Dwelling in Dispersal: Logic of Subtraction, Infrastructuring of Endurance, and the Production of Fugitivity along the Belgian-French Route to the UK

This thesis asks how migrants dwell, move, and sustain orientation toward a destination when the state has organized their presence around its impossibility. Its ground is the Belgian-French route to the United Kingdom, where "Dublinized" migrants face an architecture that compels movement while criminalizing it, and erodes the shelter it requires. Dispersal, the thesis argues, is enforcement's mode of operation, not its failure. Three instruments constitute this formation: the Dublin Regulation III, a technology of suspension producing an administrative non-person for whom every jurisdiction disclaims responsibility; France's zéro point de fixation, targeting the consolidation of migrants' presence into a legally demandable form; and Belgium's "transmigrant" category, declaring the Dublinized migrant inherently nomadic and so exempt from rights formally owed to asylum seekers. The thesis then turns to what dwelling becomes when it can no longer take root. Through nineteen months of mobile-activist ethnography, I trace how eviction cycles subtract terrain from migrants' encampments while assembling, in their place, a circuitscape: a distributed geography of squats, camps, and hosting networks spanning Brussels to the Channel, legible only at the scale of the route itself. Read through an infrastructural lens, these circuits endure not despite their ephemerality but through it, sustained by peculiar modes of endurance in infrastructuring dwelling and movement. What this infrastructure sustains is not mere survival but a subjective orientation. Read through the analytics of fugitivity, the thesis distinguishes this from migration studies' aspiration framework: aspiration presupposes a field of possibility to select from, while Dublinized migrants inhabit a field from which possibility has been subtracted. What remains is anterior to aspiration – minimal, repeatedly reconstituted, oriented away from an intolerable present rather than a chosen destination. This fugitive orientation is not a mere tactic migrants deploy, but the very form of existence the border regime produces and then polices. Held together, these registers (governmental, spatial, infrastructural, and subjective) outline a wider technique of contemporary border governance, in which the control of unauthorized migration works not through walls or deportation alone but through the engineered impossibility of rest, and in which fragile infrastructures of solidarity must be continually remade in the narrow space that logic leaves open.