Description
To govern migration and displacement, states around the world attempt to capture the movement of ‘irregular’ migrants through detention and encampment. These camps are sites of violence and enforced isolation, but they are also sites of transversal connection, action and resistance. Detained people have long drawn on varied repertoires of resistance as well as performative acts of communication to challenge detention regimes. A range of actors, both inside and outside detention, enact heterogeneous relations of political community and solidarity performed across international contexts. Their struggles thus transform entrenched notions about what politics is, who is entitled to perform it, and where and how it can be practiced.
This paper explores how these struggles that emerge in and over detention reveal entanglements of power that function to govern mobility in a range of interconnected contexts across the globe. They reveal an archipelago of camps with intertwined logics, technologies and practices. The paper examines acts of resistance in detention camps run by the Australian and United Kingdom governments respectively. It shows how people in camps forcibly bring to light often disavowed connections, denied linkages and erased histories, to tell the story of the global management of people and movement in new ways.
