The authorities in the CCAC simultaneously weaponise their own ignorance, and project an ignorance onto those who are detained. Developing Spivak’s concept provides a useful way to reattribute agency to those managing and operating the CCAC—a space constructed to suspend racialised mobilities—without necessarily diagnosing the intent of the authorities. Rather, there is power in the ignorance of decision-making or failure to take decisions, while simultaneously perpetuating an image of their benevolence or ‘humanitarianism’. The second section describes the infrastructure, key changes and legal basis which already make the CCAC a detention space contrary to European law. This transitions the paper to the central discussion in sections three and four on how ignorance together with changing detention practices and enforced waiting, contribute to and exacerbate detention. These practices undermine suggestions by the Greek and EU authorities that they are simply responding to an overwhelming situation, but rather they are strategically ignorant towards their preparedness and thus produce their own failings. This paper concludes that the changing circumstances make the space and practices of detention more difficult to challenge. Revealing a third aspect of ignorance, wherein legal NGOs and lawyers are themselves mediating ignorance. Ultimately, changes to practices, standards and conditions cannot reconcile with the arbitrary and unlawful detention of people on the move which the CCAC represents. Reiterating statements made in IHR’s report, this paper does not find any form of detention of people seeking international protection permissible, regardless of the ‘sophisticated language’ and appeals to benevolent intentions. 1. Introducing Sanctioned Ignorance The Greek hotspot islands are politically positioned as an ‘entry-point’ or ‘frontier’ into Europe and the European Union. For this reason, Gayatri Spivak’s postcolonial scholarship importantly aids in recognising and critiquing the colonial entanglements which persist in the practices of bordering ‘Europe’. Scholars writing in the fields of decoloniality, postcoloniality, and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), argue that international law and the international refugee law regime were informed by enduring colonial logics (4). The EU hotspot approach— the political and legal basis for the Samos CCAC—suspends the mobility of populations from the global south entering Europe during the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. This is inextricably entrenched and entangled in Europe’s ‘post’-colonial present. The crisis of borders is also a crisis of management, wherein media and political discourse refer to an ‘overwhelming’ number of people arriving at the border and an ‘overwhelmed’ system for managing those populations (5). This discourse is often framed in racialised terms but ignorant to the colonial and hegemonic histories which produce contemporary mobilities. As argued by Polly Pallister-Wilkins, the so-called ‘humanitarian border’ space is involved in perpetuating Fanon’s global colour line of unequal mobility and the Greek hotspots are a material and bureaucratic tool for consolidating that inequality (6). The CCAC is not only a form of unlawful and arbitrary de facto detention but occurs within the specific context and historical legacy of constructing and bordering ‘Europe’. Postcolonial scholarship for this reason may also help us understand how the material infrastructure and pervasive social control are exacerbated by this legacy. 2