En route : the mobile border migrant camps of Northern France

This chapter examines the rapidly-evolving spaces of the makeshift and institutional border migrant camps created in Northern France between 2015 and 2017. While camps for forced migrants are often analysed as isolated and isolating spaces of containment which in many cases endure for decades, border migrant camps, as this chapter demonstrates, are often dynamic, hyper-temporary and highly connected spaces which make part of the ever-changing entanglements of intense border practices and migration flows. The geographical areas where these camps are located could be defined as ‘mobile borders’, the active border zones that are constantly altered by the interplay between bordering practices and the tempestuous mobilities which exceed them. Rather than establishing sites where the ‘state of exception’ is 'given a permanent spatial arrangement', these camps create a constantly changing spatial reality and a highly ephemeral constellation of formal and informal spaces which is reconfigured by the border conditions which they make part of.