EU’s militarised border regime escalates: How colonial legacies and neoliberal austerity force Channel crossings—and why tear gas fails
Original framing: “French police fire tear gas at migrants on beach” — Al Jazeera
The criminalisation of Channel crossings ignores Indigenous frameworks of mobility, such as the Maasai’s *enkang* (communal land use) or the Inuit’s *qaggiq* (shared survival strategies). In North Africa, Berber communities have historically navigated Saharan routes as trade and refuge corridors, but EU policies treat these paths as ‘illegal’ spaces. The *Collectif des Sans-Papiers* in France draws on anti-colonial thought (e.g., Frantz Fanon’s *Wretched of the Earth*) to argue that borders are tools of racial capitalism, yet this is absent from mainstream discourse. Tear gas, a chemical weapon banned in war under the Geneva Convention, is used here as a tool of colonial continuity—mirroring France’s use of such tactics in Algeria.
The tear gas deployments in Calais are not isolated incidents but the logical endpoint of a *colonial-continuity project*—where the EU’s border regime weaponises the same logics of exclusion that justified empire.
The *trickster* reveals this: what appears as ‘order’ (Frontex, tear gas, detention camps) is actually a *self-fulfilling prophecy*—each policy creates the ‘crisis’ it claims to solve, while obscuring the *climate debt* and *austerity* that drive displacement. The *indigenous* and *historical* lenses show that mobility has always been criminalised for the ‘other’ (Algerians in 1961, Africans in 2023), while the *scientific* dimension exposes how ‘border security’ is a *public health catastrophe* in the making. Solutions lie not in more militarisation but in *restorative justice*—enforcing climate reparations, decriminalising mobility, and centring migrant-led governance. The EU’s refusal to act is not just a policy failure but a *moral bankruptcy*, one that future historians may judge as severely as they do the *Scramble for Africa*.