Performing states of crisis: exploring migration detention in Israel and Denmark

Deportation regimes are increasingly studied from the perspective of the anthropology of bureaucracy and the governing techniques used to detain, exclude and deport ‘unwanted’ migrants. Such approaches force us to ‘think with the other side’, to include the experiences and dilemmas of street-level officials in our analysis that may challenge our positionality as researchers, as well as our wish to produce ‘evidence’ of deportation practices. Amit and Lindberg’s paper sheds light on the performance of state power and the techniques of controlling non-citizens by presenting ethnographies from two ‘open’ migration detention centres, very similar in function, but strikingly different in practice: the now-closed Holot detention centre for African asylum-seekers in Israel; and the Udrejsecenter Sjælsmark (Deportation Centre Sjælsmark) in Denmark. Migration detention, as a state-making mechanism, serves different functions. Ilan Amit and Annika Lindberg find that, while Holot was a manifestation of coercive power and an over-recording strategy on behalf of the Israeli state, Sjælsmark exemplifies a different governing technology that operates through deliberate state negligence and abandonment. Ethnographies of the performativity of these different power strategies offer insights into the intricacies of state control as it reconfigures sovereignties by declaring and enacting ‘crises’ of migration control.