 Well, can I welcome everyone to the second installment of our workshop series, run by the carceral policy policing and race project that I lead. Last month, we had a wonderful event where we were able to explore the colonialities of incarceration in the global south. Today, we're discussing bordering detention and deportation. The workshop really is a way of expanding what we mean by carcerality, because systems of confinement are not just enforced by prison officers and the police. They're also enforced by border guards and detention agents to and too often the realities of bordering detention and deportation are understood independently from how they operate, which is this much broader carceral regime. Narrow, penal centric discussions, which conceptualize incarceration within the confines of criminal justice, routinely ignore the experiences of racialized populations confined in migrant detention centers, refugee camps, off-shore processing centers and border checkpoints. And this workshop understands how forms of bordering detention and deportation are a constitutive element of mass incarceration itself. In our analysis, we will ask how do colonial logics that have long criminalized, detained and dehumanized those who are compelled to cross national boundaries, building on a historical analysis of the relationship between convict labor, human transportation. This workshop traces systems of detention and deportation and bordering to its colonial roots and diagnoses its function today to protect colonial required wealth and to uphold hierarchies of race, class and gender. I'm joined by Professor Shari Akin, who is an associate professor at Queen's Law with a cross appointment to cultural studies. She's an expert on the immigration and refugee law and has appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada in a number of immigration cases. I'm also joined by Dr Enrique Martino, who's doctoral teaching and research fellow at the University of Compulsay de Madrid. I said that very badly, forgive me, my Spanish is appalling. He's in social and economic history, and particularly the study of exchange, money, labor and kinship in African history. And we shall also be joined by Dr Fiore Bihana. I said that properly. He's an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California. Because Fiore's in Southern California, she will join, but she's not quite with us yet understandably because it's about 6am in the morning there. Her research focuses on the politics of collective memory amongst the Eritrean diaspora in northern Italy within the context of the migration crisis. I think that this particular aspect that we're looking at is hugely important because sadly, as a consequence of the war in Ukraine, the world is facing a massive feud shortage problem, a famine problem. It's a problem that will mean that people will cross borders and flee borders. It's very likely over this next few years that we're going to see even more migration. And because we've still got this populism with us. In the western economies, we're also going to see a sort of anti-immigrant rhetoric growing. Hard to believe. It's going to grow even further, but it's going to be very present in the national discourses of so many of our countries. So I think that this is really, really important. Each speaker will present. Thank you for stepping into 21st before evaluating questions from the audience. Okay, so I'm unmuted and you can see the shared PowerPoint slide. Okay, perfect. So good afternoon. Thanks also to Ollie and David for the invitation. I didn't know how to title my talk and in the introduction was said that the previous session was had a lot to do with colonial history. So I suppose I provide a link to the previous session the current session. Because I want to spotlight an episode in colonial imperial history that is very revealing very interesting. And the terms that were created during that debate, I've really persisted. I think it's always so important to return to this episode. I think it might be well known. It's the case of Liberia and the League of Nations investigation in the 1930s. To briefly introduce myself I've been writing about the history, especially the colonial history of recruiters labor contractors agents runners hooks touts, what are today called smugglers and traffickers. The agents who organized usually cross border labor mobilities in the colonial period and in the post-colonial period. And then I've been particularly interested in their in the genealogy and imagery in the colonial period, which is when the start the economy emerges between you know free regulated movement and unfree problematic impermissible movement usually organized by these by this new underground of recruiters and brokers. And the paradox is that initially, these recruiters they were seen in a very positive light they were they were seen as a substitute for, for the usual sources of labor in the 19th century which had been until then for most of the colonial world the slave trade. So they were welcomed as kind of harbingers of kind of free labor. And they were seen as legitimate ways to mobilize labor whether it's recruiters through a type of forced labor tribute taxation all these things were seen as kind of modern tools of labor mobilization. But then at some point, a corner states switched they, they started excluding them from the management of labor mobility and designating them as the kind of the new slave traders. And I have a book coming out about this with a particular focus on Nigeria and West Africa. So yes, my, I wish to focus on the case of Liberia, which is, which as you may or may not know is became the focus of international attention during the so called Liberia slavery scandal, involving the recruitment of labor between Liberia and the Spanish colony of Fernando but also between the other main employer of labor was the Firestone Company the US rubber manufacturer that had in 1926. Negotiate a large land concession with the government of Liberia 100 year lease on a million acres about the size of Greater London in exchange for a credit of $5 million. The Firestone use very much the same recruitment methods that were later denounced. They, you know, they had to, they had to find figure out a way to present themselves as, you know, as a capitalist benefactor as a, as a, as an employment provider kind of philanthropic imperial capitalism capitalism and contrast themselves with the, with the massive kind of colonial exploitation that was then associated with the Spanish, who were an easy target because in the British press and the Americans press, the Spanish had always figured as this kind of semi civilized colonizer who always more more barbaric more, more exploitative. And the scandal. It's interesting to see because the, it has been researched a lot. And by looking at it in detail again, we can kind of intimate how in the contemporary era, there's also certain scandals and probably will be an increasing and especially, you know, developing countries outside of the West who get spotlighted, investigated for a certain labor conditions labor recruitment conditions in certain ways the whole point is the way that the lighting the way the blame is attributed the way the causes are presumed. And I think Liberia provides a kind of template for this kind of humanitarian new imperial scandal, especially on labor and labor migration. And it's been exhaustively researched, especially by a brand day's professor by him some data in this book Brothers and strangers. And it's interesting to note that he, I mean, this is this type of archival research where you get you know, the secret State Department CIA documents, the private memos and meeting notes, things that in the contemporary period are not clear. Well, one can imagine that similar things are going on. And so the whole Liberia scandal started with the Harvard professor. Raymond Bull, he wrote a book called the native problem Africa published in 1928. He was the director of the foreign policy association. And, and he had written a book on on on labor policies in clone Africa. And he's, and he spent particularly an inordinate amount of attention on the case of Liberia. But he also actually spotlighted the case of Firestone that in the 1926 deal in exchange for this $5 million credit, the Liberian government would would give a one minute one million acre concession and guarantee the labor. And that was part of the deal, because labor recruitment was one of the main difficulties in colonial business mobilization enterprise, etc. So Bull actually points out that, you know, if, if, if Firestone plant rubber plantations reach full production it will require 400,000 contract workers, which is the entire, you know, working age population of Liberia and a population of 1.5 million. So, you know, in this, in this concession was bound to give rise to, to exploitation and scandals. And the other issue that Firestone saw was that a lot of the labor in this period in the 1920s was actually being exported from Liberia and only to Spanish Guinea. The Congo Gabon the timber concessions, the shipping port that port areas, a lot of Liberian workers were were basically the manpower of West Africa, especially coastal West Africa they were recruited in Liberia and worked on one or two year contracts all over the West African coast. So fires don't have to figure out a way to limit the immigration of Liberians in order to dedicate the entire workforce of Liberia to its big to its planned rubber concessions. And this was very important for US policy. So there's links, you know, between Firestone and the State Department, etc. The American State Department, because they're extremely worried about the rubber supplies. The US manufacturers consumed 75% of the world's rubber for tire manufacturers for etc. And the price have been rising in the 1920s by over 15x so the price of over 10 cents of both $1.40 in the late 1920s before collapse in the world depression. So the US, one of the prime kind of new imperial policies of the US was to independently secure its, its rubber supplies that was controlled by the, by the British and the British Empire principally in Southeast Asia and Malaysia. Indeed, it was an active policy for example Churchill when he was colonel minister. He says here, you know our principal means of paying back our war debt to the US is to sell them rubber from our Malaysian supplies. So the US strategy in Liberia was to actively figure out a way to secure the labor, have a, you know, a kind of neo dependent government there in place. So the question was how, how, how best to do that. And so, seeing, seeing it coming hard, this is booked by the Harvard professor bull kind of scandalizing the labor conditions not only in Liberia, because it was very common across colonial territories to use, you know, Corvette labor forcefully recruited labor arbitrary fines and taxations that can only be paid off through enlisting in certain contract labor. So this kind of creation of a free labor market. And so in order to preempt the potential critique that America would be exposed to. They engineered a kind of kind of modern slavery scandal. So this left side is from Sundiata again, who says you know the US is worried that if you don't intervene and eventually the British or French will take over Liberia because of the scandal and they'll be given the kind of trustee, a UN trustee territory by the League of Nations. So they had to, they had to control the scandal. And by unleashing a kind of, it's just, it's just missionary American mysteries is unnamed is unknown so it's probably this kind of early OAS or CIA agent who denounces to the League of Nations and then in a letter to Washington about the parent condition of slavery in Liberia. The US is quite brazen about this so they write directly to the Liberian government saying that, you know, you will have discovered, you know, my chance that you have that you have a system in force that is hardly distinguishable from the organized slave trade. So they actively actually conflate the different types of labor, modes of labor forced labor slavery, P and etc. into into a kind of hardly indistinguishable slave trade like processes and that's also that's why that's why the scandal wasn't called a slavery scandal even though it wasn't a slavery is about kind of forced forced labor in the sense of the state taxes people in labor. So after Liberia was forced