Abstract
When the ‘refugee crisis’ in Calais became an issue of renewed concern in the summer of discontent in 2015, UK’s reticent stance towards the crisis was captured through its measured approach. A notable riposte from the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, was to send in yet more security fencing to fortify the borders in Calais to assuage the disaffect from the truckers and the public. Dubbing this as UK’s ‘razor wire humanitarianism’, the paper examines how the material artefact of the razor wire is implicated in the aesthetic of violence towards the refugee and migrant bodies in the camps of Calais. Designed as a biotechnology to cause injury and trauma and to equally enact a material boundary against bare life (collapsing distinctions between animal and human) the paper utilises the razor wire as a lens to document UK’s treatment of the ‘precarious body’ where it is consigned to deaths and accidents invoking the border as a spectacular of necropolitics of the ‘living dead’.
Highlights
When the ‘refugee crisis’ in Calais became an issue of renewed concern in the summer of discontent in 2015, the United Kingdom’s reticent stance towards the crisis was captured through its measured approach
In being deconstructed as a material artifact against the border politics of Fortress Europe, razor wire performs to a theatre of human struggle of bare life against the sovereign state
The genealogy of razor wire through the biopolitics of the unwanted refugee body reveals an ongoing relationship between pain, trauma, exclusion, and the production of bare life at the border
Summary
When the ‘refugee crisis’ in Calais became an issue of renewed concern in the summer of discontent in 2015, the United Kingdom’s reticent stance towards the crisis was captured through its measured approach. The developments in Calais need to be located within a wider context in which in 2014 the world was positioned as facing its biggest refugee and migration crisis since World War II (UNHCR 2015) This was due to the movement of millions of people (with children constituting almost half of this population) as a result of conflict or persecution and being stranded for years on the edge of society as the long-term internally displaced or refugees. While development aid has enjoyed a more progressive reputation than emergency relief, the different waves of refugees entering Europe have been a testing ground for the British historical ideal of providing sanctuary This so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Calais and the Mediterranean became a theatre for this contracted humanitarianism. The acceptance of refugees from their countries of origin rather than within the E.U. ignites the border as a space of constant expiation and violence while reinforcing the material and symbolic value of the border fortified through razor wire
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