Life in ‘Punitive Protection’: The paradox of migrant detention in Estonia

Abstract

The detention of irregular migrants in the European Union has increased in scope and intensity in the years following the 2016 ‘refugee crisis’. Detention is usually codified as an administrative practice, a neutral routine necessary for the surveillance of irregular migrants and the enforcement of immigration laws. However, this formally ‘administrative’ process belies a unique contradiction: although cast as a benign procedure, detention is often experienced by detainees as a form of punishment and incarceration in the absence of criminal charges. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork from the Metsa Detention Centre in Estonia, I argue that this paradox—what I term punitive protection—can make detention a disorienting and uncanny institution for migrants. Detainees experience ‘punitive protection’ as the tension between what they are told is real and what they are certain is real. For my informants, Metsa was not just a space of confinement, but an alternate reality where their beliefs, hopes, and struggles were denied by state practice. Keywords: Migration, detention, agency, refugee studies, criminology