to agree and what were they forced to agree to obviously after the League of Nations launch this investigation, they had to, you know, the top seven recommendations of the League of Nations inquiry and commission was to, you know, open the door to American business interests and abolish the shipping of labor abroad. So this is a moment when capital imperial capital wants to become a mobile, but actually in order to do that it needs to also immobilize labor, which in the case of Liberia was very mobile. And they needed this public outcry in order to get these demands from the press to say, oh you know the America do something. Liberia is under your type of moral tutelage was seen as part of it was kind of seen as a Latin American Caribbean one road dog crime territory that was under an American tutelary or mandates territory. So, so they had to do something and. And so this given the pretext in order to secure than the labor supplies and the territories for the for the rubber. It's not as direct obviously but in general these are the final motives. Obviously the process is very indirect so the Commission is independent the League of Nations appoints three people, a Liberian politician for president, a British colonial explorer, Christie, and an African American sociologist from Chicago Charles Johnson. And they unanimously agree on these recommendations which are in line with what the US wanted to get out of it. But there is interesting tensions between them especially between Christie who was the British. The one of the committee heads and Charles Johnson the American sociologist and so the other he notes how Johnson notes that Christie's has a hysterical extreme statement condemning the whole government and calling everything slavery slave dealing and slave traffic etc because this is exactly a discourse that would allow the US to then through a show of moral force intervene in Liberia, which wasn't independent Republic. And it's interesting to see here what Christie behind the scenes has to say you know he's for him. He's for Africans, especially the Liberians and the Liberian elites. We're still standing 100 years behind England. So it's a very classical colonial mindset to see what is happening in outside of the West as if it's somehow backwards in time. And this, this idea of positing, you know, developing countries in some other epoch or period, then creates this natural association with okay if this is there 100 years ago then naturally what is happening there is a kind of obsolete system that like that we used to have and that we abolished for example slavery. So then slavery becomes modern slavery becomes linked in this kind of in this kind of blurry time timeline, where contemporary processes of exploitation, for example, the firestone concessions, the cutting edge kind of credit agreements with the New York financiers who were supplying the firestone the money to the Liberian government said all these contemporary processes are then kind of hidden from view by by imagining what's happening here is this kind of revival of this 19th century process that can only be rectified through to further colonial intervention. And here this is very clear and in a very famous book that also kind of is the British version of this American Blitz Blitz Creek promotional bits against Liberia. Written by Kathleen Simon, the wife of John Simon the famous foreign home office head and chancellor in the 1930s. And here also this dedicating as an ornament amount of attention to Liberia, where three kind of characteristics that even continue to this day in these type of scandalizing of, of ILO or UN or even NGO based kind of forced labor scandals or forced labor scandals. First, the kind of gross exaggeration you know she says in Liberia there's 100 to 500,000 slaves no one can say it's a it's a ridiculous number. Then there's also the recommendation to have you know, have introduced a strong minded whites, the white type of leader like Lugar who was the British colonial administrator for Nigeria. So, to create this imaginary that you know the conditions of extreme exploitation arise because of this insufficient penetration or administration by imperial power. So she says, you know, oh, it's clear that there's so much slavery in Liberia because Liberia is economically backwards. And Liberia's reason for suddenly accelerating its conditions of exploitation is related to this kind of links to certain American capital than other colonial capital along the West African coast British French Spanish. So it's the same idea of placing it backwards in time. And yeah, I mean as cryptics already then noted, and this is from the clippings of a web to boss's archive. He was following this case closely as I briefly mentioned. This is all a very contemporary process in the United States State Department. Then after the scandal broke, sent its military and delegates to Liberia. In order to abolish slavery, which was the kind of humanitarian imperialism of the day, you know, it's like human rights days and even invaded country if you're there to boss slavery, and then rehabilitate the economic conditions and make Liberia government observes the contracts with the finance corporation of America firestone tire company subsidiary, because the Liberia leaders actually refused to pay back the loan after the collapse of rubber prices. So this intervention, you know, was geared to this. And the terms of the critiques are also very interesting because it was, it was, it was, it was contentious even then. How should we criticize Liberia, the only independent black republic in Africa, or in Atlantic Africa, who are the, who are the benefactors of this critique, how should we couch the critique etc. Is it from an internal African critique or is it an external diasporic or colonial critique. These tensions are already there. And one of the two most local people actually we're tackling the case where we're Dubois, and and Nambia Ziqui with very prominent later Nigerian president and in the 1930s, you've been studying in the US publishing and crisis which is that the journal that Dubois was editing. And they both wrote very interesting critiques that were actually quite rare. So the rest, most of the critiques were, as we saw before, you know, these, this revival, how did how could these new Liberian elites with themselves were descendants of slaves in the mid 19th century, how could they revive the slave trade. They need to get we've got rid of we introduce white administrators to Liberia, etc. And so Dubois critique is especially the way that the media focused it to create this kind of scandals if it's this kind of revelation, whereas you know the conditions of exploitation Liberia were well known, because it was hardly indistinguishable from other conditions of exploitation and other colonel territories, because they use similar tactics to mobilize labor threats of arrest. And so the reason finds in order to extract kind of labor as repayment to that, etc. So normal colonel practice nothing to be scandalized about that's why it's interesting, obviously the motive behind here is not the fact that to deny that this existed in Liberia it's to focus why certain countries get picked, and why certain other countries don't. And this dynamic continues today obviously. And there were especially critical of a sort of a book published by George Shuler who's a notable African American journalist who was sent to Liberia to write this book about this revival of slavery called slaves today that denounces the aristocratic elite establishment of Liberia for exploiting its own kind of native population of its inch land. And then here it's interesting because here both George Shuler who's seen as kind of an eventual right wing African American critic. And also the extreme left of the pan Africanist critiques kind of coincided for example George Padmore. He also denounced the Liberian elites. Because he used a class analysis so the elites were the culprits here. It doesn't matter if they're black or white, they're just as equal equally rascally as he says equally able to exploit. And I mean there's a few things that Zeke way as a key where wrote that are very interesting but you know this is just the idea that that you know what I would already saying I got my analytical ideas from from these articles had the way Liberia uses kind of scapegoat to scapegoat the crimes of all the other crimes that other European colonial powers are doing so that's the function of the scapegoat to isolate something and everyone is guilty of and point and point the blame at someone. The scapegoating mechanism continues to stay certain countries certain figures for example recruiters intermediary figures etc. And then I think my last slide is just briefly to say how, in the end, there was a once the US managed to depose the president of Liberia through a set of coupe through a scandal. Secure what it wanted, which was the kind of rubber rubber supplies and eventually also opening up a port US Navy port in Monrovia. And, and this proved indispensable because during World War two Liberia was the only rubber supplier to the allies after Japanese took over East Asia. So it was clearly part of the, you know, kind of US imperial strategy. It was a direct way because these scandals then it subsided you know they secured the public image of Liberia as it's kind of subsidiary state. But when Liberian leaders if they would you know for example challenge the US terms of the deals or the new shipping interest in Liberia, or they were granting too many iron mind concessions to other countries were pushing or refusing to push the line on decolonization in the 1950s and 60s that the US wanted them to. Then the US kind of always comes up with these potential kind of labor scandals, as a kind of stick as a kind of geopolitical stick in order to kind of force countries into place so this is kind of the I think one of the main things I just wanted to finish with and highlight the way, obviously, processes of, you know, incarceration exploitation in the different kind of non Western world are systematic or ever present but it's, it's what gets picked up and highlighted, especially in the Western press and by international organs that usually have a kind of design to them, which are diffused because you know it can involve Harvard professors can involve some state department people who don't really coordinate, but the, but the general motive or end result is kind of clear. So with that, I think I have 20 minutes are over and I want to thank all the again for the invitation for everyone here. Thank you. I'll stop sharing. Enrique that was fabulous thank you so, so much. Can I kick off with two questions, if I may. One is, I mean, that was a history that I did not know, but I do know the history of both Liberia and Sierra Leone which is to many extent a sort of tragic history. I just wonder if you, if you've been able to sort of tie a context where you have a sort of a deeply African community with a sort of former enslaved community that then goes back. Obviously here there's also the difficult situation of African Americans themselves who are determining that this is slavery, it lends to this discourse that distinguishes between race and class and race and capital and sort of race experts will understand that sometimes there's a criticism of North American discourse that doesn't link race to capital and this seems to be one of those and labor and therefore class. One of those arenas where you sort of see that writ large so I wondered if I might tempt you into that sort of modern discussion. And the second of course is this familiar concern really of the way in which one evil is fixed and then replaced with another. It's a bit like, you know, abolishing slavery and replacing it with Jim Crow because of course Jim Crow would have been very present in America at this time when Americans are challenging enslavement I wondered also whether there was a sort of modern context in which you could sort of link to where you know there's a modern campaign but actually the wrong that is being got rid of is being replaced with a new difficult different sort of perniciousness really, which is what happened in this very, very clear example so those are my questions. I think we'll bring in other people's questions before you come back and Rike to give you a bit of a breather. Could others indicate if they've got questions. Thanks. I'm