Downloaded by [94.66.124.78] at 01:32 30 November 2017 2 M. BOSWORTH ET AL. In a relatively short period, borders and the control of irregular mobility have moved from a peripheral to a more pressing concern for criminologists in Europe, North America and Australia (see, inter alia, Aas 2011; Aas and Bosworth 2013; Andreas 2003; Bosworth 2008; Bosworth and Guild 2008; Fassin 2011; Gerard and Pickering 2012; Grewcock 2011; Pickering and Ham 2014; Pickering and Weber 2006; Weber 2006; Weber and Pickering 2011). However, we are still building an empirical base from which to understand the micro politics of irregular migration and border control practices. On the one hand, official governmental discourse presents geographical divisions as fixed and defensible. On the other hand, a growing body of interdisciplinary academic research has comprehensively disrupted such accounts, redirecting attention to those who move across borders and the ways they experience border policing, as well as to the perspective of the security forces and their own conceptualisation of border control (see for example Aas 2005; Pickering 2005; Pickering and Weber 2013; Salter 2007; Sanchez 2016; Weber and Bowling 2004; Wilson and Weber 2002; Wonders 2007). Empirical work in the US and Europe has been instrumental to this discussion, highlighting the multifaceted and diverse nature of border control (Bigo and Guild 2005; Pallister-Wilkins 2015; Vaughan-Williams 2012; Williams 2015). In this paper, we contribute to the scant body of applied research in this field by offering an analysis of accounts drawn from a range of migrant and asylum-seeking women and border police in Greece in the central holding facility for migrants in Athens and the Athens airport detention centre. Interviews were conducted over a 12-month period in 2011–2012 by one of the authors in the first site as a research officer and in the second when she was working for a Greek NGO.1 While the Ministry of Interior and Public Protection had overall responsibility for immigration issues and detention facilities, the Hellenic Police approved this research. In negotiation with the relevant authorities, we were given full access to interview staff and detainees and permission to move freely throughout the centres. Detainees were recruited through the social service, and in consultation with detention officers. Staff respondents were chosen based on their experience of having worked both at the border and in detention facilities.2 Below, we set their testimonies against the political and social context of Greece and the European Union (EU). By focusing on the micro politics of producing, performing and crossing borders we highlight the incoherence and contradictions between prevailing logics of border control (Salter 2008). In so doing, we offer a grounded critique of border control policies in Greece that moves beyond prevailing theoretical conceptions of the border as a state of exception. Through rich, empirical description, we reflect the concrete nature of current politics. These are not sites or people outside the law, but rather places and populations whose existence and options reflect and reinscribe global patterns of racial and gender inequality. Border control, the testimonies of our research participants remind us, articulates and relies on racialised and gendered understandings; while the women seek out alternatives, the border guards deny them and turn them away. By comparing the women's accounts of their decisions and experiences with the views of those charged with enforcement and oversight of border control, we reveal the intersectional nature and effect of border crossing reflecting on the role such matters play in nationality, citizenship and belonging (Bosworth, Parmar, and Vázquez 2017).