Women’s Immigration Detention in Greece: Gender, Control, and Capacity1
Mary Bosworth, Andriani Fili and Sharon Pickering
University of Oxford and Monash University
Forthcoming in Maria Joao Guia, Robert Koulish, Valsamis Mitislegas (Eds.). (2014).
Immigration Detention, Risk and Human Rights. Springer.
Introduction
As states around the world have sought to reduce rates of irregular migration, many
have deployed criminal justice agencies and institutions in the name of border control.
Such actions have, somewhat belatedly, garnered the attention of criminologists,
leading to the development of a vigorous field of inquiry known as the ‘criminology
of mobility’ (Aas and Bosworth, 2013; see also, inter alia, Guia, van der Woude and
van der Leun, 2012; Leerkes and Brodeurs, 2010; Pratt, 2005; Barker, 2013; Weber
and Pickering, 2011; Pickering, 2014). As this body of literature has expanded, so too
have the sites and methods of analysis in it.
While, for the most part, much
scholarship has been primarily theoretical or based on secondary and legal analysis
(Aas, 2011; Welch and Schuster, 2005; Bosworth and Guild, 2008; Cornelisse, 2011),
more recently, a handful of criminologists have begun to publish qualitative accounts
of the nature and effect of border control (Bosworth, 2012; Fili, 2013; Kaufman,
2012; 2013; Kaufman and Bosworth, 2013; Gerard and Pickering, 2012).2
1
The fieldwork for this paper was conducted by Andriani Fili from November 2011 – February 2012,
supported by the Oxford University Research Support Fund at the Faculty of Law as well as by
Australian Research Council Future Fellowship of Sharon Pickering. Mary Bosworth would also like to
acknowledge funding from the European Research Council, Starter Grant, 313362 in writing up the
project. Where possible interviews were digitally recorded and then fully transcribed and translated
into English by Andriani Fili. Others were recorded in note form and then translated into English. All
interviewees have been anonymised. More information about this ongoing research can be found at
www.borderobservatory.org and http://bordercriminologies.law.ox.ac.uk.
2
If we include anthropology, politics and geography, the volume of ethnographic research expands as
does the amount of theoretical work on border control (On the former, see, for example, Hall, 2010;
2012; Mountz, 2012; Gill, 2010, on the latter, see Makaremi, 2009; De Genova and Peultz, 2010;
Fassin, 2011).
1