wondering if you can speak about the implications this kind of historical account for today, in terms of maybe your position on things like and trafficking narratives, and you know that the modern slavery today, because obviously it's quite clear at the moment that there's been a conservative government that's very, it pretends to care a lot about trafficking right and it cares about bond slavery, but uses these narratives to essentially back down on people who are moving across hospitals on vulnerable people on the people who are being exploited, whether that's the war on drugs with the Countines, or with P crossing borders and sending people to Rwanda somehow dissuade traffickers. And I wonder, is that kind of how does your account lead to those implications and do you have a position on those kind of narratives that really govern our discourse today. Are there any other questions for Enrique, anybody else who wants to come in. Caroline. Hi Enrique. I must apologize, I had to be away from the session for a few minutes, so you may have covered this, but my question is, do you have any reflections on the impact of the slavery on women in Liberia, do you have any gender reflections? Thank you Caroline. Okay, I think I'll let you come back in the time available. Okay, thanks. Yeah, I, I realize I should have focused more on the, on a Zikwiz article because actually he resolved some of these, some of these issues. Okay, it's interesting so he wrote as a low very lone voice he was a 27 year old student in the University of Pittsburgh. The future president Nigeria, and no one was defending Liberia it was you know the university hated kind of scapegoat League of Nations everyone denouncing everyone condemning. So he wrote, for example, in this article defensive Liberia he actually criticizes the League of Nations and the ILO convention on slavery it's the 1926 convention, which isn't a convention actually banned slavery. It's a convention that first of all says you know there's obviously no slave markets anymore. But what it does, it isolates the permissible forms of forced labor. So if you look at the 12 articles of the short convention, it's all about how states can legitimately use, for example, penal labor, you know their anti-vabrancy laws etc. In order to, or comic labor in order to force labor but without being denounced slavery. So, but for example when when Liberia used it, very much a normal tool of statecraft and conditions of fiscal incapacity and lack of a monetized economy. You know when Liberia user then suddenly gets turned to slavery rather than permissible public service, a type of public taxation, a type of even collective or communal duty. This was the language that was used in the British Empire. And it's unclear whether the Liberian elites also use this kind of paternalist legitimizing or obscurantist language to legitimize their forced labor. But you know from the outside world, it was a scene is just plain revival of the slave trade and absolutely wasn't it had nothing to do with it. Which is what the web to boy and they point out but they're very the few people who do. Everyone else is content with this new conflation and kind of vague conflation in order to denounce the people that need to be denounced in order to intervene etc. And yes, so the anti trafficking narrative is in the same vein that's why I think it's so important to revisit this historical episode, because you know whoever you want to externally intervene with for example, in 2017 18 in the case of Libya, and West African mostly Nigerian migrants who were there, you know, what how was it portrayed portrayed instead of, you know, seeing it in the geopolitical context of the breakdown of the Gaddafi state and the rise of militias, and ransoming harassment different types of, you know, a parasitic or exploitative things that could happen in Libya but also elsewhere. If you frame it as this type of revival of slavery by these Arab recidivist Arab kind of slave traders who have returned to the 19th century, then it makes this type of moral humanitarian intervention much easier. If you don't complicate yourself, you can even bomb them if you want to. So it's kind of, it's fundamentally this kind of moral, moral gun, or that is used selectively, for example, even in the case of Qatar, the only other ILO investigation from Liberia, the Portuguese Empire in the 60s that was part of the political pressure for decolonization as well is Qatar, a few years ago, you know the condition of Nepali and South Asian workers there. And you know why why Qatar and not the Emirates or Saudi Arabia, because Qatar, you know was seen as a countervailing power with maybe the Al Jazeera different things. So these political context are very important to understand why certain things that highlighted and other people just get a carte blanche, even though everyone's using the same system everyone is just deploying the labor market and the state tools. That are seen as legitimate or even shrine is legitimate in all of these ILO conventions. And the case of gender is interesting because the is it also notices this so the way the new ILO and humanitarian missionaries start conflating they start conflating, you know forced labor state corvets with pawnship which is just a normal kind of financial payment where instead of amortizing your property or your house, you're more to size a person, because there's no market in property. So it's kind of a normal financial tool that exists everywhere, not only in Africa. And you know suddenly turn that into the existence of this kind of slave trade that can be equated with the worst excesses of the 19th century slave trade, and even marriage so the payment of dowry or reverse dowry which is bride wealth. And then suddenly gets converted in the 1920s very actively by missionaries and even international organizations as a type of purchase of people and a continuation of the slave trade. So all these things that conflated into one in order to kind of augment this urgency for intervention for more missionary education for more financing of imperial initiatives, etc. You know, there's no the these things they only get brought up whenever there's a there's a necessary narrative in order to justify some intervention against a public or against a treasury. So other times they just get forgotten or not mentioned so it's this kind of selective use that is very interesting to see because obviously history is complicated and there's constant things that are used in order to exploit labor in order to control the communities, etc. But it's how or why people in cases get, they get flashed they get spotlighted, usually in the interest of states and international organizations in order to try to control it, because, as I said the 19th century was part of the process of this of creating these narratives in order to control and create regulated mobilities contrasted versus against the opposite and the opposite of that is the worst that you know hell the slavery etc. This kind of moral cosmological narrative is still behind a lot of statecraft and geopolitical construction of an imperial order, and that uses women as a certain cases or traffickers escape with etc. So this has a long history is my main point. Thank you so much for that presentation and for that extensive analysis. Really wonderful work and I'm hugely hugely grateful to be informed about it to go away and mine it now myself so I'm really really very grateful. Thank you very much. Let me hand over to. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you, David, and I think we've sorted out the problem. I think just a second. Maybe not quite. Yeah, I think so. Awesome. You guys can see my screen right. Yeah, it's perfect. Okay, awesome. Okay, so thank you. I'm really delighted to be here today and, and I think in recase talk was a really excellent prologue to mine, which I've titled from slavery to mass incarceration the case of immigration detention. The image. It's not actually a detention center. It's actually the endpoint of really where my talk is going which is detention abolition. And the both the promise and prospect of that because well, I think the bulk of my talk is fairly descriptive and an attempt to address. That's probably the first question that frames the this workshop series, namely the experience of migrants in detention, and the inequalities and structural injustices that such detention reflects and reproduces. I think it's very important to not just chronicle the problem, but point to the solution. And so that's the explanation for the image. This is situated in Canada, and we began all our talks in Canada by acknowledging our own positionality as part of an effort to implement an ambitious reconciliation plan with our indigenous peoples. I feel it's very important to acknowledge my own settler positionality. And I want to acknowledge the land on which I'm living and working as an uninvited guest in Toronto or Takaranto. I acknowledge this land is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the credit the Anishinabeg the Chippewa the Haudenosaunee and Wendat peoples. It's now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to research and teach on this land. So, just by way of framing this presentation, I want to kind of begin with the transatlantic slave trade spanning centuries, some 35,000 slave voyages, somewhere between 12 to 15 million people enslaved. And to understand that context as an international system that fed a world market. And when we flash forward to today, we can think about the conceptual links between slavery and detention. We can understand both as global systems. Right. So today, and this data by the way is called from the global detention project which is a, an NGO that the catalogs, the problem of migrant detention around the world. This map is on their homepage, and I think it's a really excellent graphic presentation of the proliferation of detention, both in the global north and the global south, literally around the world. 1361 immigration detention centers. And these are facilities that are both administrative ad hoc criminal and some which are actually unknown. And while the total number of migrants in detention today is actually not known because data from many countries is extremely difficult to come by. We do know that every day, tens of thousands of men women and children are detained around the world for reasons related to their immigration status, and I think this, this map, aptly highlights that. So framing my presentation are essentially three ideas and I am probably not going to go into them in the meat of my presentation so much as just using them as a framing tool, and happy to engage in more depth. So I think this is a discussion or questions about it so the first idea is that discourses of the vulnerable non criminal detainee or refugee refugee women children, and sort of using their cases as a kind of hook for saying we really need to figure out this risk legitimizing incarceration for racialized adult male so in other words as soon as we start talking about, we must abolish detention for children, or we must abolish detention for women. We must ensure that we have alternatives to detention for these vulnerable groups. We in effect end up legitimizing detention for everybody else, and, and I want to emphasize that that everybody else predominantly is a racialized population, whether we're talking about the global north or the global south, and preponderantly racialized adult males. So I think it's very important to be cognizant of the risks of this kind of discourse. And this is related to the second idea, which is that reform error efforts that are predicated on detention avoidance, or alternatives to detention are predicated on these very same discourses and risk reinforcing structural injustice and the state's power to survive both non citizens and citizens of their liberty. So when we say, it's okay to lock up criminals, but it's not okay to lock up vulnerable migrants, we're actually reinforcing administrative violence and I think it's very important to be cognizant of that. And this is really linked to the third idea, which is that detention abolition must be predicated on a wider understanding of global detention machinery. And this wider understanding actually aligns with the norms and principles embedded in existing legal frameworks, albeit an evenly and sparingly implemented, and I'm going to sort