The Detainee, the Prisoner, and the Refugee: The Dynamics of Violent Subject Production

Abstract

This article takes violence in the law seriously, scrutinizing three sites engaged in violent subject production and resistance: the Guantanamo Bay detention center, supermax prisons in the US, and European refugee camps. The concepts of martyring and torturing serve help to untangle the dynamics of the law's violence. The violent subject production techniques used in these sites are discussed as torture practices that aim to reproduce the dominant subjectivity. As the law has often proved unable to fully address the situation of the detainee, the prisoner, and the refugee, hunger striking as martyring is discussed as a way to deconstruct hegemonic subjectivity and to force the law to face its own violence.

“They just don’t care about us!”: Police custody experiences for young men with histories of injecting drug use

“…Like from the start, they didn’t like us … Yeah, he just smiled, and flicked the blinds so I couldn’t see them. And I just went BOOM, BOOM, BOOM on the door … [They] wouldn’t even let them leave a letter for me!As the accounts above highlight, for the participants in this study, fair and just treatment was sacrificed “according to [their] behaviour, characteristics and status” (Nieminen, 2016, p. 23). Dividing practices of discrimination forced them to respond in ways that reproduced the very subjects the community are encouraged to fear—“dangerous, violent, bad, Others”—and legitimised their abusive neglectful treatment they described, sustained their permanent marginality and stripped them of their status as citizens with human rights.…”

“…Feeling they had no legitimate recourse in an environment where requests for care and complaints about a lack thereof were not taken seriously, young men used unruly behaviour and self-harming to convey despair and frustration, and to gain authority in a place in which they had very little control (Fiske, 2016; Nieminen, 2016). This behaviour we argue, also operated as a form of resistance to dominant truths imposed upon them as worthless subjects, undeserving of fair and just treatment.…”

“…I ended up cutting, and I got twenty-two stitches. They took me to hospital, drugged me up, then they took me back to the cells.A mechanism for simultaneously expressing their anger at injustices experienced, exerting pressure to achieve material outcomes and for resisting imposed powerless subjectivities (Fiske, 2016; Nieminen, 2016), self-harming behaviour, however, was sometimes reportedly ignored and exacerbated harm. For example, James explained how hunger striking was a form of protest and demand for more kindness and care—a way to “just to try and get some sympathy really”—that ultimately received little attention from staff and made no difference to how he felt treated.…”

Public-Private Partnership In The Penitentiary Sphere: Economic Aspects Of Law Enforcement Activity

“…The work took into account the experience of organizing food self-sufficiency in penitentiary institutions (Bejarano-Roncancio, Celedón-Dangond, & Socha-Gracia, 2015), as well as the possibility of creating new types of correctional institutions (Gilmer & Comerford, 2019). The work also takes into account modern views on the differentiation of persons held in penitentiary institutions in the context of public-private partnership projects (Nieminen, 2019), as well as the ideas of modern researchers in the field of increasing public influence on national prison systems. The work is based on the use of a systematic approach, which was used to combine the methods of analysis, synthesis, induction and deduction.…”

Fracturing the “Exception”: The Legal Sanctioning of Violent Interrogation Methods in Israel since 1987

“…Recently, scholars have questioned whether it is the suspension of law that allows for the sanctioning of state violence (Johns 2005;Hussain 2007;Lokaneeta 2011;Nieminen 2019). Discussing the interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay, Nasser Hussain (2007, 735) has suggested that "the exception as it has historically and theoretically been understood, as a suspension of regular law, even a space of non-law, no longer exists."…”