perspective is also interested in such matters in Denmark. There she contrasts practices of ‘kindness’ like baking with coercion through dynamic security. In Greece, much like the institutions they work in, detention officers have been overlooked in the literature.81 Cabot (2018) explores the emergence of the figure of the good police officer in the narratives of advocates for asylum seekers in the Greek asylum system. This perceived ‘goodness’ is associated with a new ethos of accountability and transparency in the governance of asylum, yet, this image might reveal more about the NGO practitioners, who are projecting it, rather than the actual officers, who are synonymous with arbitrary violence. Rozakou (in preparation) is concerned with the moral world of detention officers (see also Borrelli and Lindberg, 2018). While recognising their anti-immigrant attitudes, she explores how they often exhibit care towards immigrants, drawing on the Greek notion of ‘filotimo’ (love of honour). However, as she shows, violence and dehumanisation are not challenged by this exhibit of care but are rather in full compliance as ‘filotimo’ has a strong nationalist content.82 What this diverse scholarship shares, though, is that they rarely interrogate the idea of police itself, all the while they denounce police abuses. This approach, Micol Seigel argues, ‘leaves us disputing superficial aspect of police practice, never taking up our assumptions about what police are or what they do, foreclosing challenge to the legitimacy of the police in a democracy’ (Seigel, 2018, p. 6). Borrowing from Seigel (2018), who defines policing as ‘violence work’, I seek to explain how this violence has become so normalised in a detention setting. Detention centres are distinctive institutions marked out by high levels of uncertainty for staff and detainees. These are also sites that are marked out by global, racialised systems of inequalities. Detention centres are simultaneously politically contested and largely hidden and unfamiliar to most citizens. They are by racialised logics that strip the confined of their humanity and permit brutality to occur. The work of a detention officer is quite unclear under these circumstances. I show that rather than authority, rooted in relationships however unequal, all too often staff in detention in Greece draw on an authoritarian logic, in which those confined are owed nothing, perhaps not even food. See Pallister-Wilkins (2015) for an exploration of border policing and humanitarianism. For another reading of the word ‘filotimo’, see Cheliotis (2014), who argues that this concept of Greek honour has been employed in Greek prisons to promote order. 81 82 128