Description
In response to widespread migration and displacement, detention regimes around the world attempt to capture and control the movement of ‘irregular’ migrants through detention and encampment. Detention camps are sites of violence and enforced isolation, but they are also sites of action, resistance and connection. In their struggles, people in detention draw on multiple and varied repertoires of resistance as well as innovative and performative acts of communication, that challenge entrenched notions about what politics is, who is entitled to perform it, and where and how it can be practiced. Their struggles involve a range of actors, both inside and outside detention, and thus enact heterogeneous relations of political community and solidarity performed across contexts.
This paper explores how these struggles that emerge in detention camps bring to light intricacies and entanglements of power that function to govern mobility in a range of interconnected contexts. These regimes of population management are revealed, through the camp, to link sites across the world through the reproduction of logics, technologies and practices. The tentacles of these regimes stretch transversally, through geopolitical and governmental contexts, but they also extend through time, emerging and re-emerging in different times and places. This paper looks at particular acts of resistance in detention centres run by the Australian and United Kingdom governments respectively. It explores how, in their struggles, people in camps forcibly bring to light often disavowed connections, linkages and histories, and tell the story of the global management of people and movement in new ways.
