Arshad Isakjee
Biographic Data
| ID | 214100 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Arshad Isakjee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Arshad |
| FAMILY NAME | Isakjee |
| SIGNATURE | ISAKJEE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Liverpool |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6095-2597 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 409 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
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…
The border security economy in the English Channel: Small boats, racism and late imperialism
The movement of people in small boats across the English Channel to claim asylum has created a policy and media spectacle in the UK. This article examines the bordering regime along the Northern French Coast and in the UK which have shaped the criminalised journeys. Contributing to debates on the fragmentation of state power, we interrogate the political economy of bordering and the wider global and social interests that shape the border security…
Knowing the Border: Epistemic Friction and Irregular Crossings of the English Channel
This article explores epistemic injustice in the context of border crossings. In many contexts around the world borders are fortified not only through walls, fences and guards, but also through knowledge claims about human mobility. We can conceptualise these types of claims as ‘epistemic borderwork’. This article discusses 39 semi-structured interviews with people who crossed the English Channel irregularly, primarily in small boats. These testi…
Four seasons of border violence: The co-option of the seasons into the management of migration
From ocean currents to rivers, deserts, and mountains, the environment is often weaponized into border controls against people homogeneously racialized as “irregular migrants’’. This paper is based on our observation that direct violence used during pushbacks – illegal forced returns over a border – are enforced as well as resisted in the context of seasonal shifts; temporal processes that have been side-lined in migration-violence literature. Ba…
Small Boats, Big Contracts: Extracting Value from the UK 's Post‐Brexit Asylum ‘Crisis’
This article discusses post‐Brexit asylum policy in the UK. On the surface, Brexit had little impact on asylum, but Brexit, combined with the new phenomenon of small boat Channel crossings, created the conditions for a new and extreme UK policy agenda. It explains how politicians have sought to deliver border sovereignty performatively after Brexit by introducing extreme measures, ostensibly—though not practically—to stop small boat Channel cross…
Eco-coloniality and the violent environmentalism of the UK-France border
This article examines the eco-coloniality of the UK-France border by tracing the transformation of the notorious Calais "jungle" refugee camp into a nature reserve. We empirically investigate the ecological politics of the Calais borderzone, arguing that the environment plays a crucial role in both enacting and obscuring border violence. Based on long-term research at this site, we explore how the environment does political work by excluding, har…
The Politics of Injury: Debilitation and the Right to Maim at the EU Border
Borders are sites of mass injury. This article questions the necroconsensus that has emerged within migration studies, and explores the political role that less-than-deadly violence plays at contemporary borders. By withholding from outright killing, and thus avoiding the optics of public scrutiny, EU states are deploying a carefully calibrated politics of injury designed to control racialised groups through debilitation. The injuries produced th…
Bringing order to the border: Liberal and illiberal fantasies of border control in the English channel
This article focuses on the advancement of fantasy policy solutions to irregular migration, drawing on the case study of the UK/French border. In 2018 people began to cross the English Channel in significant numbers to seek asylum. This led to much commentary and a raft of new legislation seeking to criminalise people crossing the Channel and end rights to seek asylum in the UK. In this article, we explore the interaction between two sets of fant…
Epistemic Borderwork: Violent Pushbacks, Refugees, and the Politics of Knowledge at the EU Border
Borders are sites of epistemic struggle. Focusing on the illegal tactic of the “pushback,” which is routinely deployed by state authorities to forcefully expel asylum seekers from European Union territory without due process, this article explores the uneven politics of knowledge that helps to support or unsettle this clandestine border violence. Drawing on long-term qualitative research on the Croatia-Bosnia border, including interviews with pus…
Channel crossings: Offshoring asylum and the afterlife of empire in the Dover Strait
In 2020, over 8,400 people made their way from France to the UK coast using small vessels. They did so principally in order to claim asylum in the United Kingdom (UK). Much like in other border-zones, the UK state has portrayed irregular Channel crossings as an invading threat and has deployed a militarized response. While there is burgeoning scholarship focusing on informal migrant camps in the Calais area, there has been little analysis of stat…
Blood, body and belonging: The geographies of halal food consumption in the UK
This article presents a framework for understanding how 'halal' food consumption is understood, practiced and experienced by British Muslims through an empirical study in Birmingham (UK). There are emerging bodies of literature in geography that analyse food/animal ethics and work recognising the increasing importance of the halal food industry. However, there is also a need to understand how ethical and theological concerns translate when scaled…
