This book examines everyday borders in the UK and Calais as sites of ethical political struggle between segregation and solidarity.

In an age of mobility, borders appear to be everywhere. Encountered more and more in our everyday lives, borders locally enact global divisions and inequalities of power, wealth, and identity. Critically examining everyday borders in the UK and Calais, Tyerman shows them to be sites of ethical political struggle. From the Calais ‘jungle’ to the UK’s ‘hostile environment’, it shows how borders are carried out through practices of everyday segregation that make life for some but not others unliveable. At the same time, it reveals the practices of everyday solidarity with which people on the move confront these segregating borders. This book sheds light on the complex ways borders entrench themselves in our lives, the complicity of ordinary people in their enactment, and the seductive power they continue to assert over our political imaginations.

Of general interest to scholars and students working on issues of migration, borders, citizenship, and security in international politics, sociology, and philosophy this book will also appeal to practitioners in areas of migrant rights, asylum advocacy, anti-detention or deportation campaigning, human rights, direct democracy, and community organising.

Thom Tyerman is a lecturer in International Politics at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. He researches borders from a critical perspective with a special focus on the hostile environment in the UK and Calais and ‘no borders’ migrant solidarity politics. His work has recently been published in Geopolitics and Border Criminologies. Alongside his research, he is the joint coordinator of an immigration detainee support group in the UK and is involved with various activist projects and initiatives that seek to challenge border apartheid.