Law, Life, Impossibility: Theorising ‘Law Application’ in Detention Centres for Foreigners

Abstract

The paper attempts to grasp conceptually the nature of law application in zones of confined life. Drawing upon empirical research, it uses the example of closed centres for foreigners. Approaching the topic with methods of sociology of law and legal anthropology, as well as drawing on Agamben’s conceptualisations of law and life, I would like to propose a more general understanding of the role that law plays in total institutions such as detention centres. A great majority of legal provisions pertaining to them is stipulated with the intention of defending the detainees from abuses of power. Nonetheless, the positivist view of the law which translates noble principles, enshrined in constitutions and international law, into low-rank acts and then regulates the behaviour of officers, is at odds with the practice revealed by the sociological and anthropological research. The law remains a foreign body to officers: it is acknowledged as a body of rules which officially regulate all the actions of the institution, but in truth it functions rather as the Other’s gaze. It embodies external control and the possibility of intervention. As such, it never regulates the actions per se (it is too unfamiliar to do so), but rather constitutes an external foothold which stops officers from applying all the methods of discipline that they spontaneously invent. It also provides a free object of criticism which mediates between officers’ projected goals of border guards and their expected practice. Consequently, the vision of the law as a tool that ‘regulates’ detention centres is empirically contradicted. The paper addresses this relation with the use of Agambenian conceptuality, seeking points of contact between the law and life as well asking to what degree life is lawrepellent in confined zones.