This book examines how the Calais Jungle posed and addressed the European Question. The issue of who and what counts as European was articulated through this makeshift camp. The book argues that the Jungle acquired meaning as a localised struggle to define territory, borders, rights and refugees in Europe. Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad is used as a framing device for analysis. Discourses of tropicality are shown to produce the Jungle in terms of a postcolonial space of exception. This representational space fused bodies and environment in racialised ways. Attention is then drawn to assemblages that gave rise to political subjectivity, which partially elided a Eurocentric prism of rights. Here, the book explores how a ‘right to the jungle’ was generated via relations between refugees, aid workers and material objects—constituting the Jungle as a space of representation. Finally, intimate life in, and beyond, the Jungle is examined as a spatial practice that contests the EU border regime.

Zaki Nahaboo is a lecturer in sociology at Birmingham City University, UK. He has research and teaching interests in postcolonial studies, historical sociology, and international political sociology. Zaki writes about imperial citizenship, the racialization of migration, free speech, and multiculturalism.

Nathan Aaron Kerrigan is a lecturer in sociology at Birmingham City University, UK. Nathan's teaching and research interests centre around themes of community, space, and place. He is particularly interested in the way these different thematic areas impact on the regulation and control of minority ethic and migrant bodies in rural areas.