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Journal of Political Power
ISSN: 2158-379X (Print) 2158-3803 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpow21
Routing the camp: experiential authority in a
politics of irregular migration
Naomi Millner
To cite this article: Naomi Millner (2013) Routing the camp: experiential authority
in a politics of irregular migration, Journal of Political Power, 6:1, 87-105, DOI:
10.1080/2158379X.2013.774978
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2013.774978
Published online: 30 Apr 2013.
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Routing the camp: experiential authority in a politics of irregular
migration
Naomi Millner*
Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
Often approached through Giorgio Agamben’s work, the camp-like spaces asso-
ciated with asylum-seeking and refuge in Europe have been portrayed as sites
of abjection to a predatory sovereign logic. In this article, I claim this reading
overlooks the forms of authority in play at such sites. Through a theoretical
interrogation of a politics of irregular migration and an empirical investigation
of No Borders’practices, I emphasise the ‘experiential’forms of authority
through which subjects are already taking and remaking the meaning of citizen-
ship. Through Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of politics and sense, I argue that
the task of discerning productions of experiential authority within new geogra-
phies of mobility is a critical political task of our time.
Keywords: authority; irregular migration; ethics; experience
Introduction
Forming the point of departure for this theoretical intervention is a moment and site
of contention, in which ethical responses and responsibilities toward irregular
migrants were being phrased in new ways. This is the French port of Calais in Sep-
tember 2009, when the squatter camps known as ‘jungles’were being destroyed
under the direction of the Sarkozy administration, with the tacit approval of British
and European governments. ‘Irregular’migrants in this context are those who
attempt to travel or remain, without the legal documentation to do so (Huysmans
2006, De Genova 2011). This article attempts to perform a ‘routing’of camp spaces
like Calais in the two senses of the word: firstly, by setting such sites –often por-
trayed in terms of exclusion or abjection –in the context of a history of movement;
and secondly, by rupturing (from within) the orders of knowledge which give it a
sense of determinate meaning.
Calais summons images of squalor, riot police patrols, scabies outbreaks, human
trafficking and rights violations in the popular imagination. In the mainstream
media, the port-town has symbolised the ‘tide’of immigrants and asylum-seekers
threatening Britain’s national and spatial integrity, and the pressing need for citizens
to fight illegal migration as part of a protection of ‘community’interests (Bigo
2007, Coureau 2011). Meanwhile, Calais is frequently invoked by human rights
activists to remind states of their obligations toward the stateless –obligations clari-
fied by post-war Human Rights Acts, and, in advocates’accounts, neglected by
*Email: nm7180@bris.ac.uk
Journal of Political Power, 2013
Vol. 6, No. 1, 87–105, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2013.774978
Ó2013 Taylor & Francis
European states (Laacher 2002). Thirdly, Calais is a key referent within European
Union (EU) ‘Security and Justice’policy documents, which describe the necessity
of synchronising forces against ‘border crimes’–and aligning asylum-seeking with
terrorism (Walters 2008). The squatter camps at the port-town have, as such, been
called an epitome of the twentieth-century ‘camp’theorised by Giorgio Agamben: a
space of indeterminacy or of ‘bare life’stripped of the basic dues of citizenship
(Fassin 2005, Bigo 2007, p. 27).
In this article, I demonstrate how the conceptual resources offered by Jacques
Rancière’s political philosophy help recons true camp-like spaces as a site of the
production of new forms of authority. I suggest that we can revisit new entangle-
ments of migrants, activists and non-governmental actors at such sites in terms of
a history of creative political acts, generative of new articulations of collective
belonging. This work contributes, with other articles in this edition, to our under-
standing of how new forms of authority over social life are being produced as
forms of ‘positive’,or‘productive’power which continue to structure social rela-
tionships in the light of the decline of traditional authority documented by promi-
nent political thinkers such as Arendt (1951) and Parsons (1963). Although the
‘outside’or transcendent domain once occupied by God and tradition no longer
anchors political processes, changing conditions of social and technical life see
the emergence of other authoritative relations (Connolly 1987). As Blencowe
(2013) and Dawney (2013) suggest, this is a context where new ideas of ‘objec-
tivity’–such as biological life, the universal and the market –are becoming
constituted as authoritative referent points for community. My article offers a
fresh account of the meaning of democratic politics in the context of declining
forms of traditional authority, focusing on the contested domain of irregular
migration politics.
Specifically, I treat a key problem identified by scholars of irregular migra-
tion: that attempts to articulate universal codes of practice across multiplying
forms of social advocacy result in an ‘ethicalisation’of politics. This amounts to
a reframing of political issues of movement in terms of compassionate sensibili-
ties, and a consequent eviction of polemical disputes over the way that citizen-
ship is governed. In line with Dawney (2013) and Noorani (2013), I use the
term ‘experiential authority’to refer to a specific production of authoritative rela-
tions produced through experimentation, which is under-acknowledged within
humanitarian styles of intervention. Drawing on Rancière’s theories, I extend the
conceptual claims of these case studies to suggest how such experiential forms of
authority offer to problematise and refresh forms of activism which have tended
to reify a universal community of belonging. Through their capacity to foster and
mediate ongoing political disagreements, emergent solidaristic forms of activism
offer to politicise ethics in a moment where ethics has been characterised as an
evacuation of the political moment.
This argument is staged in four movements. First, I revisit Hannah Arendt’s
account of the decline of traditional authority through Jacques Rancière’s politics of
aesthetics to suggest that what is termed an ‘ethicalisation’of asylum –its eviction
of polemic moments can be re-politicised through attention to the simultaneous pro-
duction of new forms of authority within specific existential sites and situations.
Second, I follow how an emergent, ‘autonomy of migration’literature has begun
this work, rethinking irregular migration as a polemic space of disagreement. This
is a point which leads us, thirdly, to consider how the multiplication of ideas about
88 N. Millner
citizenship and collective belonging can introduce ‘dissensus’into the political com-
munity (Rancière 1999). To do this, I draw on my participant observation work and
interviews with the anarchist of No Borders network, reflecting on the possibility of
opening new theatres of politics in relation to the Calais ‘camps’. Finally, I consider
what is ‘authoritative’in No Borders’experimental engagements, concluding on the
critical role of political testimony against a backdrop of ethicalised relations.
