Detention-as-spectacle

Using a combination of migration studies, political sociology, and policy studies, this paper explores the contradictions and violence of immigration detention, its architectures, and its audiences. The concept of “detention-as-spectacle” is developed to make sense of detention’s hypervisible and obscured manifestations in the European Union. We focus particularly on two case studies, the United Kingdom and Malta, which occupy different geopolitical positions within the EU. Detention-as-spectacle demonstrates that detention is less related to deterrence and security than to displaying sovereign enforcement, control, and power. A central aspect of the sovereign spectacle is detention’s purported ability to order and even halt “crises” of irregular immigration, while simultaneously creating and reinforcing these crises. The paper concludes by examining recent disruptions to the spectacle, and their implications

Borders, (dis)order, and exclusion: migration governance at the margins

No abstract available

Governing migration from the margins

No abstract available

Subversive knowledge in times of global political crisis: a manifesto for ethnography in the study of international relations

This paper explores the promises and pitfalls of using ethnographic methods to analyze global politics in turbulent times. Ethnography has not gone unnoticed by international relations (IR) scholars, but the method remains at the fringes of the discipline. While acknowledging more recent feminist and practice theorist contributions to ethnographic research in IR, this paper brings together contemporary research across diverse issue areas, ranging from humanitarian intervention to transnational migration, to ask about ethnography's larger contribution to understanding global politics: What kinds of knowledge does ethnography produce about IR? In what ways might ethnography, informed by local perspectives, challenge top-down approaches to the study of IR? We identify three primary justifications for ethnographic methods based on different, though overlapping, forms of knowledge that they can uncover: tacit knowledge, marginalized knowledge, and subversive knowledge. We acknowledge issues that complicate access, and we warn that ethnographers are far from immune to the imperialist arrogance of mainstream methodologies. Ultimately, we call for reflexive scholarship to navigate the international politics of a “post-truth” and post-Covid world

Immigration detention: an Anglo model

Over the last twenty-five years, immigration detention policies and practices have proliferated around the globe. We look at four liberal democratic countries with the largest immigration detention systems—Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and identify components of an immigration detention policy ‘package’ as well as historical parallels in the early adoption of detention in these countries. This ‘Anglo model’ of detention is based on three main features: (1) the existence of indefinite and/or mandatory immigration detention policies; (2) the use of private security actors and infrastructure; and (3) the use of creative legal geographies in order to interdict and detain people offshore. Past scholarship on detention has focused on single national case studies or assumed the leadership of the US as the primary innovator in the field. Our paper establishes the empirical and theoretical grounds for considering these countries as a group and suggests a more complex process of policy adoption among them. Identifying an Anglo model of detention lays the critical groundwork for understanding the expansion of immigration detention and the transnational diffusion of detention policies among these countries, as well as where and how countervailing pressures to detention might form

Small states and non-material power: creating crises and shaping migration policies in Malta, Cyprus and the European Union

This article examines how the power relationships between Malta and the Republic of Cyprus, on the one hand, and the European Union, on the other, shape irregular immigration policies in these two sovereign outpost island states in the Mediterranean. As member states on the EU's southern periphery, Malta and Cyprus have faced new institutional structures since their accession in 2004 within which they now construct their migration policies. Here, I examine how the new structures influence the discourse and logic of migration policies and politics and also how the seemingly small and powerless states affect regional policies. My contention is that, within this EU framework and with limited material power, the two outpost states have developed strategies based on nonmaterial power in order to defend and promote their interests. Such strategies have resulted in treating irregular immigration as a crisis in order to attract support. The new dynamics have thus resulted in more barriers to migration, and in negative consequences for the individual migrants and refugees on the islands. Although the strategies of Malta and Cyprus have been surprisingly successful in influencing regional migration governance, their long-term effectiveness is questionable, and their effects on the migrant and local population problematic

Constructing a crisis: the role of immigration detention in Malta

Malta remains the only country in the European Union that maintains an 18-month, mandatory detention policy for all irregular migrants upon arrival. This paper examines the role that detention has played in the Maltese government's response to the flows of irregular immigration to the island in the 21st century. It argues that detention is symbolic of the crisis narrative that the Maltese government has constructed as a response to these immigration flows in order to gain more practical and financial support from the European Union. The detention policy also serves to reinforce this interpretation of irregular immigration. Such a portrayal, combined with the use of detention as a deterrent, produces detrimental consequences for the migrant population, as well as the wider Maltese society. The paper draws on over 50 interviews, conducted by the author, with government officials, non-governmental organisations, and migrants and refugees on the island

Trying to transit: Irregular immigration in Malta

No abstract available

Review of: Foundations Of International Migration Law, edited by B. Opeskin, R. Perruchoud and J. Redpath-Cross. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012

No abstract available