Liberal Violence and the Racial Borders of the European Union
This paper examines how racial violence underpins the European Union’s border regime. Drawing on two case studies, in northern France and the Balkans, we explore how border violence manifests in divergent ways: from the direct physical violence which is routine in Croatia, to more subtle forms of violence evident in the governance of migrants and refugees living informally in Calais, closer to Europe’s geopolitical centre. The use of violence aga…
Informal migrant camps
This chapter situates the informal camp as a vital space of contemporary migration, discussing it in relation to more formal settings and theorizing the role of political inaction in their spatial politics. The chapter starts by highlighting different formations of the informal camp; from adjunct encampments near formal refugee sites; to urban squats in transit cities; to the widespread prevalence of ‘jungles’ as important spatial formations for …
Bad news from nowhere: Race, class and the ‘left behind’
Brexit, race and migration
This timely series of interventions scrutinises the centrality of race and migration to the 2016 Brexit campaign, vote and its aftermath. It brings together five individual pieces, with an accompanying introduction, which interrogate different facets of how race, migration and Brexit interconnect: an examination of the so-called left behinds and the fundamental intersections between geography, race and class at the heart of Brexit motivations and…
Ruins of Empire: Refugees, race and the postcolonial geographies of European migrant camps
Public health in the Calais refugee camp: Environment, health and exclusion
The ongoing emergency for refugees is having profound and hidden health consequences for thousands of displaced persons who live in informal ‘makeshift’ camps across Europe. This interdisciplinary paper reports the results of the first environmental health assessment in such a location, in what was Europe’s largest informal refugee camp in 2016, in Calais, northern France. We detail the lack of facilities for sanitation, safe provision of food, w…
Violent Inaction: The Necropolitical Experience of Refugees in Europe
A significant outcome of the global crisis for refugees has been the abandonment of forced migrants to live in makeshift camps inside the EU. This paper details how state authorities have prevented refugees from surviving with formal provision, leading directly to thousands having to live in hazardous spaces such as the informal camp in Calais, the site of this study. We then explore the violent consequences of this abandonment. By bringing toget…
Urban landscapes and the atmosphere of place: Exploring Subjective Experience in the Study of Urban Form
Urban landscapes are produced through the combination of material forms and subjective human experience. Drawing on the concept of atmosphere, we argue that human experience of urban spaces drives alterations to the built environment, making it critical that these are studied in tandem. Atmosphere is created through the combination of human activity, individual emotional responses and subjective perceptions of built forms. Though unique to the in…
Dissonant belongings: The evolving spatial identities of young Muslim men in the UK
Since 2001, a number of controversial and sometimes violent events in the UK and elsewhere have raised anxieties around British Muslim male identities. The problematisation of those identities is now framed around the supposed conflict between Britishness and Muslim-ness. Yet these discourses of the belonging of young Muslim identities often underplay or fail to consider the increasing importance of local, British spaces in ethnically diverse tow…
Geography, migration and abandonment in the Calais refugee camp
Controversy, Islam and politics: An exploration of the 'Innocence of Muslims' affair through the eyes of British Muslim elites
In September 2012, a video entitled 'Innocence of Muslims' was uploaded to YouTube. The fourteen-minute clip featured actors playing the Prophet Muhammad, his companions and wives, and while production values were amateurish, aided by airings on Egyptian national television and others elsewhere, the video went viral. Recalling the Rushdie affair two decades beforehand, angry protests took place across the world. In the UK, the response from Musli…
A catastrophic lack of inquisitiveness: A critical study of the impact and narrative of the Project Champion surveillance project in Birmingham
This article focuses on both the narratives of Project Champion, a surveillance scheme in Birmingham in the UK that saw the installation of 216 closed circuit television and Automated Number Plate Recognition cameras in two areas which contained the greatest concentration of Muslims in the city. Considering the period of time throughout which Project Champion was conceived in 2008, instigated and eventually dismantled by July 2011, this article p…
Violent Inaction: The Necropolitical Experience of Refugees in Europe
A significant outcome of the global crisis for refugees has been the abandonment of forced migrants to live in makeshift camps inside the EU. This paper details how state authorities have prevented refugees from surviving with formal provision, leading directly to thousands having to live in hazardous spaces such as the informal camp in Calais, the site of this study. We then explore the violent consequences of this abandonment. By bringing toget…
Epistemic Borderwork: Violent Pushbacks, Refugees, and the Politics of Knowledge at the EU Border
