ABSTRACT
Although the importance of mobilities has been emphasised in classic works regarding the prison, the social sciences have only recently explored them in respect of carceral procedures. The link between carcerality and mobility has been studied on several levels with regard to controlling foreigners. First, routes are increasingly structured by alternating free travel/forced displacement and are marked by somewhat long phases spent in detainment sites (Clochard, 2010; Michalon, 2012; Schmoll, 2014). Detention is also considered as an experience of stopping and waiting (Griffiths, 2014), or as an experience of route renegotiation (Darley, 2008). Research thirdly deals with the fact that confinement and circulation are structured through ‘governmental mobilities’ (Gill, 2009a), that is to say, displacements determined and organised by the institution, be it in connection with the ongoing procedure or with punitive aims (Michalon, 2013). They are an integral part of constraint and institutional control; they generate a sense of disorientation among displaced foreigners (Hiemstra, 2013), reducing the possibilities of external aid and upsetting internal sociability (Gill, 2009b). This displacement has theoretical implications. Closed settings become redistribution platforms for the flows of foreigners (Kobelinsky and Makaremi, 2008). They are therefore often conceived as part of a wider tendency: ‘the global expansion of the confinement industry’ (Martin and Mitchelson, 2009: 459) – confinement being understood as ‘being kept in enclaves, whether they be concrete or abstract, ethnic, physical, legal or institutional’ (Akoka and Clochard, 2015: 11). Lastly, mobility is no longer only an expression of freedom – a widely valued perspective in the mobility turn – but also an instrument of the power of the State, able to even force the issue (Baerenholdt, 2013; Creswell, 2006; Gill, 2013; Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013; Turner, 2007).
