Gilmore in her collection of her lifelong work on abolition (2022), abolition is a process, it cannot tell us what we have to do, but it can help us more towards envisioning and building a future that does not yet exist. As Mariame Kaba (2021) reminds us, abolition is as much about asking the right questions as having the right answers. In critically engaging with the Greek detention system, I hope I have asked the right questions. Methods, data collection and analysis Below I set out the sources and methods I used for my research, describe the process of doing fieldwork inside and outside detention and how all this has informed my analysis. Sources The stakeholders I interviewed did not just focus in the present but more than often spoke about their long-term experiences in the field, referring even to the beginning of the detention system. However, it seemed at a very early point in my PhD that if I wanted to understand the continuity of detention policies and practices, I had to find alternative sources of information. Yet, as I show in the introduction, the Greek academic literature on the issue has a very short time-span and does not contain ethnographic work. Therefore, in order to lengthen the time-span of the project I sought to review and analyse other materials too (Morawska, 2011). In addition to finding sources in academic libraries, I read the entire archive of the reports on visits by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture to police stations, border guard stations and detention centres, which date back to 1991. I also read voraciously publications by third sector organisations and large numbers of relevant policy documents and legislations. As I was wading through all of this material exhaustively, I took notes, which I categorised in an excel spreadsheet. I divided this sheet by detention facilities and by region, e.g. borders, islands, inland. This categorization helped my analysis as it allowed me to identify patterns, commonalities and differences across the detention estate, but also typologies between the facilities that have been used in Greece over time. This exercise was also useful because I was able to classify changes over time, which led to a genealogical reconstruction of the history of immigration detention in the country (Campesi, 2020). The aim was to look at the evolution of the detention system not simply as the aggregate of practices but also as institutional segments governed according to different underlying philosophies and pursuing different objectives. In doing so, I have identified four distinct eras of 44