“We Shall Overcome” – The Role of Polarization for Detainees and Police Officers in Austrian Detention Centres

More and more people worldwide are on the move and even in a globalized world they are perceived as a threat to countries and to their sovereignty. In the EU, member states are required to increase voluntary and forced return to cope with the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ and to protect the external borders (De Bono, 2016). The deportation of migrants establishes a ‘migration management tool’ (Mitchell, 2017) to separate citizens from non-citizens, even if they are settled (Anderson et al., 2011). Categorized as humans that are ‘unfit for citizenship’ (ibid) people without a valid residence permit are put in the threatening state of ‘deportability’ (De Genova, 2007). Global changes in immigration laws, visa policies and border control often justified by national interest (Bosworth, 2017; Doty and Wheatley, 2013) have led to a criminalization of migrants (Bosworth & Turnbull, 2015). The criminalization of migrants and the distinction between being ‘fit’ or ‘unfit’ for citizenship creates a polarization in society, even more, when citizenship is established not just as a community of law but also as a community of values (Anderson et al., 2011). In our paper we focus on this polarization by reporting on our large-scale study in four Austrian police detention centres, where immigration removal detention is operated. We show how this polarization is reproduced in everyday life in the detention centre. Our findings indicate that the interaction between detainees and police officers is very much shaped by the polarised discourse of belonging and foreignness. The discourse offers ‘subject positions’ (Keller 2011) for the detainees and for the police officers that reproduce the polarization. In our paper we describe how this polarization influences the interaction of police officers and detainees and leads to different perceptions of situations and to completely different concepts of meaning. At the same time, however, we also show that detainees and police officers do not necessarily have to assume these subject positions. In our participatory research project, in which we worked with detainees and police officers to develop solutions to the problems of immigration removal detention, we used the method of vignette-based focus groups (Miko-Schefzig, 2019; Miko-Schefzig/ Reiter 2018). In this method, short scenarios that are typical for everyday life in detention were constructed based on our previous empirical research. In the focus groups, we brought the detainees and police officers at one table to discuss their perspectives on the typical situations in detention. By discussing difficulties that both groups considered to be problematic for everyday life in the IRDC, police officers and detainees were in a position to explain their perspective to each other. Thus, in the vignette-based focus groups, the mutual exchange of perspectives between the police officers and the detainees brought the similarities and differences to the surface. It showed that both groups were ambivalent in their subject positions as only police officer or only detainees. In other words, by applying the method of vignette-based focus groups we found that the research situation itself changed some of the subject positions.