Revisiting authority through Rancière
What constitutes a politics of a plurality of experiential and experimental authori-
ties, in a context where tradition has been significantly eroded as its proper theatre?
For Rancière, what can be described as an ‘ethicalisation’of irregular migration
emerges from shared fields of aesthetic resonance, based in unspoken, ‘common
sense’ideas of the proper ordering of the social (Rancière 2006, 2007a). By condi-
tioning bodily sensibilities, aesthetic models and practices influence what is ordinar-
ily visible, and what it is possible to say: they determine a historically specific
‘distribution of the sensible’(Rancière 1999, p. 36, 2006, p. 12). Politics, for Ran-
cière, is a polemic disturbance of such a distribution –or background sense of what
is held in common between bodies –which takes place as another version of ‘what
counts’is staged by a party which ‘has no part’within that given order, on equal
terms (Rancière 1999, p. 70). To properly understand the significance of this claim
for contemporary struggles over citizenship-belonging and movement, we need first
to see how Rancière’s political philosophy rewires an Arendtian account of the ‘rise
of the social’.
In Rancière’s (1999, 2006) account, self-authorised acts of intervention –such
as the demonstrations enacted by the Paris sans-papiers in the early 1990s, as they
occupied churches declaring themselves citizens based on their contributions to
France –are important to critical scholarship to the extent that they evidence politi-
cal disagreement. Such acts mark the appearance of a collective which is not
counted as ‘part’of the social, and the assertion of a polemically different version
of rights (‘what counts as citizenship for you isn’t the same as what counts as citi-
zenship for us’). The disagreement produces a dispute over the ‘givens’of a gov-
erned order: what substantive rights there are, and who may define them. This gives
rise to aesthetic transformations to that social order. Specifically, it reconfigures
what can be perceived, seen or heard of a community, and how this is invested with
political significance (Rancière 2006, p. 13). Such transformations also demand a
shift in the sensibilities of critical scholars, often throwing into question their care-
fully structured accounts of society, inequality, and the reproduction of the two
together (Rancière 2007b).
The rise of ‘biopolitical’forms of knowledge production, and new forms of
exclusion, are not, in this reading, primarily an effect of an increasingly powerful
sovereign (see Blencowe, 2013). Instead, they can be linked with what Arendt
(1951) calls the ‘rise of the social’in her description of the gradual deconstruction
of traditional forms of authority. The decline of traditional forms of authority (as
associated with the founding of the nation, state, and church) can be seen, through
this lens, to give rise to new ways of ordering experience, which invest knowledge
claims and political statements with the weightiness to govern. Rancière (2009) sug-
gests that this condition, and the place it gives to ethics, makes an ambiguous place
for politics. Yet, I want to show how the identification of experiential forms of
Journal of Political Power 89
authority in this new context can help identify where the aesthetic regulation of a
given order is being remade ‘from below’–that is, from the basis of the equality
which precedes the authorisation of legitimising structures. In my definition, this
marks the reconstitution of polemic democratic spheres for the present political
moment.
For Arendt (1951, 1958), traditional authority was the means through which a
polemic politics of disagreement was formerly opened in the context of social life.
Rather than exerting coercive force, or a uniquely sovereign form of power, this
authority governed conduct in the modern western world through an appeal to an
‘outside’beyond the individual’s knowledge –a form of continuity which bears the
weightiness of the past, or of divine will, into present social questions. Conse-
quently, the instruments (or ‘technologies’) which augmented particular structures
of individual experience (such as the testimony of the forefathers), and which
helped them to endure, were invested with the capacity to open ‘a kind of theatre
in which freedom can appear’(Arendt 1958, p. 154). Traditional authority consti-
tuted a domain other than the social, apart from questions of economic and instru-
mental efficiency, through which to enact the promise of a coming justice (Dillon
1999).
In Arendt’s account, this sphere of political appearance has progressively lost its
grip in western social life, as the traditions underpinning foundational authority
have been demythologised, or rationalised. For Arendt, and derivatively, for theo-
rists of biopolitics and citizenship like Giorgio Agamben, the foundation of univer-
sal human rights marked a crucial point in this history. At this moment, the human
community re-grounded notions of justice in what was immanent to itself, rather
than in something beyond its bounds. A notion of universality was concretised in
law based on what society owed its (human) constituents, regardless of the variation
in state citizenship contracts. This has transformed politics, linking disputes over
citizenship rights and entitlements to the development of supranational bodies of
regulation and humanitarian bodies of protection, and producing a new category of
the ‘rightless,’defined in terms of the rights of victims, and unable to enact any
rights or even any claim in their own name (Rancière 2004). With other scholars of
irregular migration, I find this new idea of universality highly problematic, and link
the rise of humanitarianism with a depoliticisation of irregular migration (see Mill-
ner 2011). Contrary to Arendt, however, I argue that this shift can be seen to mark
the proliferation of forms of authority, based in continuities forged through technol-
ogies which work with ideas of what is on the ‘inside’of the community (such as
biological life, or experience of limits), in new kinds of ways (see Blencowe,
2013). What is necessary, however, is to redefine democratic politics for this
moment of proliferation.
Rancière’s theory takes us further on exactly this question. Rancière’s point with
aesthetics is that as modalities of knowing and experiencing the weightiness of the
world (he focuses on notions of ‘art’) shift and change, so too must the way in
which we locate its politics. If we are primarily governed through a technocratic
management of social anxieties and unease, rather than through an appeal to the tes-
timonies of the forefathers, then this, too, is the stage on which a dispute over who
or what is included must take place. Unlike Arendt, Rancière (2009) does not
mourn the loss of the traditions of aesthetic production (he calls them ‘mimesis’)
which formerly dictated an autonomous space for political appearance. This loss
was, too, the effect of the development of processes for deconstructing oppressive
90 N. Millner
structures of organising, and the development of the modern arts (such as literature
and film) as domains in which the possibilities of political communication are radi-
cally opened. But, he does locate in the erosion of these traditions a unique diffi-
culty in differentiating the appearance of collective political subjects. The
dissolution of foundational referents for formally mediating affected being (aisthe-
sis) is buried beneath a sensory indistinctness, which is what Rancière terms ‘ethics’
(Rancière 2006).
