The Detention of Immigrants in Poland
Securitising Discourses, Practices and Spaces
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Publishing:15th Jan '27
£171.99
This title is due to be published on 15th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
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.
'The Detention of Immigrants in Poland situates detention within the intersecting national and European frameworks that govern “unwanted mobility”. The book takes us inside Polish detention and reveals how coercion is normalised through routines of care and confinement. Combining unmatched access to facilities with a novel account of securitising assemblage, this timely and rigorous book deepens our understanding of how migration control is translated from design into security practice.'
Professor Florian Trauner, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.
‘The Detention of Immigrants in Poland: Securitising Discourses, Practices and Spaces is an analytically rigorous and empirically rich study that offers a rare inside view of detention facilities, illuminating the routines, administrative procedures, and spatial arrangements through which securitisation is enacted. Taking a critical perspective, it demonstrates how migrants become governable security objects: not enemies, but anticipated “disruptions” to be managed. While grounded in the Polish context, the book’s insights reach far beyond a single case, making it an important and timely contribution to migration and security studies, particularly from Central and Eastern Europe.’
Witold Klaus,Professor at Institute of Law Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland.
‘Based on rare access to all six immigration detention centres in Poland, The Detention of Immigrants in Poland: Securitising Discourses, Practices and Spaces offers a unique contribution to security and migration studies. The Polish case provides a rich counterpoint to dominant Global North scholarship, revealing a detention regime shaped by its communist heritage, migration externalisation, and tensions between nationalist approaches and the bureaucratisation of EU border governance. Through discourses, practices, and carceral spaces, the book exposes the paradox of visibility and opacity in everyday institutional processes that transform migrants into governable objects of security.’
Alethia Fernandez de la Reguera,Lecturer at Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, UK.
ISBN: 9781041035114
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
188 pages