Security is no accident: considering safe(r) spaces in the transnational migrant solidarity camps of Calais

This chapter will examine the political activities, and in particular, practices of safety enacted bytransnational migrant solidarity collectives and projects based in the UK and on the French/British border zone of Calais. Specifically I am going to look at two groups, London No Borders and Calais Migrant Solidarity and the use or lack of use of safe spaces policies in negotiating and confronting issues of safety and insecurity within their praxis and organising spaces. I will recount the issues that arose during the Calais No Border Camp of 2009 and the establishment of the Feminist Security Group. The last section of this chapter is a list of recommendations for transnational migrant solidarity activists that seek to use the concept of safe(r) spaces policy in managing collectivity and the lessons that have been learnt both in my activism and through my interviews with fifteen of these collective members.