Ethics, for Rancière, means not the subjection of aesthetics and politics to moral
judgements, but the dissolution of ‘norms’into facts. Linked to the practices and
forms of critique which eroded traditions of aesthetic production and mimesis, eth-
ics sees all forms of discourse and practice from the same indistinct point of view.
The point of view is indistinct because fact and law (what is and what ought to be)
become increasingly indistinguishable, with judgement bowing down to the power
of the law imposing itself (Rancière 2009). Also known as a situation of ‘post-poli-
tics’, these historical conditions are associated with political claims to the irreduc-
ible heterogeneity of the world (we are the ‘global community,’in which everyone
is supposed to be counted (ibid., p. 115)) and aesthetic claims toward an idea of art
coextensive with life itself. Politics fails to appear as such, because polemical
claims to appearance are seen to reconfirm the necessity of universal legislation and
consensus, rather than to fundamentally problematise particular ‘stages’of social
organising and belonging.
In this context, experiential forms of authority can be understood as the weighti-
ness accrued by an individual, figure or collective in its capacity to induce a partic-
ular principle for action. Experiential forms of authority claim different, often
partisan, loyalties. They are generally obscured, however, by a ‘consensual’regime
of appearance –a sense that, fundamentally, everyone agrees in principle, and
shares an equal capacity for speech. For example, a demonstration for the rights of
those without papers may be interpreted as evidence that freedom of speech is
being practised, rather than a problem for democracy itself (Mezzadra 2011). Mean-
while, there no longer exists a clear ‘transcendent’arbiter of politics (such as
‘God,’or ‘tradition’). The law subjects instead to new, immanent ‘outsides’to
social life –in this case, ‘universality’, but also other contenders such as financial
markets or biological life.
1
However, these outsides tend to bear an imperative on
ethical conduct –‘this is how things are’–bringing emphasis to the administrative
question of how to order processes, rather than the political question of what
appears.
However, Rancière’s account of the post-political situation also points to the
vital place of theatres of disagreement. By working at the edges of common aes-
thetic and political sensibilities, and at points of overlap between divided communi-
ties of sense, Rancière theorises the possibility for the elided moment of politics to
theatrically reassert itself in the form of disputes over who or what is present (see
also Caspão 2007). For Rancière, the ‘repartitioning’of the sensible incurred within
a moment of politics involves a demonstration that what feels to be a natural
response is not the only one possible. His politics of disagreement is a politics
which revisits sensible excess within situations so as to disturb the ‘destinations’of
words and bodies (Bayly 2009).
In summary, in the context of the decline of traditional forms of authority, ethics
has an important new role on the political stage. Appeals to experiential knowledge
and experimental know-how have contagious effects amongst those with a back-
Journal of Political Power 91
ground of shared experience, and yield important tactics through which to affect
others with political concerns (see Roelvink 2010, Hynes and Sharpe 2010). Yet,
problematically, it is also through the ethical register that historically political
issues, such as asylum-seeking, are evicted of their polemic moments. To invoke,
ethics is to imply that we can know from experience the right principle of action,
and, that such rules will supplement legal definitions of rights with a witness to sin-
gularity which transcends the law. This sense gives rise to the universal notions of
community and of rights, which Agamben takes issues with, for it is, in practice,
necessarily partial. It can also be associated with the ‘hold’of the types of policy-
making which are used to determine the processing of asylum claims, as a language
of fethics invests technical intermediaries to improvise new measures based on their
personal sensibilities and judgements (Gill 2010). However, through Rancière’s
account, I am suggesting that claims based in experiential forms of knowledge can
create new kinds of continuity and commonality, which assert a dispute within a
specific space of common investment. This is somewhat different from the usual
way that Rancière’s theory is incorporated into critique, where the contingency and
singularity of political moments of demonstration tend to be highlighted. I argue
that to rethink politics for the contemporary moment, we need instead to show how
the reconfiguration of aesthetic forms of ordering is not just about breaking (sover-
eign, police) orders, but also about producing new opportunities for the generation
of authority. Disruption and difference make experience possible, but the crucial
point for politics is how conditions of disagreement are fostered and sustained.
Critically, this move allows for a politicisation of ethics in a moment where eth-
ics appears to mark the depoliticisation of issues of movement and citizenship. In
the following section, I show how an emergent ‘autonomy of migration’perspective
contributes towards this politicisation. Starting from a critique of the ethicalisation
of asylum shared with other irregular migration scholars, this perspective takes us
further, showing how and where new claims to presence are acquiring the authorita-
tive ‘weight’to define substantive ideas of collective belonging.
The autonomy of migration
‘Ethicalisation’refers to the conversion of political questions of asylum and state-
lessness into questions of voluntary benevolence, and is generally associated with
the birth and expansion of transnational forms of non-governmental assistance to
the stateless (Agamben 1998, Edkins 2000). Through the stylisation of appeals for
the exceptional treatment of those without citizenship status, agencies of care and
humanitarian aid are seen to replace political struggles for recognition with a condi-
tion of indeterminacy: a right to remain based on state benevolence and bodily vul-
nerability (Ticktin 2006). Ethnographer Didier Fassin (2005) calls the humanitarian
aspect of this logic ‘compassionate repression’. For him, the transformation of asy-
lum into an issue of moral sympathy diverts attention from asylum claims as
polemic interventions into the fabric of international relations, playing instead into
state territorial interests. This, for Fassin, reproduces the grounds and necessity of
state intervention, and forces irregular migrants to adopt particular narratives of vic-
timhood to benefit from the limited rights on offer. Sites such as detention centres
and refugee camps are consequently sites of the production of permanent conditions
of containment, whose abject subjects, denied singular identities or histories, con-
firm the state’s beneficence and territorial reach (Agamben 1997, Ek 2006).
