Governments increasingly rely upon detention to control the movement of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. Approaching detention from an interdisciplinary perspective, this new edited volume brings together leading writers and thinkers to provide a greater understanding of why it is such an important social phenomenon and suggest ways to confront it locally and globally. […]
Academic Research
Spatial Control: Geographical Approaches to the Study of Immigration Detention – Global Detention Project Working Paper No. 24
This paper surveys research on immigration detention conducted using geographical methods, highlighting how geography’s conceptualization of detention as a form of spatial control offers tools to scholars and activists working to contest this form of immigration control. […]
Putting Immigration Detention in Interdisciplinary Perspective
What can we learn from the interdisciplinary study of immigration detention regimes? Michael Flynn explains in this essay for Oxford University’s “Border Criminologies” research network. […]
Analyzing Immigration Detention from a Global Perspective
Michael Flynn to give a presentation at the workshop “Immigration Detention in the Age of Migration Control” held at the University of Southern California on 7 April 2017 and co-hosted by the USC Gould School of Law, Border Criminologies at Oxford University, and the UCLA School of Law. Flynn’s presentation is entitled “Analyzing Immigration Detention from […]
Detention, Deportation, and Waiting: Toward a Theory of Migrant Detainability: GDP Working Paper No. 18
The global expansion of deportation regimes has spurred an analogous expansion of migrant detention. This GDP Working Paper situates the analysis of immigration detention in the framework of contemporary critical theory, interrogating the economy of different conditionalities that undergird the distinct categories of migrants who are subjected to detention power. […]
Border Criminologies: Assessing the Changing Architecture of Crime and Punishment
This paper examines contributions from the nascent field of “Border Criminologies” in assessing the changing architecture of crime and punishment, focusing primarily on immigration detention.
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Bureaucratic Capitalism and the Immigration Detention Complex
This paper argues that post-structuralist approaches to the study of immigration detention present a number of theoretical and conceptual problems. Post-structuralist analyses focusing on discourses divorced from actors present teleological problems in terms of theory. Additionally, poststructural accounts of detention centres using concepts such as homo sacer and Banoptican tend to conflate human rights and citizenship rights, […]
There and Back Again: On the Diffusion of Immigration Detention
From Mexico to the Bahamas, Mauritania to Lebanon, Turkey to Saudi Arabia, South Africa to Indonesia, Malaysia to Thailand, immigration-related detention has become an established policy apparatus that counts on dedicated facilities and burgeoning institutional bureaucracies. Until relatively recently, however, detention appears to have been largely an ad hoc tool, employed mainly by wealthy states in exigent circumstances. This paper uses concepts from diffusion theory to detail the history of key policy events in several important immigration destination countries that led to the spreading of detention practices during the last 30 years and assesses some of the motives that appear to have encouraged this phenomenon. […]
