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Paper short abstract

How is life around an offshore migrant detention centre? Based on ongoing fieldwork with the residents of Gjadër (Albania), this paper examines how the imposition of Italian carceral borders echoes, reverberates, and refracts experiences of confinement in the village’s landscape and history.

Paper long abstract

Gjadër is an isolated village of 200 people in northern Albania. Since mid-2024, an outsourced-for-profit Italian migrant detention facility for over 1,000 detainees has stood at the village entrance. This paper explores how the inception of the offshore detention site resonates with both prior and concurrent forms of confinement.

Albania’s socialist regime restricted citizens’ mobility both across and within national borders, and punished trespassers with incarceration and forced labour. Gjadër’s residents began emigrating following the collapse of the dictatorship. Now, elderly people with vivid memories of state socialism face new forms of isolation and stuckedness as younger generations flee. After the atheist regime’s fall, Catholic nuns established a mission in Gjadër, managing employment, shelter, and support for women fleeing violence across the country. Care for women is administered through institutionalisation, centralising resources and opportunities around religious providers.

Both past socialist policies and current capitalist and racial infrastructures have, over time, contributed to shaping degrees of unfreedom, confinement, and options for making a life in the village. How do these different events mirror each other in Gjadër’s residents’ lives? This paper interrogates the concept of carcerality by fragmenting and analysing it through the scattered experiences of Gjadër’s inhabitants, not to pinpoint which of them engenders ‘carcerality proper’, but to identify refracting and echoing dynamics and processes which have long structured the village’s social landscape. By recomposing and visualising these refractions side-by-side, space opens up to understand border and carceral abolitionism in inextricable ways.