Description
Across the UK, US, and Australia immigration detention can be understood as a transnational carceral web (Mainwairing et al, forthcoming) comprising entanglements of corporate and state power which entrap people, spaces, and communities in relations of harm and exploitation, while in the process producing carceral economies and subjects. The carceral logics embodied in this web have their roots in the persisting coloniality of state-making and racial capitalism. In the face of an expanding carceral web, various forms of resistance have emerged. Here we identify the work done to prise apart strands of the web, liberate people and spaces from their entrapment in the carceral web, and challenge the web through collective acts of refusal. Drawing on interviews with organisers, advocates, activists, and people with lived experience of detention across Australia, the UK, and USA, we explore strategies of resisting the carceral web including counter-mapping, economic boycotts and divestment campaigns, the use of hunger and labour strikes within detention, the building of webs of care, and leadership by experts by experience. In doing so, we seek to complicate binary debates between ‘abolitionist’ and ‘reformist’ approaches to detention and highlight the transnational connections between local and national struggles.