of point to those instruments towards the end of my presentation. And I want to, you know, there's a long line of scholars who've contributed to the literature today on detention abolition in the context of both criminal justice studies and migration studies but but I want to point to Ruth Wilson Gilmour's work in and this is a popularized a version in which she was quoted in a special feature of the New York Times magazine. Interestingly, it opened the weekend of a workshop that I co organized at at my university, bringing together scholars from the criminal justice world in the migration studies world so with Wilson Wilson Gilmour asked this when people are looking for the relative innocence line in order to show how sad it is that the relatively innocent are being subjected to the forces of state organized violence as though they were criminals. They're missing something that they could see it isn't that hard. They could be asking whether people who have been criminalized should be subjected to the forces of organized violence. Right. So, so that for me is the critical question. I'm going to talk a little bit about Thailand and Canada as kind of emblematic of a country in the global north and a country in the global south that is a transit location for migrants in contrast to Canada, which tends to be a destination country. So he this photograph was taken by somebody who was in detention by a detainee a couple of years ago, January 2020. It's a photograph of an immigration detention center in Bangkok, where a facility designed to hold no more than 500 detainees often accommodates up to 1200. And if you read about what's going on in Thailand you'll hear accounts from detainees first person accounts of having to actually sleep in shifts because there's just not enough room on the floor. So, you know, when it's your turn to sleep you get a little corner of the floor when it's not your standing up. So that's what it looks like in Thailand. We don't know the total number of people detained it's not available the global detention project doesn't report it and they have reports on all kinds of countries but we don't know. So we don't know the daily average of people in detention either. Although we can guess that there's certainly thousands of people detained in Thailand. And that at any one time, those numbers are quite high. It's interesting to note that in terms of the reason for why people are detained in in Thailand. It's enough to be in the country without permission. That's it. It's a basically if you're in the country without permission. There's no discretion, you know, baked into sort of adjudicate on a case by case basis, it's lock you up. Thailand is not signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention so there's no special recognition for asylum seekers or refugees and in fact that's enough in and of itself to get you locked up. There's 22 detention centers around Thailand and you know you think about that Thailand's geographically not a very large country. I'm going to compare the number of detention centers in Thailand with the number in a country like Canada where there's just a handful and a much larger geographical area. In terms of the condition in those centers severely overcrowded which I think you had a sense of from the photo. No access to exercise space inadequate nutrition children don't go to school. The list goes on in terms of the length of detention it varies between three days to 12 years. Refugees and asylum seekers are detained frequently for two years or more. Let's take a look at the picture in Canada. You know a little under 9000 people detained in the last reported period. Some 326 people in detention as a daily average so presumably a much smaller number than what's in what we would see in Thailand. Important to see this in terms of the length of detention the average length is just two weeks just a little shy of two weeks. But over the last you know six years Canada's held more than 300 detainees longer than a year so that's important to note as well. Most detainees end up in these specialized immigration holding centers but everybody else ends up in jail. And you know locked up with people who are facing criminal charges or serving criminal sentences. So some 32% of migrants are detained in those provincial jails and other facilities. And the vast majority of people in Canada are detained on the basis of flight risk namely a concern that they're going to go underground if they're released. And it's not that you're in the country without permission per se. But I would argue that flight risk is a bit of a proxy for that in terms of how the law actually addresses it. There's no knowledge that there have been reform efforts both in Canada and in Thailand and I am not going to go through them in detail. But one interesting thing to mention in the Canadian context is that there was an 82% reduction in the population in detention during the peak of the pandemic here in Canada, 82%. Interestingly, we see numbers, you know, slowly and steadily going back up. But I think the question that the reduction clearly points to is surely it's not necessary to detain to the extent that Canada is detaining. And Thailand's making some small efforts specifically aimed at vulnerable the vulnerable right so the very problematic discourse that I pointed out to at the beginning, I mean, you know, the government of Thailand has been persuaded to pursue alternatives to tension for children and families, and to implement a special screening mechanism for asylum seekers and refugees in its very early stages. So I'm going to follow the money for a moment, going back to sort of the theme of, you know, looking at detention machinery as a world system. So back in 2012, Canada gave the Thai government some $7 million to combat human smuggling and crackdown on illegal migration, quote unquote, those funds were used to train police as well as immigration and Border Patrol officers. They gave money, obviously supported detention and deportation, at least indirectly, right, particularly in light of the grounds for detention in Thailand in the country illegally so everyone who is in the country illegally is rounded up detain and deported directly contributed to those initiatives as part of a comprehensive interdiction strategy, which has been implemented in the region more broadly to prevent irregular migration to destination countries like Canada. Refugees who are fortunate enough to access the assistance of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees join a very long queue as they wait for resettlement, often in detention and just really important to understand the links right because on the one hand when the migrants arrive in the global north they often find themselves subject to detention. We have to be very careful about detention reforms that end up fueling interdiction. And what that means is that instead of arriving in the global north, migrants on the move end up stuck in transit countries and locked up there instead. Right, so we can see detention numbers going down in some destination countries in direct correlation with the intensification of these interdiction efforts. And worldwide, we see deaths soaring on dangerous migration routes on both land and sea. We've got the highest number of refugees on record in the world right now, and we're seeing immigration detention in both transit and destination countries on the rise. Starting now in the last portion of my talk to the Canadian context. I cite a relatively recent report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, which noted that the Canadian government's approach has largely failed to address the deeply embedded structural gaps that disproportionately affect persons with psychosocial disabilities in immigration detention. So in addition to the fact that the population in detention in Canada is disproportionately racialized. People are disproportionately non white from poor countries in the global south. They are also disproportionately persons with psychosocial disabilities. And the NGOs have cited Canada as perpetuating discriminatory treatment in breach of both Canadian and international human rights law. It's important to understand that Canadian law facilitates and reinforces the problem. Individuals in detention do get a review before an independent adjudicator after the first 48 hours after that for seven days and then every 30 days thereafter. But there's no right of appeal. There's just a limited right of judicial review with leave. It's very hard to get access to the federal court in Canada to actually challenge the grounds of one's detention. And the reason for that is a Supreme Court of Canada decision dating back decades now, which reinforce this notion that the most fundamental principle of immigration law is a non citizens don't have an unqualified right to enter or remain. And as a result of this decision, all kinds of structural inequalities have been perpetuated in and inscribed in the text of the law in Canada. So, you know, other detainees who are not being detained on the basis of their migrant status, have a, you know, direct access to bail and a direct access to appeal the merits of any refusal. Non citizen detainees do not and it really stems back to this really foundational decision. And the first thing is a slightly more recent decision of our federal court of appeal in the case of thought about a saying which actually said that although you have this right to sequential detention reviews by an independent adjudicator. Previous decisions to detain you have to be considered at all subsequent reviews and if the adjudicator wants to release you when their colleague the month before didn't, they have to provide clear and compelling reasons for departing from previous decisions. So this dicta actually serves to reinforce the likelihood that if you've been in detention a long time, you're going to remain there even longer. And this to kind of give you a sense of the highlights are perhaps more appropriately low lights of detention, the detention scheme in Canada. There's no statutory limit on the length of immigration detention. The longest period of detention to date in Canada has lasted over 11 years, which involved a man with an apparent mental health condition, and who was detained only on the basis that his identity could not be established. And this image of the telephones just because I think it's a very stark reminder that people in detention have very limited contact with anyone in the outside world during the time that they're detained and they actually have to pay for phone calls. I want to give a bit of a face to who ends up being detained in Canada. This is one individual Abraham Turei stateless. He was released in 2018 after spending five and a half years behind bars. It's interesting to note that his case actually was considered by the UN working group on arbitrary detention. The group found that Mr. Turei's detention was arbitrary and a contravention of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil Political Rights and requested Canada release Mr. Turei unconditionally and accord him an enforceable right to compensation. He's still waiting. Stateless Kashi Ali spent more than seven years in a maximum security jail because Canada was unable to deport him. He lacked proof of citizenship. He endured beatings from guards, nearly daily lockdowns and one stretch of solitary confinement that lasted 103 days. He formally designated the unknown person. This man was behind bars in a maximum security jail for more than six years and he refused to participate in 51 detention review hearings and the immigration refugee board essentially acquiesced to this state of affairs. Mr. Brown is particularly noteworthy and I just want to share what Mr. Brown had to say himself, highlighting the fact that the absence of a statutory limit on detention is really a problem, right? When people are locked up in most systems of law they're sentenced and they know how long they're going to be locked up, but in the immigration system they don't. Mr. Brown says, it was horrible. I would have rather been dead than detained not knowing when I would be released. I spent five years in there and I still can't get over it. The experience is trapped in my mind. His case went to the Federal Court of Appeal was ultimately denied leave to get to our Supreme Court, but the system was basically given a stamp of approval