92 N. Millner
The most important problem with viewing irregular migration this way is how
particular spaces and subjectification processes become emptied of contestation. The
new circuits of information and coordination that link border police, detention cen-
tres and EU agencies such as Frontex (see Andrijasevic and Walters 2010) are cast
in that reading as a neo-imperial form of state power, which produces the abject
populations of ‘quasi-citizens’at an increasing distance from the polis (Bloch and
Schuster 2005). Rather than being approached as sites of struggle, refugee camps
and detention centres are, further, described in terms of ‘sovereign’authority over
biological life, which depends upon maintaining a power to exclude a particular
population from the full benefits of citizenship (Isin and Rygiel 2007). Advocacy,
humanitarianism and activism are described as agents in the production of a supple,
healthy body of state power (a particular reading of the ‘biopolitical’subject, see
Bhandar 2004), allowing little space to consider the changing ways that alternative
notions of citizenship and collective belonging are being constituted through experi-
ence and experiment. In drawing out a more polemic reading of camp-like spaces,
the ‘autonomy of migration’perspective points to the existence of multiplying
forms of experiential authority as a route toward opening new theatres of political
dissensus.
‘Autonomy of migration’is a perspective which asks us to acknowledge that
besides being constrained by proliferating forms of mobility control, refugees and
migrants are emerging as major protagonists in political struggles (Isin and Nielsen
2008, Nyers 2010). Further, irregular migrants, and those in solidarity with them,
are actively engaged in constituting new forms of substantive belonging through
their polemic movements and claims. Drawing on Moulier Boutang’s (1998) con-
ceptualisation of migration as autonomous movement, this body of work owes
much to the (especially Italian) autonomia Marxist tradition, which regards living
labour as a constitutive and antagonistic element of the labour relation (Negri 1989,
Mezzadra 2007). Autonomy here asserts the primacy of movement over the organi-
sation of capital, the regulation of the States, and static or structural points of view.
Irregularity is reconceived as a tense and agonistic process shaped by multiple
forms of political investment, and a key stake in contemporary political struggles.
Rather than documenting the stratification of subjects through state design or the
social construction of privilege, those affiliating with the ‘autonomy of migration’
perspective redefine the study of irregular migration as a form of ‘escape’which
precedes state control (Papadopolous et al. 2008), and perpetually redefines citizen-
ship’s content. Autonomists’perspectives therefore prioritise the lived practices,
desires, expectations and behaviours of migrants –especially irregular migrants –
over the legal processes of states, as a means to interrogate the new meanings of
political belonging which are being established through contention (Mezzadra
2011). Non-sanctioned forms of migration are construed as political and creative
acts: first, as the generative forces which security and political-economic must strive
to keep up with (Mezzadra and Neilson 2008); and second, as the embodiment of
forms of knowledge grounded in lived experience, with their own authority to speak
to ongoing political practices (Isin 2009). This approach strongly problematises ten-
dencies in irregular migration scholarship to rediscover Agamben’s‘camp’of con-
stitutive outsiders everywhere (Isin and Rygiel 2007, De Genova 2011). Walters
(2008), for example, works to challenge the way Agamben’s work on the camp
frames biopolitics as a regime of extended state sovereignty, rather than a prolifera-
tion of forms of power, as Foucault saw it
2
(Panagia 1999, Lemke 2005, Blencowe
Journal of Political Power 93
2010). ‘Autonomy of migration’scholars attempt to register other forms of authority
emphasising the dispute, rather than continuity, which characterises biopolitical
productivity.
‘Autonomy of migration’scholars therefore revisit the camp as a site of struggle
over meaning, and a locus of the production of experimental and provisional forms
of authority (Rygiel 2011). These constitute a ‘groundless ground’for new kinds of
claims over citizenship rights. For example, instead of treating citizenship as part of
a broader regime of control, Isin and Nielsen (2008) want us to explore how groups
and collectives constitute themselves as citizens, often in defiance of legal or socio-
political frameworks. They explain that a focus to ‘acts of citizenship’allows them
to explore such processes of constitution, as part of a broader critique of long-stand-
ing articulations of belonging. The act emphasises the deed, rather than the doer
(Isin and Nielsen 2008, p. 2) and the rupture over the socio-historical patterns, and
its performance establishes the conditions for alternative senses of belonging. This
emphasis also marks a break with the citizenship literature of the last two decades,
shifting from ‘liberal’notions of the citizen in relation to formal entitlements (or,
‘how an order holds’, Isin 2008, p. 26), toward rights as the constitutive perfor-
mances of those ‘who present themselves as subjects to whom rights are due’(ibid.,
p. 18).
In my argument, the re-articulation of asylum in terms of morality and state
beneficence, which Agamben and others identify, does reflect a crucial observation
about how such a polemic politics of irregular migration is policed away from view
in our historical moment. However, I link this phenomenon not with sovereign
power but with the idea of ‘universality’which emerges against sovereignty’s
decline (Foucault 1997, pp. 47–48; Rancière 2007a, pp. 1–2). Universality is a
naturalised code of ordering which frames the self-conduct of citizens and states
against the background of a community without an outside (e.g. the community of
universal human rights). It is an ‘idea of objectivity’in the terms that Blencowe
(2013) and Dawney (2013) lay out, but, unlike the ideas of biological life which
Foucault explores, the telos and scope of this immanent outside are problematically
defined from the outset. Naming ‘the community’as the community is, in this read-
ing, the gesture of foreclosure: it precludes in advance the question of whose part is
not included in the part of the ‘common’, and maintains an illusion of universal
stakes and values (Rancière 2004). As Kirwan (2013) argues through Jean-Luc
Nancy’s philosophy, defining the community as a coherent whole sutures the gaps
of communication and lines of difference which are the very medium of democratic
politics. Rancière shows us by another way how we might follow Nancy from
community to acts of dissensual communication against a backdrop of ethicalised
political arguments.
Starting from the ‘autonomy of migration’perspective and elaborating it through
Rancière, it is possible to approach the ‘ethicalisation’of the asylum differently,
acknowledging the simultaneous production of other forms of authority over social
life, besides that of sovereign jurisdiction. Not only traditional, ‘foundational’medi-
ators of authority such as church and state, but also narratives and testimonies bear-
ing the expertise of lived experience, can take on a defining role, and can give rise
to a multiplication of ways of being a political subject (Givoni 2011, Dawney,
2013, Noorani 2013, Brigstocke, 2013). Isin and Rygiel (2007) reframe a politics of
irregular migration in this sense as a politics of ‘surplus names’: the political
sequences which derive from the introduction of names into a social context which
94 N. Millner
set out a question or dispute about who is included in their count. The ethicalisation
of politics becomes the politicisation of ethics, where new processes are established
for objecting to the objectivity of a situation: that is, where mechanisms are created
through which to articulate the non-universality of ‘universal’claims, and the
polemic differences between substantive notions of political belonging which are in
play.
