and not knowing, between rendering bordering practices visible and strategically erasing them from public knowledge.’ (Loyd and Mountz, 2018, p. 2). As a result of this paradox, attention, in the Greek context, has been focused along the politically charged Greek-Turkish land and sea borders, naturalising deterrence and military defense practices, at the same time as related histories of the disturbing accounts of violence and neglect from inside the country’s detention centres are obscured. The few accounts from inside detention that are available to the public are often eradicated by processes of official rationalization, denial and whitewash; what Mona Oikawa (2000: 41) characterizes as deliberate, systematic ‘hegemonic ideologies of forgetting’. Yet these violent histories cannot be forgotten not only because they underpin the very origins, experience and administration of confinement for marginalised peoples in contemporary Greece, but also because they have fundamentally shaped the contemporary Greek nationstate. This thesis is, therefore, motivated by a desire to bring back to life the experience of immigrants inside Greek detention facilities in order to document past injustices and explain how the proliferation of harm and violence producing the detention estate in the present have been so effectively normalised. Above all, the central objective of this thesis is to document the Greek immigration detention industry. I am writing this because I have seen and witnessed the horror and I want to expose it; to unveil officially obfuscated and unresolved accounts of power from within detention facilities, institutions that are traditionally sealed from public view. To this end, this thesis presents material from 10 years of research and work inside a number of different detention sites. It draws on a large amount of empirical data, including more than 950 informal conversations with detainees and staff; more than 70 semi-structured interviews with detainees and other actors (e.g., detention staff, NGO workers, policymakers, charitable and volunteer workers, political activists and journalists); detailed fieldnotes; participant observation inside the central detention centre in Athens; 14 months of working as an NGO practitioner in the airport detention facility; shadow monitoring visits of the Greek National Preventive Mechanism; and nearly four years of collaborating with practitioners and activists on projects that aim to inform public understanding and debate at a time when the numbers confined are growing and conditions of their detention are worsening. 13