Abstract
This chapter explores Foucault’s concepts of power and resistance and argues that detainees are not submissive recipients of state power, but retain and use agency throughout their detention. The chapter explores different detainee analyses of immigration detention and politics, outlines some of the strategic and political debates former detainees had within detention centres, presents different ethical and pragmatic frameworks used in decisions of strategy and tells three detainee stories as case studies.
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Notes
- 1.
The term Muselmann was used by concentration camp inmates to describe fellow inmates who had lost ‘all consciousness and all personality’ (Agamben 1998, 185) and who were consequently indifferent to all around them, whether pangs of hunger or cold, beatings from guards or approaches from fellow inmates. The Muselmann was described by Primo Levi in his account of his own experiences during World War II, If This be a Man. Agamben takes Levi’s figure of the Muselmann to explore the ambiguous philosophical terrain in which ‘life’ and ‘death’, and zoē (‘the simple fact of living common to all living beings’ [Agamben 1998, 1]) and bios (living proper to an individual or group’ [Agamben 1998, 1]) become indistinct.
- 2.
Some people in detention did collapse into a state which might resemble Agamben’s Muselmann (Shayan Badraie, whose story is partially told later in this chapter, is a dramatic example of this). But when such collapses occurred, others around the person rallied and exercised their own power in many different ways on behalf of the Muselmann. There is an insufficiently critical acceptance of representations of detainees as ‘passive victims’ and the dominance of this view serves to further mask the agency of the majority of detainees who resisted throughout and beyond their detention.
- 3.
Separation detention refers to the holding of a detainee in a separate compound with others who have arrived on the same boat. Separation detention is described by the Department of Immigration as a ‘management tool through which the integrity of Australia’s visa determination process is maintained’ (HREOC 2005, section 3). The primary purpose of separation detention is to prevent communication with others who have already had immigration interviews and legal advice to prevent earlier arrivals ‘coaching’ new arrivals in the process and criteria that they must meet to trigger the protection visa application process (HREOC 2004, 240, 2005, section 3; JSCM 2000, 33). During this stage of detention no telephones, faxes, newspapers, television, radio or any form of communication with other detainees or with people in the Australian community is permitted (Commonwealth Ombudsman 2001, 13; HREOC 2004, 11, 240, 254, 2005, sections 3 and 4).
- 4.
Hon Philip Ruddock was the Minister for Immigration from 1996 to 2003.
- 5.
Some government backbenchers were an exception to this but there was no discomfort publicly expressed by government Ministers.
- 6.
The Badraie family’s real names are used here as their story is well documented in the public sphere.
- 7.
A distance of approximately 900 kilometres.
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Fiske, L. (2016). Power and Resistance. Everyday Resistance to Immigration Detention. In: Human Rights, Refugee Protest and Immigration Detention. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58096-2_3
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