Resistance as a thread The concept of resistance is at the core of the thesis. I explore its meaning in three different contexts. First, I consider resistance to change. The chapters that follow set out to explain the historical development of detention, its social and political operational environment and how this form of confinement has become a key technique of control of migrants in Greece. They further seek to explain how the state and the police have managed to insulate immigration detention from any threats to its existence, remaining at the same time publicly unaccountable and able to protect bureaucratically opaque policies. Following Carol Agόcs (1997, p. 918) this institutionalised resistance presupposes ‘the authority to act or to choose not to act, and the power to legitimate or to silence the voices of those who advocate change’. In these processes of legitimation, institutionalised practices become unquestioned contributing to the stability of organisations. In this case, I aim to show how the authorities have used their power as well as their control over resources and other agencies to resist change when they perceive it as threatening. Second, I explore what happens when detained men and women in Greece resist the violence of detention. Building upon previous research (Bailey, 2009; Griesbach, 2010; Fiske, 2012; Tyler, 2013; Bosworth, 2014; Puggioni, 2014; Campesi, 2015; Hughes, 2016; Esposito, et al., 2020), I take resistance against the violence of detention for granted. The issue of resistance against immigration enforcement practices worldwide has, indeed, been well documented, borrowing from the literature on resistance inside prisons (Karlene, 1993; Bosworth 1999; Bosworth and Carrabine 2001; Carrabine 2005; Corcoran, 2007). Notwithstanding the caveat of representation in these prison and detention ethnographies, i.e., the fact that these texts often situate agency on one side of the domination/resistance binary (Hoffman 1999), limiting detainees and prisoners to a single text or a normative definition of their identity, this body of literature has been instrumental in understanding power relations from the point of view of those subject to them. Yet, what happens in the aftermath of these challenges is rarely part of these accounts. Here, I explore resistance as a threat to a system that seeks to immobilise, exclude, and sometimes kill those found inside. In doing so, I chart the strategies of disciplinary power and reactive responses to challenges levelled by detainees and those that support them and explain what they may mean for the future of detention in the country. If resistance can 30