Caged Histories

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 Oxford

In 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 Oxford

Centering 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 Researcher

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.