unsuccessful attempts to get into these centres, it is not always the state actively blocking research (Dimitriadi 2017; Rozakou, 2019). As I explain in the following chapter, I have been both successful and unsuccessful in obtaining official research access and this does not necessarily have to do with an open or a closed approach to research on the part of stakeholders. According to police statistics, in 2018, they granted 225 access requests to detention centres countrywide. These, of course, include all the actors that have visited detention facilities, including multiple visits by NGOs and monitors. Nevertheless, no matter how restricted access to detention is, it is not entirely absent as one would assume, given the lack of information about what goes on behind bars. Here, I instead suggest that the authorities, mainly the police, have maintained a strategy of ‘clopenness’ (Parsanoglou et al. forthcoming as cited in Rozakou, 2019), by which detention spaces resemble inaccessible places, which are open to a limited few. As I will argue later in the thesis, those who have been able to access detention centres may be (inadvertently) complicit in contributing to the expansion of the very sites they seek to monitor, research and scrutinize through their work. Casting light on this, Rosset and Achermann (2019), point out that the seeming or real illegibility of bureaucratic processes shields the legibility of state as a discourse. ‘Indeed’, they further argue, ‘the unequal access to knowledge that results from illegibility prevents outsiders from producing and claiming knowledge about the state, thus reinforcing the state’s narrative about itself’ (Rosset and Achermann, 2019, p. 2). Therefore, through creating confusion around who, why and where people are detained in the country, the authorities have built metaphorical security walls around these facilities that prevent a deep understanding of their operation. But, as Katerina Rozakou (2019), who is one of the few academics who has managed to conduct research inside immigration detention centres, explains, researchers, who ignore a seemingly inaccessible field, risk uncritically reproducing the very violence of the migration regime. Consequently, immigration detention in Greece is hidden in plain sight. Below, I carve out my approach in making sense of the field. Conceptualising immigration detention Grounded in long-term ethnography and involvement with the field of immigration detention, this thesis adopts an unconventional structure, whereby the theoretical discussion is embedded separately in each chapter, instead of in a separate literature review 22