Fighting a Fictional Invasion via the English Channel: Self-defeating Discursive Performances of Sovereignty in Response to Irregular Migration

The Conservative UK government’s ‘Stop the Boats’ campaign depicts mobility across the English Channel as an impingement of national sovereignty (Braverman, 2023), and supports exceptional measures to restore it.
Yet scholars have observed that sovereignty is not an attribute but a practice, produced by states’ enactment of what it means to assert sovereign power (Edwards, 2020; Aalberts, 2004; Ashley and Walker, 1990). Therefore, although it is often imagined and depicted as an essential, pre-discursive quality possessed by states, state sovereignty has a performative, discursive and constructed character (Edwards, 2020; Spengler et al., 2021; Jones et al., 2017). When shortfalls in state power become evident, performances of sovereignty can be undertaken to obscure apparent state weakness or reassert strength. Performative measures of sovereignty in relation to migration include physical interventions such as border walls (Brown, 2010) or detention camps (Amit & Lindberg, 2020), or politico-discursive ones such as legislation (Kahn, 2006) and government rhetoric (Akopov & Krivokhizh, 2019). This paper focuses on performative government rhetoric by members of a political elite, which has “preferential access to the mass media”, and the ability to “set or change the agenda of public discourse and opinion making” (Van Dijk, 1995, p. 4). Specifically, it illustrates how cross-channel migration has been represented as a powerful external threat to sovereignty in rhetoric by UK Home Secretaries Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, prompting punitive and exceptional government policies as assertions of state power in response. Yet it argues that these performances of a ‘strong’ sovereign state, and the repressive policies they are mobilised to justify, may actually produce state ‘weakness’ in practice.