Necropolitical Compassion: Rhetorical Care and Repressive Borders in the English Channel

This article examines how a discourse of compassion is used to facilitate harmful, even deadly, bordering practices. That is, governing migration through exposure to harm, including premature death. Whilst important scholarship has explored this phenomenon in terms of “compassionate borderwork” and “humanitarian bordering,” we extend these analyses by foregrounding the racial-colonial logics underpinning bordering. This is done through engagement with Carolyn Ureña’s concept of “colonial love” and Achille Mbembe’s concept of "necropolitics". These allow us to centre the relationships between contemporary bordering and colonial logics of human hierarchy. We explore this through analysis of UK political discourse surrounding the “small boat” Channel crossings phenomenon 2018–2024. Our analysis focuses on four archetypes: the evil smuggler, the criminal queue jumper, the vulnerable victim, and the compassionate state. This article contributes to our understanding of the political use of compassion as a racio-colonial technology of organised abandonment, banishment, exclusion and expulsion, in the UK and beyond.