Description
The immigration detention centre has become a key technology of contemporary global border regimes designed to immobilise irregular migrants. Despite the radical vulnerability and rightslessness produced by these spaces, they have also become sites of numerous and varied acts of resistance, including hunger strikes, lip-sewing, sit-ins and barricades. This paper explores resistant acts undertaken by people detained by the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia, as well as the approaches of anti-detention activists. In doing so, it provides an account of the ways in which global logics of border control are repeatedly met by a multivalent, mobile and complex politics of resistance, that traverses boundaries of many kinds. This paper argues that such acts challenge entrenched notions about what politics is and how it can be practiced and, given that they are often related to self-destructive techniques, they also trouble understandings of the relationship of politics to suffering and trauma.
This paper speaks to existing scholarship in Critical Border Studies and Critical Citizenship Studies, and works both with and against current theoretical approaches that draw on biopolitics, in order to understand contemporary bordering practices and the political subjectivities they produce. Further, it takes a critical approach to humanitarian and advocacy interventions to examine how certain gendered and racialised assumptions, and conceptions of mental health, can serve to limit political meaning. Ultimately, this paper argues that by engaging with detained protesters as both political subjects and people who suffer, we gain greater insight into this emergent and multivalent politics.
