Detaining the Immigrant Other: Global and Transnational Issues R. Furman, D. Epps and G. Lamphear (Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press (2016) 240pp. £35.99hb ISBN 978‐0‐19‐022257‐4

Some issues seem global or transnational by their very nature. If we think about migration or climate change, for example, a wide lens feels more appropriate than a narrow focus. But what does it mean to have a global perspective on something? Short of mastering all languages and spending decades researching different places, omniscience is a long way off. Detaining the Immigrant Other: Global and Transnational Issues, an edited collection on immigration detention around the world featuring scholars from many countries, concerns itself with the big picture. But more than anything it illustrates the major theoretical and practical difficulties of a global or transnational approach, however appealing it may at first seem. Of the book's 16 chapters, the majority are case studies on immigration detention in individual countries, including the USA, Mexico, South Africa, and Turkey. The chapters each provide some descriptive detail about how the administrative detention of foreign nationals is carried out in different places, charting recent policy developments and, in some cases, discussing findings from fieldwork. The book covers a range of countries and so is likely to be of interest to anyone researching border control, with particularly good chapters on immigration detention in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Malta, and Sweden, and a comparative chapter on Greece and the UK. These contributions provide succinct accounts of the function and meaning of detention at several levels, all the way from the political rhetoric of national sovereignty to the daily life of immigration detainees and staff. Asylum seekers who have travelled to Australia by boat are relegated to transnational detention environments marked by hopelessness, despair, and preventable mental illness. In pursuing self-serving, bilateral strategies that seek to divest it of the burdens of processing and protection under the Refugee Convention, Australia continues to destroy lives, breach its human rights obligations, undermine international and domestic relations, and frustrate realization of durable solutions for refugees in the Asia-Pacific region. (pp.151–2) Without wishing to deny the appalling consequences of detention for many people, and acknowledging the difficulty of finding workable political alternatives to detention, a little too much of the book is spent merely listing problems. Some chapters do not build any coherent argument about why things are happening or how they might be changed. There are important political, legal, and economic constraints on government action when it comes to migration, yet many chapters have little to say about these. In Canada, for example, we are told that some families in detention have suffered ‘histories of physical assault, rape, and torture; threats or harassment by an organised group; murder or disappearance of family or friends; witnessing murder; religious persecution; domestic violence; and forced separation of family members and of parents and children’ (p.196). Parents whom the authors interviewed ‘disclosed significant distress manifesting as sleep difficulties, nightmares, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, weight loss, and feelings of shame and humiliation’ (p.204). Children, too, ‘often live through frightening arrests and detention review hearings, and experience deprivation, understimulation, lack of psychosocial support, parental distress, and harsh surveillance during their day-to-day life in detention’ (pp.206–7). It is easy to feel overwhelmed when reading these accounts, and it is tempting to give up on an administrative system that seems so cruel and harmful, whether by accident or design. But what is missing from these dispiriting claims is any sense of political agency or hope, concepts lost amid the exhaustive descriptions of detainees’ pain and suffering. What of the book's more general aim of analysing immigration detention through a ‘global and transnational lens’ (p.2)? The editors’ introduction gestures at familiar concepts such as globalisation and neoliberalism, noting the ‘increasing interconnectedness of nation states, financial sectors, nongovernmental organizations, communities, and the many other institutions in an increasingly interconnected world’ (p.3). But these broad, contested terms are treated as monoliths, with little discussion of their historical origins or the interaction of the global with the regional, national and local. What is ostensibly a worldwide introduction to immigration detention extrapolates too readily from American experience and relies heavily on some obscure sources, neglecting much of the literature on, for instance, the emergence of a world economy, privatisation and national identity. In the absence of any clear theoretical framework for analysing similarities and differences between states, and to distinguish continuity and change over time, globalisation and neoliberalism are portrayed as forces of nature with uniform effects. The rather sweeping introduction therefore gives a misleading and simplistic impression of how large-scale political and economic processes play out in reality. Ironically, the state-centric organisation of the book is a reminder of the continuing importance of national politics in an era of mass mobility. More prosaically, the text includes numerous typos and other minor errors, although these seldom detract from the substance of the book. Some phrases in the introduction are vague and require elaboration, for example ‘the current dynamics of immigration detention expressing themselves around the world’ (p.7) or the claim that French immigration laws have ‘shifted the very fabric of French society and what it means to be French’ (p.10). While the exact meaning of some points is ambiguous, the editors are in no doubt that ‘immigration detention is largely a horribly abusive institution that greatly disrupts and traumatizes’ (p.9). The book certainly provides some evidence in support of this argument, but it is perhaps less successful in its broader ambition of giving a global and transnational account of immigration detention.

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