Thematic reports and scholarly working papers produced wholly or in part by the Global Detention Project (GDP) and written by GDP staff members, associated researchers, or partner organisations.
In December 2015, the Global Detention Project completed its first fiscal year as an independent association after operating for nearly eight years at the Graduate Institute. This Annual Report details the origins and evolution of the GDP and its efforts to confront the growing use of immigration detention.
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In this GDP Working Paper, an inspector from the UK Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons discusses tensions between pushing for short-term progress in the treatment of immigration detainees and long-term reforms. The HMIP focuses on treatment and conditions, not challenging the system, even if immigration detention arguably lacks legitimacy in a way that criminal imprisonment does not. What amounts to “effective” inspection and can inspection promote meaningful change?
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This paper argues that private corporations can and should be held responsible for structural injustices that take place in immigration detention regimes in which they operate. It draws on literature from business ethics to evaluate various ethical arguments for assessing corporate responsibility, emphasising models that may lead to the prevention of harm and suffering. In […]
This paper examines contributions from the nascent field of “Border Criminologies” in assessing the changing architecture of crime and punishment, focusing primarily on immigration detention.
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Based on a two-year investigation seeking basic details and statistics about immigration detention practices in 33 countries across Europe and North America, this joint report by the GDP and Access Info Europe reveals that in many countries it is impossible to obtain an accurate picture of the number of migrants and asylum seekers being held […]
Labour migrants are a backbone of the economies of all the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council–Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. While much has been reported on the abuses these workers often suffer, very little is known about what happens to them when they are arrested and detained. […]
This paper argues that post-structuralist approaches to the study of immigration detention present a number of theoretical and conceptual problems. Post-structuralist analyses focusing on discourses divorced from actors present teleological problems in terms of theory. Additionally, poststructural accounts of detention centres using concepts such as homo sacer and Banoptican tend to conflate human rights and citizenship rights, […]
The campaign to end the detention of children, including child migrants and asylum seekers, has generated impressive global momentum. However, there remain important gaps in this effort, including the absence of an adequate definition of the immigration detention of children and inherent problems in developing realistic statistics to measure state activities. The objective of this […]
With the recent tragic surge in the number of deaths at sea of asylum seekers and other migrants attempting to reach Europe, enormous public attention is being focused on the treatment of these people across the Mediterranean. An important migration policy employed throughout the region is detention, including widespread deprivation of liberty of asylum seekers […]
This paper details the history of key policy events in various countries that led to the global diffusion of detention practices during the last 30 years and assesses some of the motives that appear to have encouraged this phenomenon. In telling this story, this paper seeks to flesh out some of the larger policy implications […]
