In advance of the ESRC-funded seminar The Politics of Detention, to be held at York on 1 July 2013, Alex Hall gives some background to the rise of detention as a means of managing human mobility in the west.
"The recent High Court order to the Home Office to pay compensation to four torture survivors who were held in British immigration detention centres once again (briefly) thrust the issue of detention into the headlines. The case revealed that people who claim to have been tortured are not always medically examined and released from detention, as Home Office rules dictate. The case affirms what critics of immigration detention have long argued: that victims of violence, sexual assault and people with serious mental and physical problems routinely find themselves detained in the UK.
Detention has become increasingly controversial over the last two
decades, as the power to confine non-nationals under immigration law and in the
name of security has been steadily entrenched across western states. Detention brings to mind high profile
cases from the ‘war on terror’ - Guantánamo Bay, the secretive practices of
extraordinary rendition, and the pre-charge detention of people suspected of
terrorist activities but unable to be convicted under normal juridical
procedures. The relationship between the detention of people deemed threatening and risky and the pursuit of security is hardly new, but detention has become
increasingly normalised and pervasive in western states over the last decade. More
specifically, the framing of human mobility as a problem of security means that
detention is more than ever viewed as a vital tool in ‘effective’ state immigration control and
the ‘robust’ management of western borders.
Under UK immigration
law, non-nationals can be administratively detained pending a deportation order
and imminent removal, or when there is a problem with verifying someone’s
identity or a perceived likelihood of a person failing to comply with the
conditions of release or temporary admission. Asylum seekers may be detained to
enable a rapid decision to be taken on an asylum/human rights claim, but
guidelines for frontline staff nonetheless state there should be a presumption
‘in favour of temporary admission or release’ and people should be detained for
the ‘shortest possible time’. In practice, detention populations in the UK
include people who have been held for days, months or even years, and they may
be categorised in various ways: as asylum seekers, ‘illegal’ migrants,
ex-foreign national offenders.
Although detention
is framed as a proportionate response to illicit or threatening forms of
mobility, and a necessary part of effective deportation procedures, it is more
accurately viewed as a means through which categories of national citizenship,
identity and security are shaped and performed. Contemporary detention
facilities – from prisons and removal centres to airport ‘hotels’, temporary holding
centres and accommodation hostels – produce flexible spaces of control where
multiple aims of protection, policing and punishment coalesce. In this sense,
detention is productive: it creates and sustains ‘the detainee’ as a particular
kind of political subject. The failure of the Home Office’s own policies relating
to the treatment of victims of torture suggests that concerns to manage
‘the detainee’ securely tends to override states’ other (humanitarian) obligations to people
fleeing persecution, suffering and violence.
Scholars
and activists working on detention increasingly emphasise the political
challenges that detention poses to western states, with their avowed concern with protecting liberties and freedoms. Detention practices show that these freedoms and
liberties always rely on exceptions and exclusions. Scholars also note that
detention is increasingly preventative and preemptive - intercepting the movement of people seeking humanitarian protection, exporting the sovereign border away from territorial state boundaries and constraining the mobility of people in the name of national security.
These are some of the issues that will be discussed at The Politics of Detention seminar, part of an ESRC-funded series. The seminar will address the following questions: What kinds of political subjects are
produced by detention? How, precisely, do detention practices differentially
value people and lives? What kinds of authority, knowledge and
expertise shape detention? Through what devices does detention constrain
dissent and protestation? How are these devices experienced? What challenges
face those who wish to open spaces for the political contestation of detention?
To what extent does contemporary detention blur the lines between protection,
prevention and punishment?"
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