Conclusions The dynamics developed during the No Border camp held in Lesvos last summer highlight the controversial implications of endorsing humanitarian discourses and practices around migrants1 detention, which often employ the 'technologies of gender' (de Lauretis, 1987) to control migrants' mobility and divide them into different categories. These gender representations accommodate a regime that needs exceptional acts of concession and benevolence in order to sustain its logics of 'differentiated inclusion'. Indeed, we have seen how these techniques are part of a larger framework, whereas the apparently irrational circularity of Dublin II can be seen as a dispositive of the EU migration regime purposely designed to defer, decelerate and deviate the movement of migrants across Europe (Papadopoulos et al., 2008). A furtherobjective of the regime of 'gentler detention' conceded to the women with children on humanitarian grounds, was to neutralize and de-politicize the protest of migrants in Pagani. By turning the migrant women detained in the centre into 'illegal migrants' yet in exceptional time allowing them a special treatment as 'care givers', this regime attempted to silence the voices of women as political subjects. Similarly the emphasis on inhumane conditions of detention can obscure the injustice of the very decision of detention on the basis of border crossing, and takes for granted the 'effectiveness' of these detention centres. Although it emerged how gendered systems of selection and 'detention management' work to reproduce women's vulnerability, not even the activists in the camp managed entirely to avoid viewing migrants as mere victims without their political agency. More generally the margin between political engagement with the migrants, solidarity actions and the provision of a service or charity is always nuanced, as witnessed in the No Border camps organized internationally over the last decade (Neilson and Mitropoulos, 2006: 11). At the same time one should avoid the temptation to lock the migrant into the romanticized and heroic figure of the intrinsically revolutionary agent. The way that we think of migrants as political subjects rather depends on how we conceive 'the political' and, based on that, what is deemed political action. As emphasized by Andrijasevic (2008b), the recognition of the movements of migration that traverse and contribute to shape the discontinuity of the sovereign borders in the EU calls into question the very way in which we conceptualize politics and define who is indeed a political agent. The wider tendency to see the acts of dissent of the detainees as non-political is achieved exactly by criminalizing and erasing the bodies of the migrants and putting them outside the (liberal) 'public space' of politics (Neilson and Mitropoulos, 2006: 4). This suggestion may help to understand the uneasiness and contradictions that emerged among the activists in their relationship with migrants as 'political Gabriella Alberti fe ΓΠ i Π i St Γβ VI e W 94 This content downloaded from 163.1.255.60 on Fri, 10 Apr 2015 17:57:53 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 2010 145