'Bringing Order to Border’: liberal and illiberal racism, technocracy, and postcolonial borders in the English Channel

In 2018 people began to cross the English Channel in significant numbers to seek asylum in the UK using small boats for the first time in several decades. These crossings were produced by the steady development of bordering and policing of the Channel, and the fortification of the port of Calais since the 1960s. These recent small boat crossings have sparked a political ‘crisis’ and a raft of new legislation seeking to criminalise people crossing the Channel, end rights to seek asylum in the UK and 'offshore'; criminalised populations to third countries (including the UK-Rwanda partnership). As has been demonstrated extensively, none of these extreme responses will stop small boat crossings, they will only produce further suffering. In this event, we explore the interaction of two sets of fantasies that are advanced by politicians and mainstream political parties in the UK to 'stop the boats'.

That is: the liberal technocratic fantasy - that this phenomenon can be efficiently ‘fixed’ through interventions in policing and multilateral cooperation with neighbouring EU states; and illiberal fantasy that extreme and performative punishments can solve it. These fantasies intersect and break at different points in time, ultimately feeding each other. They involve many of the same policy solutions which are represented in different terms. Importantly, both of these fantasies reproduce colonial racist logics and ultimately serve border imperialism.

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About the speakers

• Dr Lucy Mayblin, Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology University of Sheffield
• Dr Thom Davies, Associate Professor, School of Geography, University of Nottingham
• Dr Arshad Isakjee, Senior Lecturer, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Liverpool
• Dr Joe Turner, Senior Lecturer, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of York
• Dr Tesfalem Yemane, Research Associate, University of Liverpool