at the Federal Court of Appeal. The immigration detention regime in Canada was constitutionally sound. Here is an image of a detention center in Toronto. It's a remand facility that's overcrowded under staffed and under resourced. The number of immigration detainees held in prisons is declining in Canada, but still a significant concern. A new and improved immigration holding center opened in the western part of our country a couple years ago in response in part to the death of Mexican National Lucia Vega Jimenez, a number of years before. It was found hanging in a shower stall hours after a contracted security guard falsified room check records, and I want to underscore here the increasing involvement of the private sector in detention machinery. Canada is one of just a handful of states that's legislated mandatory virtually automatic detention for non citizens in the case of so called designated for a national security certificate cases. I want to mention briefly that the case of Manicka Visaga and Suresh, a Tamil refugee subject to a security certificate who spent two and a half years in a facility called the down the dawn jail in downtown Toronto, several weeks on suicide watch more than 20 years since his release he continues to experience its devastating effects. This case was brought to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The Commission found that Canada owed Mr. Suresh reparations that he was denied equal access to judicial review of his detention. Canada has done nothing in response and just by way of conclusion I'm mindful that I've probably gone over my 20 minutes. I want to point to the way forward, which circles back to the image on the first slide. And in fact, we can go way back in the, you know, the annals of time to the Magna Carta from 1215, which enshrined the principle that no free person shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or exiled or deprived of his standing in any way. Flash forward to the present tense, and there's a range of binding international legal instruments, both UN instruments and regional instruments for those of you in Europe right now, you'll be very familiar with the European Convention here in the Americas, our countries have the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Men, and all of these instruments point to the fundamental right to liberty, the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law, and the principle that all persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to the equal protection of the law. Clearly these new norms are being breached every day with the detention machinery that has developed and indeed proliferated since the 1980s. Now I will say that migrant detention is not new. It wasn't invented in the 1980s, but it was really the 1980s where it became a globalized system to the extent that it is today, starting in the north and moving right around the world. So I'll end by just suggesting that there is increasing traction for the idea of detention abolition and of joining forces between migration activists and criminal justice activists pointing to the fact that abolition is actually a possibility and that really is the point of cataloging this egregious state of affairs and I'll stop there. Thank you very much, Shari. That was a wonderful, wonderful and very moving presentation. I wondered if you might say something because the, you know, it's interesting to be brought up to date with the situation in Canada, Canada is often perceived as a very liberal country. Now I think Canada hides behind that considerably, but with its history. But nevertheless, it's interesting that the mass incarceration of immigrants and those seeking refuge or fleeing is so profoundly tolerated in what is perceived to be liberal. And then begs another question which is, of course, this is because they have breached or the perception is they have breached a rule. Now we can have a debate about prison abolition and what you do with say someone who murders somebody. But in this context that breach is that they have sought to claim citizenship in another country. And therefore it's something about the price, the price of citizenship, particularly in the global north, as a commodity in the structure of the world and I wondered if you had a, have you had a perspective on the currency of citizenship as it were since the 1980s and why, why we find ourselves in a place where that has become such a precious thing. It's particularly important in an age in which people are fleeing across borders. Kofi Annan talked about problems without passports which I thought was a very good phrase. There's a great change and civil war conflict terrorism. So many of the things that we're living within the world, global force drives that very migration to another country. That is, and this is so desperately sought of here in Europe we talk about fortress, fortress Europe. I just wondered if you had an observation on that. Anybody else question for sherry. I mean, I think don't come in yet. I'm just going to get other questions before, before because I'm conscious of time. Lucy, I can see Lucy's hand up. Hi, thank you so much. Thank you so much for a brilliant presentation. And as you were speaking I was definitely thinking about some of the connections to the UK. So for example, the, the, your, your case of the, the gentleman who's supported to Jamaica, for example, we had similar situation here pretty potato, just two days ago, trying to support 25 people to Jamaica many with no connections to that to that country at all, you know, been in the UK for how many years or decades. And, and again, you'll slide on following the money between Canada and Thailand as well. I thought it was really fascinating. Again, the case of happy police, hosting the Israeli police just a couple of days ago as well. And it's connected with the UK. That's the basis of my question. I wondered if you had any reflections on whether there are elements or dynamics or aspects of immigration detention that are specific to settler colonial contexts, rather than just the tribal north, you know, I'm thinking back to your land acknowledgement as well. Is there something that's very specific to that or do you find that it's generally the coloniality of the, of the transnational sort of complex of immigration that's more generalized. And also as well, speaking of, of money and the really tragic case of the women who I'm sorry I missed her name who hanged herself, you mentioned that there was a contracted security guard who forcibly had her cell checks what what role do you see racial capitalism and global corporations playing in immigration detention again here in the UK we have large global corporations such as circle that run our immigration removal complexes I just wondered if you had any thoughts on that but thank you so much Sherry thank you. Thank you Lucy. Yes, thank you. And thank you Sherry for really compelling presentation. And obviously what I think is rather sad is that, you know, it's easy to replace Canada and Thailand with so many other sort of odd couples of this sort, where you can can draw the connection. There are two points. The first one is on on the legal analysis and because actually you mentioned the right to liberty and therefore that immigration detention runs sort of counter to these basic principles. And of course the working group on arbitrary detention has been quite forthright in in making a number of those findings. But if you look beyond that, there are huge contrasts, for example in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights was that of the inter American Court of Human Rights. And in a lot of the jurisprudence actually courts and also some human rights bodies at least have upheld the right of states to detain migrants. And also there is a problem in terms of the interpretation of the law and the discretion given to state, and as you rightly mentioned to control immigration more broadly and I think the tension is seen as an adjunct of that so I think there is a fundamental legal issue. The other major legal problem is obviously that is very difficult to establish complicity of states, for example, is funding immigration detention in another country sufficient to be responsible for any violations taking place there such as Canada in the case of Libya or Italy in the case of Libya. I think their international law is still quite weak also because of the difficulties of jurisdiction and establishing remedies. I think the broader issue obviously for a lawyer all of that becomes usually frustrating therefore I think what you said is actually right that one has to be much more sort of discursive and remove sort of the sanitizing this that we see all around and say it's simply unacceptable so I, and I think your point is well made that we, we have a problem if we, if we try to reform the system very gradually without also simultaneously really calling for the outright abolition of immigration detention and I think it's a strong case to make. Shari, can you be brief because it'd be very good to get a dialogue across the three of you at the end, yeah. In fact, I think all of the interventions were really important and I'm not going to try to answer all of them for time reasons I'm going to because I think in the questions there were actually pointers to answers that we can take up more generally in a Q&A time permitting but but I do want to address the last point about the role of law and the tensions associated with it because on the one hand, the normative standards point to the possibility of abolition because of the way in which liberty is enshrined as a core value. But it's also the case the jurisprudence, as our colleague just pointed out, actually does uphold detention regimes and makes exceptions for individual deserving cases right so the case of Mr. Suresh were highlighted as egregious violations, and in both cases called for reparations to the individuals. So it points to, on the one hand, the fact that these legal standards at best achieve incremental positive outcomes for individuals, but are at the same time reinforcing a system in which there's a sort of shared sense of detention as legitimate. And that's the tension with using law because it both has possibilities and constraints. My only point in sort of pointing to the standards is to say that we need to actually use these tools in more innovative ways. Because just on the face of it, the text of the standards point to the importance of liberty. And so I think we need to kind of turn the system on its head. And I think that's what abolition really calls for. So 100% agree that there is this inherent tension that one has to be mindful of, and I'm going to just leave it there and really looking forward to what Fiori is going to contribute in and then having a wider discussion. Thank you. Thank you so much again, Shari. Fiori, thank you so much Professor. Thank you so much for joining us and for waking up early in California to bring this presentation to us. I did say at the beginning that I'm sadly not very well I'm at home with COVID. Thank you for the opportunity to give me that I will listen to your presentation, but I'm going to let Olly de Rose broker the questions and then the conversation I hope between you all towards the end thank you so much though thank you very much very grateful. I'm very excited to be here so this paper that I'll be giving I'm obviously a social anthropologist so there will be ethnographic examples of plenty. I'm writing about what I call the paradoxes of humanitarian recognition. And so I'm looking at I work with Eritrean refugee activists in Italy around questions of the migration crisis and historical memory. And so I will be giving a paper about how they think about and conceptualize Italy's relationship to Libya and countering these discourses around human smuggling and trafficking. So I began fieldwork in Italy during the summer of 2015. That summer the picture of Ilan Kurdie the two year old Kurdish Syrian boy whose corpse washed ashore in Turkey, became an iconic image that index the tragic and senseless suffering that refugees trying to reach Europe, European shores based that photo alongside the memories associated with the 2013 Lampedusa sinking frame the migrant crisis not only as a crisis of sovereignty, but as a moral crisis. This image underscored Europe's responsibility towards strangers in a post colonial world framed by deep and