Paper short abstract

This paper analyses UK port returns as a form of affective governance. Drawing on interviews with EU citizens refused entry after Brexit, it shows how legal procedures and border spaces produce atmospheres of stress, humiliation and deterrence.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how affective atmospheres are produced, sustained, and mobilised in contemporary border governance, focusing on the UK practice of port returns – the refusal of entry at ports of arrival (typically airports) followed by enforced departure. In recent years, political and legal anthropology has emphasised the role of affect and atmosphere in shaping how people subjectively experience political and legal situations. We bring this sensibility to the study of port returns by foregrounding the atmospheres of refusal encounters, understood not only as emotional reactions of individuals but as collective, situational affects embedded in legal-bureaucratic processes.

Drawing on qualitative interviews with Romanian and Polish citizens disproportionately subjected to port returns after Brexit, as well as testimonies from civil society observers, we show how port return spaces – from airport holding rooms to interrogation zones – give rise to pervasive atmospheres of stress, uncertainty, humiliation, indignity and anger. These atmospheres are not incidental but are constitutive of how port return is felt, enacted, and contested in border zones, shaping people’s sense of agency and belonging.

We argue that port returns exemplify affective governance in which legal procedures and spatial organisation co-produce atmospheres aiming at deterring mobility. Negative emotions produced at the airport contribute to momentary disempowerment of border-crossers and acceptance of the return procedure. This practice ties into neoliberal migration governance by fully shifting the responsibility onto the individual, filtering out those who otherwise would be deportable in the UK, and disciplining their future mobility in a cost-efficient manner.