mandates of caging. In doing so, she reminds us that the animalization of certain bodies works to create the conditions for their exploitation and disposability. Drawing on this diverse scholarship, I argue that racialised and gendered stereotypes and myhts about immigration offered crucial resources to detention officers in Greek institutions for justifying their actions and the harsh institutions in which they work; thus, upholding and legitimating the spaces created by the hyper-politics of border control. The rest of the chapter shows how the animal imagery has provided supportive cues to the authorities to respond to resistance by detainees. Making protests against detention illegible and illegitimate When I asked the Director of the Petrou Ralli detention centre about his role, he said ‘The aim is to have peace. To have inmates that don’t shout, don’t resist, don’t create problems- so that they have a nice time and we a better one’ (Interview, Petrou Ralli detention centre, 2018). But what happens when this ‘peace’ is breached; when detained migrants shout and resist? In line with the animalization process described above, treating migrants as wild animals that have to be tamed in order to prevent them from revolting and eventually escaping had deeply corrosive effects in the perception of and reaction to moments of resistance, contestation, and other modes of critique. In this context, any attempt by those detained to resist the violence of detention actually reinforces the imagery of animals in cages and is perceived as yet another sign of their animal-like nature, which allegedly offers them brute strength; the rationale being that as sub-humans they cannot be reasonable, nor obey orders. Ιn the role of zookeepers, keeping them in cages is a matter of life or death for detention officers. Xenia, a female detention officer, told me that her method for avoiding risk is to keep the cell doors closed at all times. ‘They are 100 and I’m 1. They can kill me in seconds.’ She went on to explain the reasons behind this strict regime ‘When they’ve learned to be abused, to be beaten up day and night, to be naked all day…you know they keep them naked and they get sick and die. They get abused. So, this monstruous behavior has had an effect on their psychology and behavior. They once wanted to hit me. They could have killed me.’ Therefore, perceived animalistic behaviour on the part of detainees, who want to escape from their cages, can only be subdued through violence. The following incident illustrates this point. 181