Caged Histories

Andriani Fili is a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford. Her research explores immigration detention, state violence, and human rights, with a focus on Greece. Her current project examines the intersections of public health and immigration systems through archival research and fieldwork. She contributes to border criminology, sociology, and anthropological scholarship and collaborates with local civil society on countermapping detention spaces in Greece.

• Introduction: Buried Seeds: Immigration Detention, Resistance, and Survival in Greece, 1. Ethnographic Returns: Witnessing, Reflexivity, and the Detention Complex, 2. Concealment and Confinement: The Hidden Foundations of Greek Immigration Control, 3. Making Lives Unlivable: The Construction of Greece’s Detention Regime, 4. The Watchers and the Gatekeepers: How Greek Detention Escapes Scrutiny, 5. Saving What We Can: Humanitarianism and Complicity in Greek Detention, 6. Azadi Behind Bars: Resistance and Repression in Greek Detention Centers, Epilogue: The Cage-Free Horizon: Abolition, Imagination, and the Fight for Justice

Caged Histories offers a detailed and gripping account of the historical development and contemporary operation of immigration detention in Greece. Drawing on over a decade of empirical research, Fili provides an unprecedented glimpse inside these hidden sites to persuasively and urgently make the case for their abolition. A must read for anyone concerned with border control.Mary Bosworth, Professor of Criminology, University of OxfordIn this empirically compelling text, Andriani Fili confronts the realities of state-corporate violences inflicted through, and embedded in, the detention archipelago in Greece. Acting as both testimony and witness, this book weaves unheard narratives from those most affected by the violence of bordering, shattering the agnosis of EU complicity. Groundbreaking. Victoria Canning, Professor of Criminology, Lancaster University This original and thought-provoking book draws on Fili’s extensive first-hand knowledge of the Greek immigration detention system, during which she gathered many hundreds of testimonies from detained migrants while observing the people and institutions that had coalesced around them. She argues that the system of detention that she has seen evolve is shaped primarily by the desire to implement racialized border control, unchecked by humanitarian and monitoring agencies that have perpetuated rather than challenged the harms of detention. Such insights and contentions ground Fili's visions of resistance and abolition in this important, rigorously researched, and passionately argued book. It will inform and trouble anyone interested in migration and detention.Hindpal Singh Bhui, HM Inspectorate of Prisons and Visiting Professor, University of OxfordCentering the experiences of detainees, Andriani’s Fili’s book exposes the violence of detention in a multiplicity of Greek sites, situating the practice of detention as a disciplinary tool of the European and Greek border regimes. It is an urgent reminder to resist detention while moving towards its abolition.Dr Lena Karamanidou, Research and Investigation Coordinator, Border Violence Monitoring Network & Independent ResearcherAt a time of rising anti-immigration sentiment and expanding detention and deportation regimes, Fili’s book is a must-read. Drawing on over a decade of empirical research and unprecedented access to Greek detention centres—facilities typically closed to academic scrutiny—this is the first comprehensive account of life inside these institutions. Fili exposes the legal, political, and structural forces that sustain and normalise detention, while powerfully centring the lived experiences, resilience, and resistance of those detained. Moving beyond conventional critiques, the book challenges the very legitimacy of this violent and costly system. It is a vital call to action for scholars, activists, and practitioners to work not towards reform, but towards dismantling carceral border regimes and radically reimagining our responses to human migration.Francesca Esposito, Fixed-term Researcher in Tenure Track, University of Bologna