Borders are sites of epistemic struggle. Focusing on the illegal tactic of the “pushback,” which is routinely deployed by state authorities to forcefully expel asylum seekers from European Union territory without due process, this article explores the uneven politics of knowledge that helps to support or unsettle this clandestine border violence. Drawing on long-term qualitative research on the Croatia-Bosnia border, including interviews with pus…
Liberal Violence and the Racial Borders of the European Union
This paper examines how racial violence underpins the European Union’s border regime. Drawing on two case studies, in northern France and the Balkans, we explore how border violence manifests in divergent ways: from the direct physical violence which is routine in Croatia, to more subtle forms of violence evident in the governance of migrants and refugees living informally in Calais, closer to Europe’s geopolitical centre. The use of violence aga…
Ruins of Empire: Refugees, race and the postcolonial geographies of European migrant camps
Geography, migration and abandonment in the Calais refugee camp
Dissonant belongings: The evolving spatial identities of young Muslim men in the UK
Since 2001, a number of controversial and sometimes violent events in the UK and elsewhere have raised anxieties around British Muslim male identities. The problematisation of those identities is now framed around the supposed conflict between Britishness and Muslim-ness. Yet these discourses of the belonging of young Muslim identities often underplay or fail to consider the increasing importance of local, British spaces in ethnically diverse tow…
The Politics of Injury: Debilitation and the Right to Maim at the EU Border
Borders are sites of mass injury. This article questions the necroconsensus that has emerged within migration studies, and explores the political role that less-than-deadly violence plays at contemporary borders. By withholding from outright killing, and thus avoiding the optics of public scrutiny, EU states are deploying a carefully calibrated politics of injury designed to control racialised groups through debilitation. The injuries produced th…
A catastrophic lack of inquisitiveness: A critical study of the impact and narrative of the Project Champion surveillance project in Birmingham
This article focuses on both the narratives of Project Champion, a surveillance scheme in Birmingham in the UK that saw the installation of 216 closed circuit television and Automated Number Plate Recognition cameras in two areas which contained the greatest concentration of Muslims in the city. Considering the period of time throughout which Project Champion was conceived in 2008, instigated and eventually dismantled by July 2011, this article p…
Bringing order to the border: Liberal and illiberal fantasies of border control in the English channel
This article focuses on the advancement of fantasy policy solutions to irregular migration, drawing on the case study of the UK/French border. In 2018 people began to cross the English Channel in significant numbers to seek asylum. This led to much commentary and a raft of new legislation seeking to criminalise people crossing the Channel and end rights to seek asylum in the UK. In this article, we explore the interaction between two sets of fant…
Eco-coloniality and the violent environmentalism of the UK-France border
This article examines the eco-coloniality of the UK-France border by tracing the transformation of the notorious Calais "jungle" refugee camp into a nature reserve. We empirically investigate the ecological politics of the Calais borderzone, arguing that the environment plays a crucial role in both enacting and obscuring border violence. Based on long-term research at this site, we explore how the environment does political work by excluding, har…
Bad news from nowhere: Race, class and the ‘left behind’
Blood, body and belonging: The geographies of halal food consumption in the UK
This article presents a framework for understanding how 'halal' food consumption is understood, practiced and experienced by British Muslims through an empirical study in Birmingham (UK). There are emerging bodies of literature in geography that analyse food/animal ethics and work recognising the increasing importance of the halal food industry. However, there is also a need to understand how ethical and theological concerns translate when scaled…
Brexit, race and migration
This timely series of interventions scrutinises the centrality of race and migration to the 2016 Brexit campaign, vote and its aftermath. It brings together five individual pieces, with an accompanying introduction, which interrogate different facets of how race, migration and Brexit interconnect: an examination of the so-called left behinds and the fundamental intersections between geography, race and class at the heart of Brexit motivations and…
Four seasons of border violence: The co-option of the seasons into the management of migration
From ocean currents to rivers, deserts, and mountains, the environment is often weaponized into border controls against people homogeneously racialized as “irregular migrants’’. This paper is based on our observation that direct violence used during pushbacks – illegal forced returns over a border – are enforced as well as resisted in the context of seasonal shifts; temporal processes that have been side-lined in migration-violence literature. Ba…
Controversy, Islam and politics: An exploration of the 'Innocence of Muslims' affair through the eyes of British Muslim elites
In September 2012, a video entitled 'Innocence of Muslims' was uploaded to YouTube. The fourteen-minute clip featured actors playing the Prophet Muhammad, his companions and wives, and while production values were amateurish, aided by airings on Egyptian national television and others elsewhere, the video went viral. Recalling the Rushdie affair two decades beforehand, angry protests took place across the world. In the UK, the response from Musli…
