The Detention of Immigrants in Poland

This book explores how securitisation of migration unfolds within detention facilities, where states seek to organise (im)mobility. Drawing on fieldwork in all six Polish Guarded Centres for Foreigners, including 161 interviews with Border Guard officers and civilian staff, the book examines detention from the perspective of those who run it and provides insight into yet uncharted realities of Polish immigrant detention system.

Developing the concept of the securitising assemblage, the book places discourse, practice and space in one analytical frame and traces how migrants become security objects within detention. It takes the reader through three cumulative dimensions: (in)visibilisation, containment and control, and removal. Surveillance makes detainees visible and knowable, producing knowledge used to manage confinement. Within containment and control, care eases distress and draws everyday relationships into security work. Removal carries this knowledge forward and keeps detainees within the state’s reach. As the analysis moves through the centres, spatial organisation gives these processes material form and durability. This process has no single author or defining moment. It endures through everyday detention work, preserving the state’s hold over unwanted mobility and detention’s own continuity.

Bringing a Central and Eastern European perspective to immigration detention research, the book will interest scholars, students and professionals in migration, sociology, critical security studies, border criminology and carceral geography.