lasting in equities and asymmetries. Yet when I returned in 2017, my interlocutors, Eritrean political activist described the Mediterranean Sea as closed. They likened the closure as having had the one bridge to refuge that remained taken from them. However, the idea of a closed sea went so against my own understandings of the materiality of water of its flow and its ability to gradually erode barriers, chip away at rock surfaces, its quality of mutability and a basement, and its role as a conduit in the traffic of persons and things that I had to ask what they meant by the phrase. At a cue so they repeated matter of factly looking visibly annoyed by the night but they they assumed framed my question. I was unaware at that time that the Italian government had recently signed a series of memorandums with the nominal authorities in Libya to intercept and return migrant boats to Libyan detention centers. Migrant official migration officials with whom I met with describe these deals as both painful and necessary. They contended that these deals would ensure that migrants would not fall into the hands of human smuggling and trafficking syndicates. And further, by limiting the number of migrant arrivals these deals would counter the illiberal populism of leaders like Victor Orban, who was according to a well placed migration official quote, willing to throw a bomb into the European Union. The subtext of these statements was clear, keeping migrants out was the only way to ensure the European Union survival. However, unfortunately, when one of the many casualties of what has been the EU's main objective of quote, busting the business model of smuggling. Eritrea is a small country in the Horn of Africa that has been described as one of the fastest depopulating countries, a former Italian colonies, it has consistently ranked as one of the highest per capita producer refugees for the last two months. Young people leave Eritrea for several reasons, mandatory mass military conscription, conditions of deep economic deprivation, threats of arbitrary detention, disappearance and political violence, and retributive state violence towards family members. From Eritrea, many young people either flee to Sudan or to northern Ethiopia. Where they transit through the Sahara and depart for Italy vis-à-vis Libya. This route known as the central Mediterranean route is the deadliest migrant route in the world. In Libya, Eritreans are subject to a vast kidnap and extortion industry, one which is central to the political economy of both state and non-state actors there and across the wider Mediterranean basin. Detention and kidnap occur in both illicit makeshift encampments and an official government detention centers. The contemporary Libyan state has fragmented into warring militias that profit off an illicit global trade in human beings, oil and arms following the 2011 NATO intervention. Nevertheless, the country currently serves as an integral partner in Europe's war against migrants smuggling. But before the 2000s, before the NATO intervention, Libya had long been a partner to Europe's mobility regime. In 2007, Silvio Berlusconi, the former Prime Minister of Italy, a Montmar Gaddafi signed the Friendship Accords. This was to serve as a form of colonial reparations. It was the first public acknowledgement by any Italian head of state of colonial crimes in Africa Oriental Italiana, Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, and during the six year fascist occupation, Ethiopia. Libya would patrol the Mediterranean and push back clandestine boats. Unauthorized migrants would then be held indefinitely in detention centers paid for by Italian funds. In 2011, Eritrean and Somalia refugees sued the Italian government under the jurisdiction of the European Court for Human Rights and heresy drama and others versus Italy over its return policy to Libya. They won, but their victory was momentary. In September of 2017, the Democratic Party of Italy and stated the memorandum of understanding between Libya and Italy, a series of non binding legal gentlemen's agreements, which gave aid to Libyan forces to intercept and dictate their interests. So in this paper, I explore Eritrean activist attempts to draw attention to the conditions within Libyan detention centers, what I called infrastructure, maintaining the fragile edifice of Fortress Europe. I focus on some of the debates that Eritrean activists engaged in around highly media ties events surrounding migration crisis. I pay close attention to the conceptualizations of mobility freedom, and their debates on the rule of law. These debates I argue are part of a politics of world making of imagining and enacting a world free of racialized borders, and in the particularity of Eritrean sovereignty, one in which the lives of young Eritreans do count. By focusing on their debates I privileged the centrality of black speech over the spectacle of black suffering, foregrounding the analysis of these systems within the kinds of vernacular embodied and experiential knowledge my interlocutors claim as survivors of the central Mediterranean crossing. While my interlocutors were aware of the structural constraints they faced, they were nevertheless quote theorizing to save their own lives, striving to explicitly link theory to praxis to affect widespread social and political change. Throughout my fieldwork, Eritreans activists held fast to the belief that visibility and growing awareness of the human rights crisis affecting Eritrea would create material and political change. This stemmed from a successful history marked by international and grassroots lobbying for an independent Eritrean nation, one which marshaled and mobilized experts and activists alike in bolstering claims to Eritrean sovereignty based on Ethiopia's segregation of international treaties and laws. More broadly, activists utilize the tools common to social movements and human rights campaigns, creating social awareness through letter writing campaigns, engaging in street protests and acting as witnesses at the European Court for human rights. I also demanded that the cruelty and pervasiveness ofness of violence they encountered at home in transit and in countries of settlement needed to be accounted for as their debates will demonstrate. Further these attempts and the debates Eritrean activists engaged in regarding the migration crisis, draw attention to what I term the paradox of humanitarian recognition, which I define as the set of policies and discourses, which veil normalize, and at times, abrogate existing humanitarian mechanisms to produce conditions of rightlessness for racialized migrants. So first on a policy level, humanitarian recognition involves the recognition of the possibility of credible claims without the promise of protection. So unlike the level label economic migrant which forecloses the possibility of refuge, humanitarian recognition and its concomitant practice of humanitarian death detention. Nevertheless requires capture and containment for it to function as a humane practice under the auspices of a war against migrant smuggling. So put simply to protect refugees from unscrupulous smugglers, powerful states block existing mechanism channels of movement, cutting off quote the supply of vulnerable migrants at its source, and this is often called the whole root perspective under EU policy statements. Moreover the paradoxical nature of humanitarian recognition hinges on the spatializing practices which renders certain places, gulags island prisons black sites as sites of rightlessness sites which critics charge with betraying the ethos of the rule of law that are nevertheless constitutive of the liberal democratic order. Nevertheless, humanitarian recognition underscores air trans double vulnerability under the system that collapses care with violence and transforms victims of kidnap into perpetrators of self inflicted violence through a set of discursive and policy maneuvers that in effect depend upon the instrumental utilization of various forms of social solidarity and kinship. So this next section is called titled the race geographies of mobilities. migrant and solidarity activists depict contemporary bordering regimes as moving borders, and that they are mobile assemblages that make on make and remake racialized geographies and cartography. Some of which have deep political colleges like that of the Euro African Mediterranean. Indeed, in the case of the Euro African Mediterranean, these racialized mobile bordering tech regimes dependent on shifting geopolitical alliances and significant investments from the EU in the material infrastructures technologies and training necessary to block migrant movements. While EU authorities are anxious to curtail the movements of Tunisian Syrians and other Arabs transiting through Libya, the considerable resources expended to stop black African migration are remarkable. And the mid office famous threat to quote turn Europe black was a crude and candid statement regarding the anti blacks racism that frames not only European migration policies, but the global migration system more generally for air trans have been one of the largest trends that through the central Mediterranean since the mid 2000s. EU efforts to address the widespread widespread traffic kidnap and extortion of you have Eritrean refugees have co lessed under a series of deals to block their movements. This includes the cartoon process. Use a number of of of deals. Well, 91% of Eritrean asylum claims lodged in the EU were accepted in 2015 growing recognition of the human and political rights crisis fate or trans based on the part of European authorities has resulted in more repression, rather than less. To state, Eritreans represent a threat to an asylum system predicated on on exceptionalism. The fact that most Eritreans fit within legal parameters of what defines a refugee under the 1951 convention that ends this global asylum system that is increasingly invested in its own destruction. Eritreans have been identified as a particularly vulnerable group official recognition of their vulnerability has created new forms of exceptionalism aimed at adjudicating who is most vulnerable of an already vulnerable by its vulnerable biased group. Eritreans alongside Syrians are eligible for evacuation from Ethiopia and Lebanon respectively through the humanitarian corridor program. The program selects 500 and 1000 Syrians for direct evacuation to Italy and provides housing and integration and language services. Eritreans have specialized abandonment that's labeled economic migrant engenders recognition creates structural evasions on the part of powerful actors who publicly proclaim the support for human rights, but tacitly support policies of containment and detention. So Eritreans are targeted by trafficking syndicates because of their wide spanning kin networks in the European Union. Consequently, the kidnap and extortion industry depends upon not only a large pool of vulnerable migrants, but those who have the means to pay. Consequently, the kidnap and extortion industry depends upon not only a large pool of vulnerable migrants, but those who have the means to pay. Ransons can reach upwards of 35,000 US dollars. Second, Eritreans invisibility as members of a recently independent African nation, one which is peripheral in the global imagination of the nationhood marks their lives as expendable the eyes of powerful actors as my interlocutors often explained to me. This was made clear to me during a meeting with Father Moses or I, the Eritreans Swiss Catholic priest who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. During our first meeting over Guinness is he relayed an anecdote from a high level migration meeting, in which he was told bluntly that Eritreans were sacrificeable. The anti black racism undergirds the entire global migration system from the difficulty with which many Africans have been accessing visas to the significant material investments in curtailing migration from Africa to Europe. Mobility regimes have come to be what scholar Catherine best man terms militarized global apartheid. The specimen refers to the novel convergence of military and security technologies and policies of containment and re bordering the world along the do boises the color global color line. So I'm going to have to skip a bit. Nevertheless, Eritreans experience with racialized predation extortion and kidnapped in Libya should