In the following section, I develop this point by exploring No Borders’involve-
ment with the Calais migrants. Rather than becoming the universal subject of
humanitarian intervention, No Borders activists work to constantly refresh its own
basis by responding to the singularity of the rights claims of migrants. This amounts
to a polemic challenge to the humanitarian ‘count’of universal community and
gives rise to new forms of politicised testimonial practice.
No Borders: constructing new theatres of appearance?
At the European Council in Tampere in October 1999, heads of EU states and
members of the European parliament assembled to implement a common asylum
and migration policy. Articulated as a concerted effort against ‘border crimes’, this
harmonisation of the asylum process included a synthesis of asylum-seekers and
migrants’bio-data (the EURODAC database), as well as new freedoms for pre-
emptive intelligence agencies such as Frontex. The Tampere Convention formed an
important marker in the story of the emergence of ‘No Borders’as an emergent
political network. Linked with a looser association of regional ‘No Border’groups
across Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and Western Europe, the UK-based network of
11 groups was inaugurated in 1999 as a direct response to Tampere, which was per-
ceived as a particularly ‘draconian’moment within a pervasive securitisation of
external borders. A meeting was called in Amsterdam by activists at this time,
where proposals for an international website platform were discussed, and an initial
mailing-list was formed. This event drew together activists and interested people
who already shared communications networks and a ‘radical’left-wing politics, in
large part through prior involvement in environmental and anti-war protests. But,
building on the resonance of the recent sans-papiers struggles in Paris and across
Europe, this event had also attracted a smaller number of self-organised migrant
groups. The European ‘No Border’network established itself primarily as an affin-
ity group with what were perceived as struggles for the right to movement regard-
less of citizenship status.
A critique of new EU security policies formed an initial point of continuity for
the emergent regional groups, working to develop alternative media for unfolding
events within the new security nexus. According to the values agreed at the initial
meeting, new networks for the sharing of information and ‘testimonies’were to fos-
ter responses of ‘direct action’: organised demonstrations or interventions through
which to address mechanisms of the evolving EU security apparatus. Distinctively
from the non-violent interventions associated with Gandhi and the peace move-
ments, direct action for No Borders means taking practical action to establish a dif-
ferent kind of polis. It does not necessarily mean forcing state policy or reform, but
refers more to the establishment of forms of self-regulation and government which
do not require state mediation, or work within its categories. A No Borders activist
I interviewed during fieldwork in 2009 described this direct action as ‘action
outside of the existing prevailing establishments,’conducted by ‘individuals and
Journal of Political Power 95
groups on their own, acting as communities rather than relying on authorities’. For
example, in 2010, a No Borders group in Sweden organised a large-scale demon-
stration at a detention-centre known for its degrading treatment of residents, whilst
UK activists collaborated to produce and disseminate a rival popular paper to the
London ‘METRO’, parodying the sensationalism of popular media depictions. Such
actions are based in a collectively-determined form of authority to reclaim the right
of movement of all, and do not appeal for the sanction of police, administrators or
politicians.
In staking such a position, No Borders, like other anti-authoritarian organisa-
tions, expands upon a history of radical ideas to identify its own actions with histo-
ries of local, indigenous and subaltern expressions of defiance to the state. Most
often cited by No Borders activists are the anarchist writers of the turn of the twen-
tieth century, including the Russian novelist and defendant of co-operativism Leo
Tolstoy; the zoologist, activist and economist of mutualism Peter Kropotkin; and
the German pacifist Gustav Landauer. These figures inspire the specificinflection of
terms such as ‘mutual aid’and ‘co-operative action’in use, carrying over a sense
not only of political equality, but also of economic equality, as against divisions of
privilege linked with histories of capitalism. In this way, No Borders draws on
longer genealogies of radical organising into the European context, such as the
‘autonomy of migration’scholars, linking the struggles of irregular migrants to
broader questions of land rights, post-colonialism and autonomous government. The
emphasis is not on a campaign for inclusion within a given community of citizens,
but on making real a universal community of migrants which precedes state divi-
sions.
The wider No Borders European movement therefore draws particularly heavily
for its inspiration on movements which have, across the last century, asserted their
independence from statist economic structures through autonomous form of govern-
ing, such as the Mexican Zapatismo, La via Campesina, and especially the Italian
Autonomia movement which was so influential on the ‘autonomy of migration’per-
spective. Proponents of the Italian Autonomia movement championed informal
modes of resistance such as sabotage and wildcat strikes, and, as the movement
developed, it sought to broaden definitions of ‘autonomy’into modes of organising
independent of the capitalist work relationship altogether (Mezzadra 2011). In con-
trast with other leftist movements of the time, they ‘advocated renunciation of pre-
cisely that form of mass struggle which today unifies the movement led by the
workers in advanced capitalist countries’(Tronti cited in Finn 2004, p. 108). This
amounted to a rejection of labour or communist party-run unions, and the establish-
ment of forms of self-government based in forms of conviviality and localism. The
development of ‘social centres’and ‘temporary autonomous zones’in Europe and
the USA are particularly indebted to such moments in the Italian Autonomia histo-
ries –indeed, such sites tend to form key meeting-places for No Borders groups.
Within the No Borders anti-statist and anti-capitalist framework for action, the activ-
ities of indigenous movements such as the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico and
Autonomia movement are held as prototypical examples of successful alternative
forms of self-government.
Calais became an iconic focus for the No Borders network throughout the
months immediately prior to the destruction of the jungles, with the yearly interna-
tional ‘No Borders camp’taking place there in June 2009. However, the decision to
establish a continuous presence in Calais was made only after the camp took place.
