Detention Landscapes: Violence in Immigration Detention Centres

In this episode we discuss the realities of immigration detention across Europe, from the individual experiencing detention to the broader politics shaping the system. What is immigration detention? The Migration Observatory explains in a recent policy briefing, ‘In the UK, immigration detention refers to the Home Office practice of detaining foreign nationals for the purposes of resolving their immigration statuses. Most countries use immigration detention. When people are detained, they are typically held in prison like conditions’.
But what does detention actually mean for those who experience it? And how do broader political forces shape the system?
Recorded earlier last year, we explore these important questions in our latest episode of the Migration Oxford podcast, and examine immigration detention through multiple lenses:
· The individual human experience: We hear from Gee Manoharan, Co-Director of Policy and Influencing at AVID (Association of Visitors to Immigration Detainees), about his harrowing experience of detention in the UK.
· The importance of research: While Dr Andriani Fili, Wellcome Trust Research Fellow and Co-Director of Border Criminologies at the University of Oxford, highlights the importance of research in imagining more humane systems, drawing on the ‘Detention Landscapes’ programme of work, which investigates human rights violations inside detention facilities in Greece,
· The politics of immigration detention: Dr Lena Karamanidou, Head of Research at the Border Violence Monitoring Network, looks at the broader politics of immigration detention across Europe, and examines the prevalence violence in detention centres.
Together, we critique and analyse current systems, and imagine an alternative future - what does a better system look like and how could we get there?
The episode is co-hosted by Rob McNeil, Deputy Director of the Migration Observatory, and Delphine Boagey, Programme Officer at the Refugee-Led Research Hub and producer of the Migration Oxford podcast.