alert scholars to quote the local experiences on the African continent, which must be considered as part of the global ideological cultural and political economic train established and continually updated by the racial logics of European hegemony and white supremacy. And while the incorporation of racially liminal Libyans as Europe's border guards follows racial hierarchies, particular to Italian colonial racial taxonomies, it would be simplistic to understand these deals as bounded by traditional definitions of neocolonial nationalism, and the racialized structures of rule. As Liz Mahmood writes, this case and others like it show that colonial histories binding individual nations to each other are leveraged in present times to facilitate neoliberal geo and biopolitics that are profoundly transnational in both character and effects. So these sites of indefinite and extra legal detention may be predicated upon neocolonial colonial relationships rendering non white, especially black migrants aspects to territorial sovereignty, but their logic since facialities are global nature. In fact, sites of indefinite detention become modular techniques that travel from place to place, adapting to local political economic conditions and racial hierarchies. Yet then during nature of anti black racism marks black migrants travelers students and refugees as objects of preemptive detention and blocking. Moreover as a shield member has argued racialized bodies become borders in and of themselves. This is affected through practices of quote containment enclosure and various forms of encampment detention and incarceration, in which knowledge of bodies through the collection of biometric data and mobilizes racialized bodies populations. So this is what I argue this immobilization produces economic value through the kidnap and random ransom industry through a particular system of extractivism, rather than exploiting labor. These systems exploit the bare necessities to maintain life itself. While border technologies and practices have changed, they nevertheless reproduced colonial and racial taxonomies, re bordering the African continent along, along the colonialist and racialist imaginaries that separate north and white Africa from black Africa. And I don't have a lot of time. So, initially I came to this project because of my interest in collective memory post colonial Italy, and it's racial politics and the legacies of socialist modernities and areas and Italy's contemporary history. At that time I described my project potential interlocutors as a study on collective memory and political imagination. I told them I wanted to learn more about a little known history, that of air trans solidarity is with local left wing groups in Bologna during Italy area is 30 year struggle for independence from Ethiopia. So, So, I'm going to move on to a next section. This next section deals with. It's also making violence visible. It's about, I'll just, I guess, read. Yosef was a young activist who many described as the voice of his generation. I first met him in 2015 when I started preliminary research in Bologna. Even if others were suspicious Yosef was nevertheless eager to speak to me, even before he had gained the prominence that he has today. He was a student who would often relay his own migration experiences to audiences of young Italians at high schools, universities and intercultural festivals. His oratorical power was felt whenever he entered a room students would often be left in tears as he would explain to them that his own activism was motivated by a desire as much to protect quote the rights of refugees as to protect Italians from an encroaching neo fascism. He made these political commitments with the day to day labor of surviving as an immigrant. He worked during the week at a milk factory located just outside the city limits. I was valuable to the activists I worked with because of my facility with academic English and certain forms of Lee leaves. Yosef enlisted me in translating and mapping the locations of illicit makeshift detention centers in Libya. He's trapped there understood that he was an important conduit for information. He would send these details to doctors without borders to provide refugees with food and water, and or to the international organization for migration, which would send out Libyan security forces to free refugees from these illicit encampments, only for them to be later immobilized informal detention centers. The families of the disappear would call him on Facebook messenger, listening to the voices of those who had begun to lose all semblance of hope pained me deeply. Nevertheless, translating these testimonies from to degree near to English was part of a larger project to document these abuses for hopeful European Court of Human Rights case. As a refugee and non citizen you set was putting himself at grace risk and he faced political retribution for multiple sources. He had been fired from his previous job at a refugee reception center for his public appearance at an anti racist demonstration in Rome. He faced death threats from traffickers in Libya supporters of the air train regime and exile harassed him and he was publicly accused of being a trafficker himself. In these difficult circumstances I saw that his health was fraying. He barely ate and slept between university work his advocacy in Italian schools and his labor as a witness and survival of multiple detention regimes. You set remain surprisingly undaunted. Nevertheless, I were deeply for him. In December of 2018 I had gone to us at home to conduct our last interview. He shared an apartment with six other college students who came to study from Italy's impoverished south. When we would talk they would be in the living room watching television, the theme song from Game of Thrones and Blair on the television set. These moments have gave me a sense of a familiar estrangement, a collapse between a life framed by a transnational consumer capitalism that I was familiar with. And one in which the life and death stakes of migration were brought into our space through the very same technologies that permit disinformation on a wide scale. In the evening you set remain on the phone for the entirety of our meeting. On other occasions when we would meet, he would be on Facebook recording video messages encouraging young air trans to remain hopeful. During our two hour interview that that evening, he continued answering call after call from Libyan detention centers describing torture beatings and the complicity of UNHCR officials, whom one caller described as quote, knowing what they're doing to us, the detention guards, knowing that the guards steal the food they bring us and sell it back to us. Libya's detention system is complex and has grown more complex after the 2011 intervention that outside Gaddafi. Some detention centers are administered by the government and National Accord in tandem with the UNHCR. And I apologize for being a little, I'm going to finish this vignette and a conclusion paragraph. Refugees are small houses and makeshift encampments run by human smuggling and trafficking syndicates. Refugees move back and forth between informal campments, formal detention centers and a fragmented city in which they're vulnerable to capture by both state and authorities and non state actors. Often formal detention centers run under the auspices of UNHCR are managed by the same militias, many rights organization site is being responsible for the litany of abuses migrants face there. And that's the larger EU discourse around human trafficking though evades an important structural fact, one that Yosef clearly understood. If one stays in an official detention center by UNHCR, one is immobilized by the illusory promise of evacuation and resettlement. Initially official detention centers were created to enable the evacuation of refugees solely refugees, those who could possibly have a credible claim for third country resettlement in Rwanda. In 2019 500 people had been evacuated to Rwanda from the 4700 in custody and the 52,000 registered by the organization. These evacuations have largely stopped as a result of the pandemic. Currently there are 597,611 migrants trapped in the country. And this does not include the number of internally displaced Libyans. This is what made it painful to hear Yosef say the word a joja, a common saying meant to soothe or comfort those who are suffering to the young men to the two young men who had called that evening. So without smugglers, many of whom are Eritrean refugees themselves, Eritreans would perish in these detention centers, and there's a categorical distinction between smugglers and traffickers within international law, and in the experiences of smugglers. But the collapse between the two categories and popular and legal discussion in Italy. Scaffisti has enabled Italian authorities to prosecute Eritreans as self traffickers, and their families as enablers and accomplices, quote busting the business model of trafficking ignores this important social fact, the predatory model of human trafficking functions because it preys upon the strong familial wants and diaspora. The border regimes and their current iterations routes these families into impossible choices that criminalizes the very real ways that transnational families used to maintain their bonds. So in effect, the Libyan detention center comp, the Libyan humanitarian detention complex routes refugees to the subject position victim of human trafficking, and their families into accomplices. I'm just going to read one last concluding paragraph before I move on before I finish this presentation that has gone. So the ethnographic examples that I presented in this article point to the paradoxes and instabilities within liberal humanist paradigms, the undergird human rights campaigning, and to the limits and defeats of Libertory projects and politics, which I can go into by looking at the ways in which Eritreans activists actively strategize critique and conceptualize humanitarian detention. I look at how experiences of capture and detention can catalyze radical visions of political freedom that extend beyond the boundaries of territorial states. In my work with yourself demonstrates the pragmatic and strategic alliances with journalists rights organizations, and humanitarian and agencies that are trained activists make elucidate the intricacies and developing political active advocacy for Eritrean refugees. So recently a group of scholars working on Eritrea, and I asked ourselves what it would mean to theorize Eritrean political culture outside of the discourse of human rights. None of us could come to an answer. Thank you so much Yuri that was, that was amazing. Really, really evocative illustration of the contemporary political and legal infrastructure of Europe. And finding this out to the politics of recognition I thought really interesting and especially how the politics or the narrative of anti traffic and how that bordering really lies on that. So, thank you so much and also for the focus iteration of the lived experience of Eritreans which, yeah, was really fascinating. And we've got time for maybe one question before we kind of bring everybody back together. So if anybody has any questions in the chat please raise your hand or unmute yourself. If not, then I have one, but bigger looks. Yes. Hello, thank you for the lecture theory and about the presentation, which almost was like a lecture in the end. I enjoyed it. And I've done some work on the cartoon process so I'm quite familiar with the dynamics there so and listening to you obviously one of the bigger issues which may not apply directly to Eritrea but certainly applies to countries such as Sudan and in the UK context in Rwanda. Now, I think which we need to address as well is how corrosive all these deals are, you know, because it's almost like you, you spread certain highly questionable practices and support them we heard that about Canada, we're not doing that, but also regimes such as Sudan certainly are now Bashir with the rapid support forces but also now Rwanda, asking the UK to extradite certain people, which had previously been protected by virtue of human rights concerns. So I think it's highly corrosive as a system so I think what you described is very important when we look at migration directly but it has obviously also even broader ramifications beyond that in the countries themselves so I think