96 N. Millner
Activists had found that migrants took responsibility for directing discussions within
the spaces they set up to an extent not experienced in previous camps or conver-
gences. This gave rise to a fresh surge of momentum in the movement. There was
a‘sense of equality’within the dialogues which, a No Borders position asserts, had
been very difficult to achieve practically in other locations. In October 2009, after
the destructions of the camps, No Borders therefore sets up an office as a base for
themselves in the town despite the assertions of the Minister of Immigration’s insis-
tence that the region was now to be a ‘migrant-free zone’. This office formed a
point of contact for a fluctuating population of several hundred migrants. Over sub-
sequent months, a rolling number of No Borders visitors also ‘patrolled’the riot
police (who would raid the remaining ‘squats’several times a night, removing blan-
kets and valuables); shared meals and practical skills with the migrants; and pro-
duced alternative media reports about the situation. They also jointly occupied the
Kronstadt Hangar with the Calais migrants, until their eventual eviction from it in
March 2010.
The discussions at the No Borders camp also gave fresh nuance to No Borders’
existing critiques of humanitarian methods of organising. In Calais, No Borders
defined its distance from the humanitarian associations through a choice to accom-
modate itself within the migrant squats and share in its practical tasks. This fol-
lowed an existing value in supporting the ‘existing struggles of those affected’,
rather than trying to devise a solution ‘from outside’(Sam, No Borders’intervie-
wee). Humanitarian practices were held to presume a passive victim without intelli-
gence or will, and therefore to maintain a gap between their political organising in
interactions with migrants. However, this initial differentiation and the practices it
gave rise to also prompted an elaboration of the critique in situ. No Borders went
to Calais but insisted that undocumented migrants be regarded the true political
activists in Calais, since, in the act of crossing the border, they assert a claim to a
polis which includes all migrants, over the socius where only certain parts are
counted. In fact, in a reversal of humanitarian vocabulary, the economic migrant
(who pursues a viable livelihood) is the most political of movers. The terminology
of ‘solidarity’, working between sense experience and visibility, configured an aes-
thetic of borders and bordering through which to attend to the minute ways in
which divisions formed –between migrants and ‘citizens’, but also between
migrants and ‘activists’. This amounts to a call for intensified attention to micro-acts
of bordering, understood to contribute toward a broader deconstruction of border
controls.
The place of experience was therefore partly established through the develop-
ment of reflexive practices which would identify ‘borders’in No Borders’own
practices, and continuously transform its own claims through attention to the acts of
migration being staged by others. The ethical practices which formed the basis for
the No Borders’interventions therefore turned on a pragmatic engagement with per-
sonal experience and its framing, rather than the plight of the victim. For No Bor-
ders activists, shared reflections on personal journeys as ‘migrants’, especially
noting the ways they, in relation to others, have been afforded differing speeds of
travel, formed the basis for political engagement. This took place through self-direc-
ted practices, such as keeping journals and group discussion, which renegotiated the
relations between personal experience and the formation of collective claims. Such
practices tended to give prominence to ‘fragments’of experience, and to ‘things
you have encountered that don’t make sense to you yet’(Nathalie, No Borders
Journal of Political Power 97
interviewee), rather than asserting unchangeable norms. This also meant that the
alternative media and working-pieces produced from a No Borders position were
characterised by ruminations on the unexpected aspects of experience, or on new
thoughts for what it might mean to enact solidarity in Calais.
This speaks to the notion of aesthetic politics which Rancière invokes, since it
points to experimental habits of learning and reflection which work to open capaci-
ties for disagreement and change within an existing ordering. For No Borders, this
pragmatic approach to experience meant, on the one hand, highlighting the way the
scene was being framed in the media and public understandings. On the other hand,
it meant reflecting also on the framing of personal experience, allowing new events
to challenge and remake shared principles of action. For example, reiterated group
reflections on ‘privilege’–in the form of papers which allowed activists to travel,
the access to resources for political speech, and as a form of division between activ-
ists and the Calais migrants –contributed to ongoing revisions of No Borders activ-
ists’practices. Popular education practices which emphasised the sharing of
experience became increasingly prominent (Millner forthcoming), and a new
emphasis on political ‘listening’over political speech saw activists’conceptions of
solidarity refreshed and realigned against migrants’claims (Millner 2011).
Yet, this difference in privilege remained problematic for No Borders’intentions,
which were to blur distinctions between migrants with and without papers. From an
outsider’s perspective, the insistence on a platform of equality did not hide clear
cultural differences in strategies of organising and political vision. The reflection of
a 25-year-old No Borders activist, with a history of involvement with the Climate
Camps, illustrates an important factor in this divide:
We’re just sort of zero distinction between migrants and ourselves; the only distinction
is that we have papers and we happen to be born in this country [...] so we recognise
the distinction of privilege there but other than that there is no distinction.
Unlike the framing of an ethical consensus based in a strong, unacknowledged dis-
tinction between the citizen-actor and victim-recipient, this articulation flattens the
relationship completely. To insist on no difference (other than papers and privilege)
between undocumented migrants and other activists suggests an essential sameness
as a driving quality, whereas the focus on the ‘act’of citizenship in the autonomist
literature was precisely against this. One consequence of such a politics is therefore
that attention to national and group histories may be deprioritised, as a result of the
refusal of ‘us’and ‘them’distinctions. A second is that gaps between what migrants
want tend to be confused with the political vision of No Borders, with the result
that personal and sociable interactions are mined to provide further evidence for a
position which already proclaims in advance how political transformation is to take
place. This also meant that No Borders activism was sometimes misunderstood by
migrants –for example, the No Borders Camp announced in June 2009 was ini-
tially understood as ‘there will be no borders left on Monday’–that is, we will
remove them!
Fragile authorities?
An obvious problem raised by this example is that, whilst a group of activists are
asserting a plane of equality through the claim ‘No Borders’, the material fact of
98 N. Millner
borders and differences remains unchanged. Perhaps, this is indicative that No
Borders does not have authority to declare what difference, or a border, is? Whilst
it is not my intention to evaluate the effectiveness of No Borders’attempts to
stage alternative politics here, in this final section, I reflect on the importance of
its work to introduce fragile, revisable testimonies into the domain of political
communication. I suggest that the styles of speech and writing No Borders adopt
reflect a concern with acknowledging acts which are already taking place which is
in line with the autonomia claims I have looked at. With Noorani (2013), I pro-
pose that this form of story-making from experience reflects an alternative form of
authority to the ‘foundationalist’forms of authority such as humanitarianism.