Small Boats, Big Contracts: Extracting Value from the UK 's Post‐Brexit Asylum ‘Crisis’
This article discusses post‐Brexit asylum policy in the UK. On the surface, Brexit had little impact on asylum, but Brexit, combined with the new phenomenon of small boat Channel crossings, created the conditions for a new and extreme UK policy agenda. It explains how politicians have sought to deliver border sovereignty performatively after Brexit by introducing extreme measures, ostensibly—though not practically—to stop small boat Channel cross…
Urban landscapes and the atmosphere of place: Exploring Subjective Experience in the Study of Urban Form
Urban landscapes are produced through the combination of material forms and subjective human experience. Drawing on the concept of atmosphere, we argue that human experience of urban spaces drives alterations to the built environment, making it critical that these are studied in tandem. Atmosphere is created through the combination of human activity, individual emotional responses and subjective perceptions of built forms. Though unique to the in…
A catastrophic lack of inquisitiveness: A critical study of the impact and narrative of the Project Champion surveillance project in Birmingham
This article focuses on both the narratives of Project Champion, a surveillance scheme in Birmingham in the UK that saw the installation of 216 closed circuit television and Automated Number Plate Recognition cameras in two areas which contained the greatest concentration of Muslims in the city. Considering the period of time throughout which Project Champion was conceived in 2008, instigated and eventually dismantled by July 2011, this article p…
Geography, migration and abandonment in the Calais refugee camp
Controversy, Islam and politics: An exploration of the 'Innocence of Muslims' affair through the eyes of British Muslim elites
In September 2012, a video entitled 'Innocence of Muslims' was uploaded to YouTube. The fourteen-minute clip featured actors playing the Prophet Muhammad, his companions and wives, and while production values were amateurish, aided by airings on Egyptian national television and others elsewhere, the video went viral. Recalling the Rushdie affair two decades beforehand, angry protests took place across the world. In the UK, the response from Musli…
Urban landscapes and the atmosphere of place: Exploring Subjective Experience in the Study of Urban Form
Urban landscapes are produced through the combination of material forms and subjective human experience. Drawing on the concept of atmosphere, we argue that human experience of urban spaces drives alterations to the built environment, making it critical that these are studied in tandem. Atmosphere is created through the combination of human activity, individual emotional responses and subjective perceptions of built forms. Though unique to the in…
Dissonant belongings: The evolving spatial identities of young Muslim men in the UK
Since 2001, a number of controversial and sometimes violent events in the UK and elsewhere have raised anxieties around British Muslim male identities. The problematisation of those identities is now framed around the supposed conflict between Britishness and Muslim-ness. Yet these discourses of the belonging of young Muslim identities often underplay or fail to consider the increasing importance of local, British spaces in ethnically diverse tow…
Public health in the Calais refugee camp: Environment, health and exclusion
The ongoing emergency for refugees is having profound and hidden health consequences for thousands of displaced persons who live in informal ‘makeshift’ camps across Europe. This interdisciplinary paper reports the results of the first environmental health assessment in such a location, in what was Europe’s largest informal refugee camp in 2016, in Calais, northern France. We detail the lack of facilities for sanitation, safe provision of food, w…
Violent Inaction: The Necropolitical Experience of Refugees in Europe
A significant outcome of the global crisis for refugees has been the abandonment of forced migrants to live in makeshift camps inside the EU. This paper details how state authorities have prevented refugees from surviving with formal provision, leading directly to thousands having to live in hazardous spaces such as the informal camp in Calais, the site of this study. We then explore the violent consequences of this abandonment. By bringing toget…
Brexit, race and migration
This timely series of interventions scrutinises the centrality of race and migration to the 2016 Brexit campaign, vote and its aftermath. It brings together five individual pieces, with an accompanying introduction, which interrogate different facets of how race, migration and Brexit interconnect: an examination of the so-called left behinds and the fundamental intersections between geography, race and class at the heart of Brexit motivations and…
Ruins of Empire: Refugees, race and the postcolonial geographies of European migrant camps
Informal migrant camps
This chapter situates the informal camp as a vital space of contemporary migration, discussing it in relation to more formal settings and theorizing the role of political inaction in their spatial politics. The chapter starts by highlighting different formations of the informal camp; from adjunct encampments near formal refugee sites; to urban squats in transit cities; to the widespread prevalence of ‘jungles’ as important spatial formations for …
Bad news from nowhere: Race, class and the ‘left behind’
Liberal Violence and the Racial Borders of the European Union
