‘Migrant’ activism and the Detention Reform Sector: resistances and reproductions of hegemonic notions of citizenship, nationhood and belonging

Keywords: state violence, racism. humanitarianism, border abolition, prison abolition, reformism, immigration detention, deportations, citizenship, nationhood, belonging
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 5

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the discourses produced by the All African Women’s Group and what I call the ‘Detention Reform Sector’ (DRS) in the United Kingdom. I explore how these discursive sites reproduce and resist hegemonic notions of citizenship, nationhood, and belonging by conducting a discourse analysis of their demands, actions and campaigns. I argue that the reformist discourses produced by the DRS naturalise and depoliticise deportation and immigration control, whilst the discourses of humanitarianism fail to problematise the violence of borders and licence border violence against those not deemed subjects of humanitarianism. In contrast, I claim that the non-reformist discourses of prison and border abolition, produced by the All African Women’s Group, resists hegemonic notions of citizenship, nationhood, and belonging by: revealing the colonial legacies of nation-state regimes of exclusion; illuminating the role of racism and capitalism in the operation of borders and national citizenship; and challenging the state’s power to categorise - refusing the state and borders. This paper illustrates the need for charities in the detention sector to reckon with colonial legacies of citizenship and border control, and be cognizant to how the discourses of reformism and humanitarianism can work in detriment to migrant struggles rather than in solidarity. Finally, I demonstrate how focusing on discourses of abolition can centre migrant struggles, challenge dominant knowledge production on human mobility and force one to imagine and build a world without borders.