I cannot imagine the despair of spending the rest of your life locked up. Even if you are not wrongfully convicted, in which case the depth of despair must feel bottomless, it must still be a staggering feeling to freeze time and space and exist in that state of mind where there is only past and present and no future. The future is nothing but anticipation. To hope is to be human. What must it feel like to learn to repress your hope?

It is intriguing to contrast such repression of hope with its possibility. After his release, when the BBC journalist Allan Johnston told his story of the harrowing ordeal of abduction and detention for 114 days in Gaza, it was clear how much strength he gained from the knowledge that the world was watching his detention. That he could hope enabled his survival.

As awful as it sounds, doing life in prison under conditions that are known and where certain rights are guaranteed or implied, is still incomparable to the situation of those locked up indefinitely without many of these same rights, if any at all. Guantánamo Bay has become a symbol of such detention. When a former detainee Moazzam Begg told his story we should no longer have been shocked. Yet when a colleague Kim Rygiel and I were writing an article about such detention centres around the world, which we eventually called ‘abject spaces’, we were absolutely stunned by the number of them that existed and the number of people that were held in such spaces.

We knew that many were designed not for criminals but for holding refuges, asylum seekers, migrants and seasonal workers. Of more than 20 million displaced peoples around the world estimated by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), more than 12 million were held in such spaces. Australia’s Woomera (1999-2003), France’s Sangatte (1999-2002), America’s Guantánamo Bay (2001-) are only the tip of the iceberg of holding people, often indefinitely.

But governments are now turning their attention away from detention centres. ‘Offshore’ or ‘transit’ processing centres may sound like dodgy financial arrangements, but these are the spaces favoured by American and European governments to lock people up after so much attention has focused on these other detention centres. Besides, governments have wanted to restrict the rights of detainees and so have chosen these spaces, which are outside national and international laws, so that detainees would have less, if any, hope at all. Moreover, ‘outsourcing’ the processing of people, as offshore processing is now called, is apparently ‘cheaper’—a calculation that beggars any belief in ethics. These spaces seem to be designed to render detainees invisible and without voice, in effect as being without agency, in the hopes of denying them precisely the hope that Allan Johnson could count on, the hope that comes with the recognition of one’s subjectivity that enables a capacity for resistance.

To take hope from people and lock them up without rights is the aim of such centres. It is very difficult to do research on them precisely because governments do not want citizens to know about them let alone question them.

About the author

Engin F. Isin is professor in Politics and International Studies and director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.