it makes it terribly difficult for activists to address these issues in their own countries where authoritarian regimes can claim that they're acting with the support of supposed human rights champions abroad. Should I wait for another question? Maybe you do that and then we can bring maybe we can ask any more questions. Thank you, Lutz. I mean, the kind of irony was that in 2019 Eritrea was headed, Eritrea became the head of the cartoon process, you know, a country in which high level generals have been accused by rights organization as being complicit or essential to kidnap and smuggling and trafficking. And all of those are actually very different processes and legal, have different legal ramifications. But it is, it gives new life to these authoritarian regimes. I'm absolutely right with the corrosive, the corrosiveness of these of these policies but what's also fascinating is that, you know, a memorandum of, you know, I've looked at the deal with Rwanda so elsewhere I've written about how my interlocutors understand laboratory mice. So I wrote an article that's under review, in which they talk about these border regimes, right. And they say, Well, we're the mice that they experiment on to see if the medicine works, and if it just doesn't kill, then they apply it to So it was a really fascinating take because it's Eritrean refugees were also subject to these voluntary self deportations to Rwanda from Israel, and an MOU memorandum of understanding is what Italy had developed with Libya, which are these kind of loose arrangements that for stall for close any kind of legal accountability but at the same time. The UK signed with Rwanda was also an MOU. So there's these are kind of new legal instruments that are developing, you know, to further, not just not the abrogation of the rule of law because international and human rights law has always been a bit tenuous and very, and difficult to to uphold international treaties, etc. So you could just break the treaty. But why engage in an MOU, right, which isn't about breaking the law outright, or just ignoring human rights law. But it is something. It is I think a way in which a public facing transcript will say well this is still the rule of law right the rule of law is an important kind of emic category for European policy officials they have to believe themselves in the rightness of what they're doing by framing it within the discourse of the rule of law. And so these legal mechanisms allow them to say, Okay, this is technically the rule of law. Because this evades kind of, it's not a treaty doesn't obviously break these conventions, we're not doing it publicly, but in effect in practice that's exactly what's happening. And in the end, it allows the rule of law to remain as a cultural ideal, without it remaining as a practicable legal standard. That's my take as a kind of political and legal anthropologist. So much. I think we've got one more question for hallow and then maybe we'll just try and really quickly bring it all together because I want to have any other questions for the broader group. Hi, thank you very much. It was a wonderful paper and I really look forward to reading it in full. My question stems from my own experience researching asylum reception in Italy. And I was actually fascinated by the way in which we have both the world making projects that emerge from the imaginations and practices and activities of the retrain activities that you that you spoke to an encounter. But, which I mean I found some resonance to with those of, well, they were not active, but actually asylum seekers in in reception centers but perhaps to their condition they also had quite specific and in fact very situated concerns that they were also very much concerned with place making practices and so I wanted to hear from you a bit more on that whether you encountered that how do you relate those place making practices with the with a broader world making one that you described so well. Thank you. So, a lot for Eritrean for the Eritrean diaspora Bologna as a city is incredibly important. So, you know, first from 1974. So, when Eritrean, the war between Eritrean E, Eritrean was an Italian colony as I'd explained complicated history but at some point it was federated to Ethiopia, then the Federation, Highless of Asia next the territory, and from 1961 to 1991 Eritrean guerrillas fought a war against successive Ethiopian regimes, and a third of the population was dispersed in exile. So the Eritrean guerrillas realized that these people were really important to state building from abroad. And so they mobilized refugees and kind of made made Eritreans in exile right so this, there was a process through which these colonial festivals, and the largest one, and most symbolically important was in Bologna from 1974 to 1991 successive communist mayors supported the Eritrean guerrillas they came to Bologna. Many of them studied at the university they would study surgery and then return back to the field as guerrilla doctors. So this is a largely unknown history for many Italians but so, so the two generations of Eritreans there. One generation, Eritrean called generational nationalism, these are the, the typologies given by Tricia Reddick or Happner, the people who left in response to the guerrilla war to the war with Ethiopia. So their subjectivities are very much so aligned with the Eritrean regime, and in freighted ways, complicated ways, and then this newer generation of refugees, generation asylum, you know, these are the people who have had to live with the consequences of a left, a radical conflict that you know turned authoritarian totalitarian in nature. So there was a lot of conflict between who represented what it meant to be Eritrean but specifically who represented what it meant to be Eritrean in Bologna. So there was, I also wrote about this but the, the recent generation of refugees actually was able to have a memorial for the Lampedusa sinking sponsored by the city. They lobbied the city government to have a memorial for the sinking, in which the majority of people who died were Eritrean. And this created a lot of political conflicts within the community between those who support the regime and those who are against the regime, and it was an interesting moment in which this was an act of claims making to the space of the city, right, and they mobilized this kind of anti fascist imaginary, and the idea that as refugees of course we fit into a kind of we face a resurgent fascism. And so we also lay claim to the city, and to this anti fascist history right our movements are, and our history specifically as Eritreans and our relationships to the left. So yeah, I'll stop, please. But thank you for the question. It's been great. I know I don't want to keep your past, past four. You're currently busy. I wanted to open up an opportunity if Sharon you really wanted to add things to the discussion. And maybe there's no pressure. But maybe if we could very quickly potentially ask for a more broad question, which is, it may be a bit reductive to do this. But I think it's always good ending kind of what we do and how we move forward. And I kind of think it touches on some of what you said. Maybe we could be more explicit, which is, if we are liaverned by systems of colonel capitalism that structure these forms of bordering invention. But should we be fighting for a world without borders is, you know, I think it's easier for abolitionists in the kind of criminal justice setting to think of a world without prisons. And, you know, should are should extended to a world without borders, if we are talking about bordering as a cross reality itself. I know that we have minutes left and that's literally impossible to answer that if anybody wanted to share their preliminary thoughts and great but no worries if not. Maybe I'll just jump in because I think that's an absolutely critical question Ali. And I think where I'm sitting in Canada. It's very important to understand the consequences of some of these arguments. So in as much as I consider myself and no borders activist. I also understand the extent to which that discourse can intensify and reinforce detention machinery. You know, deconstruct the borders. We still have states, and this system of state was perpetuates administrative violence in a highly unequal world will tend to have recourse to detention. You know, as the walls come down around the periphery, they go up inside and so I think we have to think very critically through that paradox. And it's something that I think there's not enough attention to so I don't have an answer, but I think you've asked the fundamental question when it comes to ultimately questions about citizenship, which, you know, was raised earlier and I didn't have a chance to address so thank you for the question. Okay. I'll just say, thank you also and briefly, the fact that the perspective that I was trying to bring about the labor market. It's confusing because you know the critique cannot be about labor exploitation which is the usual critique. It's rather about the labor market management. And the tension deportation is part of the superior process of labor market management, and the map that Sherry showed shows just the intense gradients of geopolitics. Where are the centers, where are they created who's finances it. So here you get a sense of the real geopolitics that is way beyond open market or labor market. And I think that this revival, the way the language that used to police this is this revival of the of the old language you know, trafficking, even fewer use a bit of this you know syndicates these kind of old fashioned terms for criminal networks. And I think the work du Bois the most about why this language, what it represented represented the death knell of Pan Africanism which was kind of a borderless kind of a dream. It put a spanner in it because it just showed that, you know, that this the past kind of continues to put a spanner into plans of kind of a global Commonwealth, a certain pan Africanist commonwealth, etc. So, yeah, I think this is the historical lingers a lot here. Thanks. I think I mean I, I think that there's a quite a significant distinction for for how it is. I mean, how borders act within the cultural imaginaries have even refugees themselves. In my work. I see that those who arrived earlier will say well we arrived legally we are the rightful refugees we're not breaking the law. And we'll have these kind of poison solidarities with recent refugees and second generation immigrants, specifically around the question of the morality of border of who crosses a border and how, how and why. So the understanding of a world without borders is not only one in which these walls would go down, but it would be also the cultural meanings associated with bordering that impact that even structure the intra communal terms of, of relationality and sociality that I have been thinking through. And even all of you are that question I've learned so much, and had no idea that there was so new on Steve, that kind of topic so yeah thank you so much. I think I just want to thank the speakers once more. Thank you for your great historical account for explaining how these more frameworks of anti trafficking slavery are used and co-opted, you know to uphold imperial power, as you say. And is also nauseating to hear those narratives from nations who profit from slavery the most. So I think your historical account is really really important. Thanks so much. A really powerful edition of the center of the tension, because I think you know, we like to think of the tension sometimes as a subsidiary to the kind of system of incarceration when really, it's actually part of it. Particularly how, you know, the reformist calls for more humane systems of the tension and just legitimizing the system attention and violence itself. Thanks to my combining a really focused illustration of our trains in Europe with such a constant analysis or tension, you know, the way upholds regimes of mobility, particularly at the end about the body in a site of division itself. I think it's pretty exciting. So yeah, thank you so much for joining us. And for all the time zones we had to mix together. So yeah, really, really grateful. And we do have a third shop soon to look out that will be on policing in the global south. So yeah, thank you so much. And hopefully see you all for the next one. Thanks again. Cheers. Thank you. Bye everybody.