legitimised the status quo inside detention and may have lost the opportunity to provide alternatives to detention. Chapter 6 ‘‘Searching for Azadi’ Resisting the detention system from the inside and outside’’ documents the forms and limits of resistance inside detention centres. While previous research documented how immigrants and protest movements react to detention policies, less is known about how states and the authorities, faced with such protests, legitimise their efforts to exclude animalised immigrants from Greek society. This chapter takes resistance from detainees as granted and seeks to explore its nature as well as the forms, with which it has been stifled by the authorities as another way to understand the violence of the detention system. In doing so, it shows how resistance shapes border control; thus, documenting its power to change the status quo inside detention. I also address the issue of solidarian resistance from the outside to understand its contours and its limits to having an impact in how detention practices are implemented. The epilogue draws together the theoretical and conceptual contributions of the thesis and the value of empirical research in providing new understandings of immigration detention locally but also globally. As evident in most of the accounts I collected from detained migrant women in Greece, despite a brutal law enforcement regime at the country’s borders and a life often at risk of destitution and homelessness, migratory movement is an untamable force that exceeds the politics of control (Mezzadra, 2011). Stierl (2019, p. 62) enquires into the idea of migration ‘as an excessive force’ and explores how people are able to subvert borders. Nino, a migrant woman detained at the Petrou Ralli detention facility in Athens, describes the ‘stubbornness’ of migration better than any other academic attempt. I came here because I have a 4-year-old kid, my parents are old, 65 and 75, and I wanted to come, sort out my papers and bring my kid here. And I look after my parents from here. They told me I was going to hide in a bus for two hours. You know where I was? Under the chairs and above the wheels…like…what is that? Like a coffin. And in reality, I was there 24 hours. Many times I didn’t understand what was going on. I was unconscious and I didn’t realise the time passing. You know what it is? When we got to Athens the bus stopped. It was the police. And they had told me that if the bus stopped, I shouldn’t do anything…I mean I wasn’t allowed to move. And I couldn’t anyway. I was like this (she shows she was cramped), above me there was steel and the engine was on. When the bus stopped, they didn’t turn the engine off because they were afraid, I would scream. And the exhaust gas was all in my face and I couldn’t breathe… it was a miracle I survived. 34