ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the tactics employed by the UK government in seeking to maintain an imagery of a border which is at once firm and closed but at the same upholds an imagery of operating a fair and humane border politics. This is done through the invisibilisation of the most brutal aspects of the UK border through the externalisation of border control to France and the concomitant bolstering of the operationalisation of a ‘politics of exhaustion’ in northern France. The politics of exhaustion comprises an array of tactics devised to render migrants’ life governable and pliant, and bodies docile, with the premeditated intention of negating autonomy, well-being, and self-efficacy. It thus seeks to curb autonomous migratory movements, by influencing decisions and ‘intent management’ through the physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion of its subjects. This chapter thus exposes how violence and harm are constitutive of, and play a crucial role within, the UK’s bordering technologies, but are invisibilised, sanitised, and depoliticised through the displacement of responsibility first from the UK government to the French state authorities and subsequently onto the exhausted bodies and minds of migrants.