This paper examines how racial violence underpins the European Union’s border regime. Drawing on two case studies, in northern France and the Balkans, we explore how border violence manifests in divergent ways: from the direct physical violence which is routine in Croatia, to more subtle forms of violence evident in the governance of migrants and refugees living informally in Calais, closer to Europe’s geopolitical centre. The use of violence aga…
Channel crossings: Offshoring asylum and the afterlife of empire in the Dover Strait
In 2020, over 8,400 people made their way from France to the UK coast using small vessels. They did so principally in order to claim asylum in the United Kingdom (UK). Much like in other border-zones, the UK state has portrayed irregular Channel crossings as an invading threat and has deployed a militarized response. While there is burgeoning scholarship focusing on informal migrant camps in the Calais area, there has been little analysis of stat…
Blood, body and belonging: The geographies of halal food consumption in the UK
This article presents a framework for understanding how 'halal' food consumption is understood, practiced and experienced by British Muslims through an empirical study in Birmingham (UK). There are emerging bodies of literature in geography that analyse food/animal ethics and work recognising the increasing importance of the halal food industry. However, there is also a need to understand how ethical and theological concerns translate when scaled…
Epistemic Borderwork: Violent Pushbacks, Refugees, and the Politics of Knowledge at the EU Border
Borders are sites of epistemic struggle. Focusing on the illegal tactic of the “pushback,” which is routinely deployed by state authorities to forcefully expel asylum seekers from European Union territory without due process, this article explores the uneven politics of knowledge that helps to support or unsettle this clandestine border violence. Drawing on long-term qualitative research on the Croatia-Bosnia border, including interviews with pus…
Small Boats, Big Contracts: Extracting Value from the UK 's Post‐Brexit Asylum ‘Crisis’
This article discusses post‐Brexit asylum policy in the UK. On the surface, Brexit had little impact on asylum, but Brexit, combined with the new phenomenon of small boat Channel crossings, created the conditions for a new and extreme UK policy agenda. It explains how politicians have sought to deliver border sovereignty performatively after Brexit by introducing extreme measures, ostensibly—though not practically—to stop small boat Channel cross…
Eco-coloniality and the violent environmentalism of the UK-France border
This article examines the eco-coloniality of the UK-France border by tracing the transformation of the notorious Calais "jungle" refugee camp into a nature reserve. We empirically investigate the ecological politics of the Calais borderzone, arguing that the environment plays a crucial role in both enacting and obscuring border violence. Based on long-term research at this site, we explore how the environment does political work by excluding, har…
The Politics of Injury: Debilitation and the Right to Maim at the EU Border
Borders are sites of mass injury. This article questions the necroconsensus that has emerged within migration studies, and explores the political role that less-than-deadly violence plays at contemporary borders. By withholding from outright killing, and thus avoiding the optics of public scrutiny, EU states are deploying a carefully calibrated politics of injury designed to control racialised groups through debilitation. The injuries produced th…
Bringing order to the border: Liberal and illiberal fantasies of border control in the English channel
This article focuses on the advancement of fantasy policy solutions to irregular migration, drawing on the case study of the UK/French border. In 2018 people began to cross the English Channel in significant numbers to seek asylum. This led to much commentary and a raft of new legislation seeking to criminalise people crossing the Channel and end rights to seek asylum in the UK. In this article, we explore the interaction between two sets of fant…
Four seasons of border violence: The co-option of the seasons into the management of migration
From ocean currents to rivers, deserts, and mountains, the environment is often weaponized into border controls against people homogeneously racialized as “irregular migrants’’. This paper is based on our observation that direct violence used during pushbacks – illegal forced returns over a border – are enforced as well as resisted in the context of seasonal shifts; temporal processes that have been side-lined in migration-violence literature. Ba…
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…
The border security economy in the English Channel: Small boats, racism and late imperialism
The movement of people in small boats across the English Channel to claim asylum has created a policy and media spectacle in the UK. This article examines the bordering regime along the Northern French Coast and in the UK which have shaped the criminalised journeys. Contributing to debates on the fragmentation of state power, we interrogate the political economy of bordering and the wider global and social interests that shape the border security…
Knowing the Border: Epistemic Friction and Irregular Crossings of the English Channel
This article explores epistemic injustice in the context of border crossings. In many contexts around the world borders are fortified not only through walls, fences and guards, but also through knowledge claims about human mobility. We can conceptualise these types of claims as ‘epistemic borderwork’. This article discusses 39 semi-structured interviews with people who crossed the English Channel irregularly, primarily in small boats. These testi…
Migration, Refugees, and Integration (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (12 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Refugee (8 works) · Calais (7 works)