Paper short abstract:

Drawing on research in a women’s migration detention center in southern Spain, this paper sheds light on the seemingly arbitrary production of emotions.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on research in a women’s migration detention center in southern Spain, this paper sheds light on the seemingly arbitrary production of emotions. Focusing on one concrete field situation, I analyze how the decision to release some and extend detention for others, thereby increasing the likelihood of deportation, causes great relief on the one hand and panic and terrifying incomprehension on the other. I am particularly interested in the ways how executed law appears arbitrary to migrants, volunteers, legal aid assistants, researchers and the police officers themselves. Therefore, “arbitrariness” – understood as a mode of production within the affective economy of deportation – is a useful concept to convey the experience when something apparently capricious happens to one beyond reason or rule. It is not only the fear of deportation, but also the unfathomable reasons why one person is deported but not the other that cause emotional turmoil and, moreover, shift power relations. I argue that arbitrariness is an affective and effective power-technique that obscures the workings of the state, causes momentary powerlessness but also produces new strategies to fight deportations.