The Horizon of Action: Conduct and Agency in the France-UK Borderscape

Abstract

The France-UK borderscape is characterised by hostile conditions that structure the lives and movements of people on the move seeking to cross the Channel. While existing literature has extensively documented these conditions and their effects, this thesis examines how they structure the possibilities through which people on the move conduct their lives. It asks how people on the move in the France-UK borderscape respond to hostile conditions. Drawing on 6 weeks of immersive ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis examines the lived experiences of people on the move across different sites in northern France. The analysis finds that hostile conditions produce a fluid and unequal horizon of action, shaping which possibilities are available, sustainable or worth pursuing, without determining how people act. Within this horizon, people navigate the possibilities that remain, suggesting a form of situated agency that is neither reducible to determination nor to resistance or resilience against border power. At the same time, everyday actions of sociality show that conduct within the horizon is not exhausted by its relation to border power. The thesis therefore proposes the horizon of action as a way of understanding how border power structures conduct without reducing the exercise of agency to responses to it.