Ouvrage auteur unique
| Résumé : | This book investigates how, with the introduction of the element of care, the forms of legitimate state violence in immigration policy have adapted to the challenges of migrants’ human rights. Since the “securitarian” turn in migration policies in the mid-1980s, the question under which conditions the use of state violence is legitimate has been central in post-industrial societies. As shown by the literature on the humanitarian border, the element of care is not antithetical to security practices, but guarantees that migrants are dispossessed of these fundamental rights without violating them. Beyond its legitimating and instrumental functions, however, the element of care has transformed the forms of legitimate violence and has itself been transformed by them.Against this background, the book unpacks the role played by social workers, educators, nurses and psychologists in the management of violence in Belgian immigration detention centres. Through the analysis of their work routines it shows how their interactions with detainees have become privileged sites of observation feeding into a risk-management mechanism in which they occupy expert positions. It illustrates how despite their professional background and care-work, they create institutional knowledge on detainees, disentitling the latter from their rights and stripping them of their agency.The role and work of these non-custodial staff is approached through an organisational analysis that takes into consideration the professional frictions and the relations of power in the centres. This approach emphasises the importance of the physical space these actors occupy, as well as the social space and division of labour that are structured by these power relations. As I will illustrate in the book, this approach makes it possible to compare different configurations and thus to analyse different outcomes of a same policy.The analysis is based on year-long ethnographic fieldwork in three detention centres in Belgium during which I was interested in the management of violence. This idea stems from Belgian government’s official position to implement a “humane” detention policy, which is enshrined in a Royal decree of 2002. Though this decree determines the rights and duties of detainees, staff and administration, it does not provide effective legal procedures the detainee can invoke against decisions taken by detention staff such that it is hard to say that rule of law has “entered” detention. As such, this “humane” policy fits within the humanitarian framework of managing the thin line between the disentitlement of detainees’ rights and the use of legitimate state violence. As such, during my fieldwork I was interested in the forms of violence that occurred in the centres: not just physical violence, but above all symbolic violence. How were these forms of violence constructed? When were they considered legitimate and when not? When, and what type of violence was routinized to such a point it was not even considered violence? |
