Solidarity in spaces of ‘care and custody’: the hospitality politics of immigration detention visiting

This article contributes to criminological understanding of immigration detention by highlighting the volunteer visiting as a space of embodied thinking about critical responses to the burgeoning crimmigration system. It draws from interview material with volunteer visitors and people held in immigration detention centres to assess conceptual relevance of critical hospitality studies for anti-border practice. Both within Derridean scholarship on hospitality and in social-discourses on migration, host/citizen and guest/migrant identifications are understood as stable subject positions. I argue that to support resistance to deportation and establish mutual solidarity and cooperation in this context, detention visitors adopt multiple strategies of hospitality that position themselves as visitors as well as hosts. By counter-posing differing ways that volunteers occupy these roles, I show how the co-presence of divergent ways of offering hospitality allow visitors to navigate the complicities that necessarily afflict support in solidarity with migrants in carceral spaces of border control

The IOM’s Crisis Management and the Expulsion of Ethiopians from Saudi Arabia

International audienceBetween November 2013 and March 2014, 163,018 Ethiopians were expelled from Saudi Arabia. The large-scale humanitarian operation set up to support the deportees can be considered to belong to a ‘crisis management’ framework. The creation of camps around Addis Ababa is emblematic of the incorporation of humanitarian logistics into post-deportation management. But the operation can also be understood as a trial run for future operations for receiving and reintegrating deportees. Since the legitimisation of forced returns through humanitarian devices and project funding are central to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and its policies promoting ‘sustainable returns’ and ‘reintegration’, this post-deportation device should be seen within a broader framework of migration management, which involves the IOM, states, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and private actors. Is it still relevant to speak in terms of ‘crisis management’ or was this case a test of a sustainable model of post-deportation assistance consistent with the global approach to migration promoted by the IOM