Rather than using fragments of experience to confirm an overarching ‘count’of a
community, activists invite their audience –including citizens, migrants and schol-
ars –to participate in remaking stages of political appearance. Whilst this account
remains bound to the authorities shaping activist conduct, and can only speculate
on broader social changes, I argue that this shift intimates important forward
routes for political disagreement between pluralising forms of experiential
authority.
Shortly before the Calais jungles were destroyed in September 2009, a story
was circulated on an information-sharing email list used by No Borders which told
of the destruction of a Vietnamese migrants’camp at Angres, 30 km south-west of
Lille. At 7am, ‘it took 82 cops to detain 85 migrants at a long established camp
(2007)’and raze the camp to the ground. But, we were told that it was ‘the local
support that is the real story’. Volunteers collected the 52 migrants detained at
Coquelles detention centre, and the 28 detained at the National Police Station at
Liévin, taking them back to Angres. After a town meeting, it was decided to set up
a new camp outside the town hall to house those who wanted to stay, and volun-
teers stayed in the camp all night long. In one sense, the style of this communiqué
mimics that of humanitarian ‘testimonies’. The ‘cops’and border-police are figured
as threats to the community, in place of irresponsible states and people-smugglers.
Meanwhile, the capacity to organise demonstrated by migrants and civilians offers a
hopeful example of moral solidity. This seems to offer a parallel affirmation of a
vision which ‘we all share’which I have been problematising in new ideas of uni-
versality as a form of objectivity. However, this excerpt makes an important distinc-
tion between humanitarian and solidaristic testimony clear. The crux of solidaristic
truth-telling lies in its capacity to evidence the formation of collectives which break
with previous boundaries of division. ‘Truth’, here, is a temporary rupture with
ordinary divisions of the social. It is not an enduring order of speech or visibility
associated with orders of moral judgement, rights acts, religious traditions or the
histories of a people, as it was in humanitarian forms. Instead, it is a truth which
throws an existing order into question. The unexpected positive feeling between dis-
tinct groups –as communicated in the emphasis on the supportive role of volun-
teers –is a rallying-cry for optimism: we are called to witness points at which the
dominant order is being remade.
No Borders’truth-telling practices work to deconstruct the ‘borders’dividing
groups as part of a broader project to deconstruct material border-controls and hier-
archical systems of citizenship. The production of testimony as instances of this
truth takes place through the documentation of resilient forms of movement already
taking place; the publication and circulation of migrants’own stories; and through
the co-production of self-published ‘zine’material –collections of articles which
Journal of Political Power 99
broadcast issues associated with a site or scene. Within this production, the ‘truth’
of testimony is identified by its capacity to break affirmatively with existing systems
of judgement and control, and is tested through an examination of personal experi-
ence. The ethical subject constituted through this truth-telling process is therefore
one who speaks the truth of experience.
Unlike humanitarian forms of testimony, then, No Borders’truth-telling practices
focus on the agency of migrants, rather than their status as victims. Interviewees
often returned to this point. For example, Nicole reiterated the signs of vitality she
had encountered in her visits to Calais: ‘good things…is people build communi-
ties’, she told me. For her, the most developed forms of organising had been evi-
dent in the Pashtun jungle. In contrast to the official and media portrayals, she drew
out the feats of creativity achieved despite the fact that it was being burnt down
every week:
What they do is they clean once a week; they build toilets there, they had a tea-house,
they had a supermarket in there, they had a mosque. They worked in a consensus
decision-making process kind a way…(laughs) but in a Pashtun way. They had lead-
ers; they had…I mean it was all very well organised.
Dieter shared this affirmation of what he considers evidence of already-existing
political agency, finding ‘much more organisation done by the migrants than people
normally assume’:
and that they are much stronger than people normally assume. I mean the fact that
many of them manage to cross the channel shows that they are well-organised, and
that they have a very strong way of claiming something.
Dieter’s summary indicates how the identification of these already-existent claims is
taken as a basis from which to orient ongoing learning. By recognising the claims
migrants are making, it is possible to revise one’s working assumptions, and
develop forms of organising which build on these already-existing loci of move-
ment. On the other hand, EU legislation often ignores this movement and these
claims, explained Coral. EU policies, in her view, are written from the economic
priorities of member-states –not through an engagement with the capacities and
desires of migrants themselves. Identifying the distinctive way migrant groups
understood their own modes of self-organising, Nicole, like Dieter, emphasised that
‘speaking out’had a lot to do with drawing attention to these forms of authority as
they already existed. The goal of her own ethical practice, as she understood it, was
inextricable from a legitimisation of the right for the ‘self-determination of people’,
over and against EU dictates.
However, No Borders’production of testimony from this opening-up of experi-
ence is also valued for its role in identifying micrological bordering practices as
textures to be worked upon. No Borders activists are not primarily interested in
enabling citizens’and migrants’groups to operate autonomously (i.e. separately),
but in seeing how new kinds of collective resonance can be constituted across
group differences. Testimony, here, is the declaration of a wrong in the attempt to
break up and re-order these capacities, and, at the same time, the identification of
new capacities, immanent to the present situation, through which this wrong might
be articulated as such. Solidaristic truth-telling involves identifying existing forms
100 N. Millner
of authority, and identifying through literary form the polemic disagreement these
forms introduce into questions of citizenship.
Is it the individual, then, in place of the universal, which constitutes the new
‘weightiness’of political claims? Importantly, truth-telling for No Borders activists
is not based on fidelity to the account of one individual. It is not the property of a
life-story. ‘Truth’for No Borders activists is based on, first, fidelity to experiences
of witnessing, and second, the capacity of telling to disturb established boundaries
of groups and identities. ‘I know what I am saying is important, and needs to be
said, when I can feel that it’s not just me speaking, but the others I have met –the
moments and encounters and situations where I become more than just myself’,
explained Amy. Where accounts do focus on one individual, they consequently tend
to draw out notes of dissonance within one person’s views, or between possible per-
spectives on their narrative. Thus, embedded within a cartoon narrative presented in
a self-published ‘zine,’we have an account of a refugee called ‘Kiahan’, which is
juxtaposed with a ‘report from the Pashtun jungle, Calais’in typeface script, which
recounts the author’s encounter with ‘K.’, which may or may not be the Kiahan of
the cartoon. The reference to ‘K’mimics a psychological or medical case-study,
while the opening recalls a humanitarian style, emphasising K. as a victim of situat-
ing forces. But, the aside quickly turns to their discussions over cultural differences,
and to the illustrator’s surprise at K.’s small gestures. In moments where we might
be tempted to pity the cartoonised Kiahan, attention is suddenly drawn to K’s resil-
ience:
K. looks smaller than a 14 year old, yet also a lot older. He’s made friends with other
unaccompanied children... [who] laugh and much about like any other kids would,
although it’s 3am and they’re too afraid to sleep tonight. K’s trainers have been
donated by a local charity and don’tfit. He wears the heels folded down, as do many
others, but still spends ages arranging the laces in neat lines to look cool.
