirts of Grande-Synthe. While its Kurdish inhabitants aim to cross the Channel to the United Kingdom, some return to Kurdistan using the state’s programme of retour volontaire, or ‘voluntary return’. I examine the affective economy of state-assisted return through the experiences of one family as they move between the social and juridical categories of illegalised and legalised. As they simultaneously cross borders thousands of miles apart, they circulate affective energies that contain particular material, spatial, and temporal dimensions. This affective economy both reveals and transforms the relationships between emplacement, belonging, and illegalisation.