Preserving Maltese Identity in Refugee Management: On the Emergence and Absence of a Prison Spatiality

Since 2002, roughly 19,000 refugees have reached Maltese shores. Both European Union law as well as national Maltese policies shape their reception and treatment. In discourse, these refugees are repeatedly represented as a threat to the social order on the island and its unique Maltese identity. Through various practices of separating refugees from non-refugee society, the societal vision of Maltese uniqueness is stabilised as a sociotechnical imaginary. Through these practices a prison spatiality experienced by refugees emerges. The emergence of this spatiality is illustrated by drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with both refugee and non-refugee institutional actors. Pointing to the relationship between the emergent spatiality and societal self-understandings connecting past, present and future visions of Maltese identity, the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries is applied in conjunction with theories of islandness. It is analysed how practices of physical separation, the impediment of social participation, legal separation and its partial suspension enact Malta as a prison for refugees and thereby stabilise a concrete vision of Maltese identity.