periods, this cannot be separated or excused from their cumulative impact on constructing the unlawful and arbitrary detention space. This brings us to the second way sanctioned ignorance is weaponised, namely by projecting ignorance onto the people who are within the CCAC. People are refused information or knowledge on changes made in the CCAC and the reasons they are made to wait. I refer here to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘imaginary waiting rooms of history’, wherein European liberal thinkers refused self-government to Indians and Africans because they were not yet civilised enough (11). To acquire a historical consciousness and the public spirit necessary to govern themselves, liberal thinkers recommended that the colonised populations wait. The people who are detained within the CCAC are often made to wait—for an asylum card, food, to see medical professionals, or receive their asylum decision. This waiting is part of what constitutes the physical barriers of detention, waiting to be able to leave the CCAC, but also waiting to access basic services. Changes are made with no effective communication as to why, and potentially disrupting the prior understanding which people had gathered towards the functioning of the CCAC. In this way, knowledge of the processes and procedures in the CCAC are the tools for self-government which authorities refuse to people who they make wait. In the following sections, I address the numerous ways sanctioned ignorance is weaponised by the authorities and against people within the CCAC in order to both reproduce and conceal detention. The final section will return to and argue that there is a third layer of ignorance. Namely, sanctioned ignorance is weaponised against the legal NGOs and lawyers who must mediate between the ignorance of the authorities and the ignorance projected onto people within the CCAC. This has a significant impact on the ability of organisations, such as IHR, to challenge detention as well as sanctioned ignorance. 2. The Closed Controlled Access Centre The CCAC was overtly constructed as a space to make a mobile population wait. The Hotspot approach is more broadly described as a space to keep people ‘out of sight, out of mind’—a space that the EU and Greek authorities can ignore (12). In this section, by first describing the Samos CCAC generally and the key historical changes over its operation, the situation is put in direct conversation with Spivak’s sanctioned ignorance. This transitions to the remainder of the paper where ignorance experienced daily contributes to the cumulative construction and reproduction of this as a space of detention. On the Greek Ministry of Migration website, the CCAC is described as having ‘modern technical and functional infrastructure that makes it a safe, controlled access facility, with upgraded living conditions for the accommodated people’ (13). Yet, people held there consistently describe the space as a prison, depriving them of their freedoms (14, 15). Constructed in a mountainous region of Samos, 8km from the city of Vathy, the facility consists of containers and temporary structures separated by internal fencing with checkpoints and external NATO-grade barbed wire fencing. The CCAC is guarded 24/7 by the Hellenic Police and private security company G4S, and monitored by constant CCTV using ‘smart’ AI software (13). 4