Importantly, links are drawn with surprising others, beyond his situation (K. wants
‘to look cool’), whilst establishing disjunctures with others in his place (‘one thumb
and palm distended’). Thus, ‘K.’is surviving from donations from a local charity,
but he has personalised the trainers and has not forgotten how to laugh. Unlike tes-
timonial styles which depend upon reifying pre-existing stereotypes (see Tyler
2006), this nuance highlights ‘K.’’smultiple situatedness, allowing him to escape
from his place as an example of a victim passively waiting for help. The position-
ing of the cartoon against the cartoonist’s descriptions of her own affectedness also
refuses closure around a particular claim to a moral vision. The teller, too, is situ-
ated, and wants to show us that her view is partial.
Humanitarian forms of activism tend to ground testimony in forms of continuity
which persists, and can be demonstrated as a form of ‘universal truth’through a
series of examples (Fassin 2005). In the mode of truth-telling used by No Borders
in such accounts, on the other hand, the only continuity between testimonies is
experience. However, as experience itself is made up of unpredictable differences
and singularities which disrupt prior forms of classification, testimony must always
be different from itself. This distinguishes the solidarity ethos as the development
of a novel authoritative relation, in which the ‘outside’brought to bear on activist
practice relates not to a fixed or bounded community, but to a constantly shifting,
immanent inside. The forms of testimony produced are tentative, and collaborative,
Journal of Political Power 101
and draw on artistic domains of resonance, allowing new kinds of belonging to be
intimated (Millner 2011). How these forms affect others remains open to question –
will they resonate with others’experiences and influence alterations in perception,
or do they remain anchored specifically to the experience of activists of a particular
historical context? However, as an ethical principle, solidarity activism has much to
offer experimental efforts to reimagine democratic domains in an ‘ethicalised’
domain. Political testimony takes singular experience as its referent, rather than the
universal community, but it still takes hold, because it works at the limits of the
seeable and sayable, where new aesthetic coordinates are being forged. Experiential
authority is based in a non-foundational relation with knowledge of a political com-
munity. The ‘outside’which forms its referent is lived experience, explored through
experiment. Where this experience is presenced back into testimonial practices to
invite action based on disagreement rather than the reiteration of a founding myth
of unity, we witness the reintroduction of the political moment.
Conclusion
In this article, I have argued that the constitution of ethics makes for an ambiguous
space for politics. On the one hand, the valorisation of ethics as a discourse of jus-
tice directed toward immanent experience renders political appearance indistinct
from a background of the ‘common’in which we all supposedly appear. On the
other hand, the constitution of new forms of authority, based on experience as an
immanent ground, also renders possible enduring means and methods for singularis-
ing particular rights claims –for bringing to presence forms of shared experience
which escape ‘common sense’categories. These new forms of authority offer new
ways of structuring experience, and extract from their responsivity to singularity the
basis from which to open new theatres of politics in a moment in which polemical
contention can seem as absent as the traditional forms which once structured them.
For a future agenda of research building from these domains of existing scholar-
ship, the work of this article yields two important strategies. The first is to follow
the analytical shift from the camp to the act, so embodying a corresponding shift
from negative to positive critique. Rather than primarily documenting the new
forms of constraint which accompany new kinds of governmental rationality, this
means locating, and participating in, a work on the forces which constitute us,
within a broader project of multiplying possible forms of subjectivity. The second
strategy is to pay attention to dissensus on the level of ethical discourse-practices,
as we participate in this effort. Many invocations of Rancière’s theory simply call
our attention to visual spectacles of protest, but this does not help us problematise
the notions of the citizenship-belonging which are materially at stake within new
geographies of mobility. Moreover, it can lead to an unhelpful fixation on contin-
gency, rather than drawing to the foreground the key ways in which ideas acquire
their ‘grip’or ‘stickiness’in our particular moment. To focus on experiential forms
of authority means noticing where different ways of being ethical are being multi-
plied, experimentally developed and brought into polemic disagreement with norma-
tive fields of knowledge.
This emphasis on experience and normativity specifically addresses the
researcher. Rather than producing critical explanations at a distance, as researchers
we are called upon to attend to what we count as critical; what informs us to be
convicted this way; and that which allows the processes by which we make
102 N. Millner
knowledge to become open to change. To work on ethics –on personal ethics,
above all –marks the production of experiential forms of authority, and the pres-
encing of dissensus into the making of critical social-scientific knowledge of bor-
ders, mobility and authority.
Notes
1. Biological life is somewhat distinct in this sense, as it bears claims which can be tested
and verified through shared measures and procedures. As such it stands as a potential
vehicle for forms of politics which translates between experience and experiment to con-
stitute tentative, revisable claims, which can be tested by other parties (and see Blen-
cowe, 2013)
2. For Agamben, ‘biopolitics’refers to the state’s assumption of responsibility for the care
of the nation, and a highly particular inscription of ‘bare life’. According to Agamben,
therefore, and in contrast with Foucault’sdefinition, ‘politics is always already biopoli-
tics’(Lemke 2005, p. 4). The critical point about the productive capacity of power in
Foucault is, in contrast, that the future remains open –power is reciprocal and not
merely an effect of control (Gill 2010).
Notes on contributors
Naomi Millner is a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Bristol. Her interests
span philosophies of politics and aesthetics, geographies of migration and mobility, and the
politics of food. Her work combines historical interrogations of political and social
movements with theoretical accounts of the material present. She works with migrants and
asylum-seekers and is active in the development of alternative pedagogical practices.
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