58 Race & Class 56(4) after being left in this bureaucratic limbo, some young men moved away from the port area and close to the main street, intending to provoke the police and thus achieve the status of administrative detention. When this failed, they started a hunger strike some days later, which the activists supported. Demanding imprisonment as though it were a right is at odds with our conventional understanding and conceptualisation of surveillance technologies. But the scenes described above took place in a somewhat idiosyncratic situation, in which different forms of internment were to be found side by side with an active civic society network engaged in supporting and caring for undocumented border crossers. Because police stations across the whole island were crowded, many new arrivals had to remain in the port area; others were accommodated in the open reception centre, PIKPA, which had been in operation since autumn 2012 under the aegis of local activists and volunteers. The situation became even more complex once the administrative status of PIKPA as an open reception centre changed, when, with the consent of individual activists, it was handed over to the coastguard’s jurisdiction. In effect, PIKPA became an ambiguity since, on the one hand, new arrivals found a safe and hospitable environment there, thanks to the engagement of the locals. On the other hand, it was officially an administrative detention centre, even though, in practice, an open one. The controversy that arose among activists deepened even more when the state’s intention to build a screening centre in Lesvos was realised in September 2013. The research questions This study draws from current scholarly approaches that point to the dual quality of immigration imprisonment: on the one hand, as an authoritative and punitive mechanism; on the other hand, as positive surveillance technologies, whose positivity lies in the state’s efforts to portray itself as the guardian of society’s interests, ensuring consensus.2 My aim here is to examine a series of issues: the imprisonment of refugees and undocumented border crossers in Lesvos as seen against the background of the increasing criminalisation of border crossing; security discourses; the implementation of transnational border surveillance technologies and their manifestations at the national and local levels; and also humanitarian care and welfare systems. My central research question is how, in the case of Lesvos, administrative internment came to be claimed as a ‘right’ by refugees and undocumented immigrants, and its granting treated as a humanitarian act by some activists. This raises two major issues: first, immigration imprisonment as a rational, positive choice, an attempt to assert power in a grossly unequal and coercive situation, and the possible relationship of such a choice to grassroots humanitarian commitment; and, second, what specific facets of the current paradigm of immigration imprisonment account for the interpretation of detention as a ‘right’. I further argue that activism, as it becomes professionalised, may acquire post-bureaucratic features, in which organisations and groups are characterised by consensus decision-making, Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on June 3, 2016