Greece has a long history of using quarantine and isolation, displacement, and confinement for those deemed undesirable or unworthy. Since the 1990s, immigration in Greece has been framed as a public health issue as well as a security problem. Immigrants are commonly represented in official state and media discourse as ‘dirty’ and ‘disease bearers’, unfit for the public health system. Unlike other European countries, where the population in immigration detention significantly decreased, in Greece, the numbers in detention during the pandemic were kept at the same levels as the years before. Instead of release, the authorities created isolation spaces within facilities or rebranded some detention centres as ‘covid centres’, where infected people would be transferred. In so doing, the authorities effectively used the health crisis of Covid-19 as justification for keeping migrants detained; in the name of the common good and public health. Drawing on the author’s long-term involvement in the immigration detention system in Greece, this paper examines how the immigration and public health systems coalesce in Greek detention facilities to shape and legitimate these contested institutions, creating an unhealthy crimmigration system.

This paper explores how the boundaries of political recognition take shape in carceral settings through an empirical study of the legal standards used to regulate immigration detention in the United States of America. In the twelve-month period from September 2022 to September 2023, 267,235 people were incarcerated in US immigration detention. To maintain this system of immigration detention – by far the largest in the world – US Immigration and Customs Enforcement utilized 126 immigration detention facilities. Notably, none of these facilities were operated by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Instead, the day-to-day management of the entire immigration detention estate is outsourced to an array of private firms, municipal jails, and county prison systems through a series of contractual arrangements. Rather than a single set of rules, ICE employs five different legal standards to regulate the operation and conditions of confinement within detention facilities depending on the type of facility and contract. According to the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) this system of outsourced detention and multiple detention standards is critical to maintaining the ‘realistic capacity needed to handle sudden increases in detention’ (HSAC, 2016: 7). In practice, evidence suggests (ACLU, 2022, AIC, 2022) that this byzantine system of detention regulations has enabled the systemic mistreatment of incarcerated people.

A rich vein of criminological work has demonstrated the penal system's critical importance in the definition and contestation of citizenship (Lerman and Weaver, 2014, Miller and Stuart, 2017, Bosworth, 2021, Aitken, 2022). This paper argues that analysis of the way national detention standards are employed to regulate outsourced detention demonstrates how these legal and administrative regulations shape a broader encounter between state and (non)citizen in immigration detention. Adapting the concept of 'organized abandonment' (Povinelli, 2011, Gilmore, 2022), this analysis demonstrates how the structure and application of detention standards enables the systematic deprivation of access to civil and legal rights and medical care, defining in turn the limits of political recognition through the exclusion of detainees.

The Arab world continues to struggle with the manifold challenges of terrorism, which poses significant threats to security, stability, and socio-economic development. Traditional counterterrorism strategies have often focused on military interventions and law enforcement measures, yet the persistence of terrorist activities calls for a reevaluation of prevailing approaches. The following presentation will examine the strengths and weaknesses of conventional, unorthodox, and other alternative counterterrorism strategies in Arab countries. Along with the expected retributive approach to counterterrorism and terrorism prevention, the presentation will highlight the less-known alternative approaches utilized in Algeria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Morocco to combat terrorism. By shedding light on the strengths and limitations of alternative counterterrorism strategies in the Arab world, this study contributes to a nuanced understanding of the complexities surrounding counterterrorism. Ultimately, the study aims to inform policymakers, practitioners, and scholars about innovative approaches that hold the potential to complement traditional counterterrorism measures and foster sustainable solutions to the scourge of terrorism.