This text seeks to present basic knowledge on the detention of foreigners in Poland and the research perspective adopted in the project involving the authors of the papers published in this volume. The article has been divided into two parts. The first one contains characteristics of the detention of foreigners in the Polish context: directions of migration flows resulting from the location of our country, as well as the whereabouts and profiles of the centres administered by the Border Guard. Part two familiarises the reader with the specific nature of our detention study project: its conceptual apparatus, the adopted research paradigms, the applied methodology, and the challenges related to our exploratory efforts being performed in a very specific place – the guarded centres for foreigners. In the authors’ intention, all this information is to constitute a useful background to the detailed considerations contained in the subsequent papers presented in this volume of the journal.

The paper attempts to grasp conceptually the nature of law application in zones of confined life. Drawing upon empirical research, it uses the example of closed centres for foreigners. Approaching the topic with methods of sociology of law and legal anthropology, as well as drawing on Agamben’s conceptualisations of law and life, I would like to propose a more general understanding of the role that law plays in total institutions such as detention centres. A great majority of legal provisions pertaining to them is stipulated with the intention of defending the detainees from abuses of power. Nonetheless, the positivist view of the law which translates noble principles, enshrined in constitutions and international law, into low-rank acts and then regulates the behaviour of officers, is at odds with the practice revealed by the sociological and anthropological research. The law remains a foreign body to officers: it is acknowledged as a body of rules which officially regulate all the actions of the institution, but in truth it functions rather as the Other’s gaze. It embodies external control and the possibility of intervention. As such, it never regulates the actions per se (it is too unfamiliar to do so), but rather constitutes an external foothold which stops officers from applying all the methods of discipline that they spontaneously invent. It also provides a free object of criticism which mediates between officers’ projected goals of border guards and their expected practice. Consequently, the vision of the law as a tool that ‘regulates’ detention centres is empirically contradicted. The paper addresses this relation with the use of Agambenian conceptuality, seeking points of contact between the law and life as well asking to what degree life is lawrepellent in confined zones.

Guarded Centres for Foreigners are the key instrument of detention policy in Poland. They are often considered as one of the key and at the same time most secretive forms of securitization and criminalization of foreigners. With panoptical practices of (in)direct observation and robust electronic surveillance the centres are tasked with containing and producing a (self)disciplined, knowable, governable and deportable immigrant, who can be swiftly expelled from the Polish territory. Building on ethnographic research, including interviews and photographic material, this article explores specific practices and technologies of surveillance in Polish detention centres by describing and discussing how they are deployed by detention personnel. It overviews different types of direct surveillance (e.g direct observation, counting, inspection), at the same time discussing the role of monitoring technologies, which have significantly influenced the practices and spaces of detention. The article concludes that further development of electronic surveillance in the Polish guarded centres may be inevitable and lead to further “panopticonization” of detention in Poland.

This paper focuses on the characteristics of the space and places of guarded centres for foreigners in Poland. It contains a discussion of universal features of the detention space for foreigners typical of the total institution, stocktaking of the centres’ space and the places which fill it, as well as characteristics of the ways of using the space and their determinants. The general perspective of the perception of the detention space focuses on its identification as a tool of authority and the execution of social control, domination and subjugation.

The aim of the article is to identify and analyse guarded centres for foreigners in Poland when considered as total institutions and the psycho-social consequences of such totalization on the officers and employees of the Border Guard who work in these centres. The above-mentioned consequences stem from their daily work in a total institution, primarily within the legal and socio-cultural conditions of the functioning of these centres and, secondly, in terms of the relationships between the staff employed in them, as well as between the staff and foreigners. In addition, they are also an effect of the simultaneous impact of the world outside the total institution on the officers and employees of the Border Guard.

For immigrants, a disruption of their migration biography as a result of detention, waiting to be granted the status of a refugee/asylum seeker, is tantamount to being in a state of suspension. Relevant literature often metaphorically refers to this situation as a state of ‘limbo’. In my article, I refer it to the institutional dimension of the total reality of the Guarded Centres for Foreigners (GCFs), calling it an ‘external limbo’ in which the individual is reduced to the rules of the controlling system. This situation evokes a state of alienation in the subject (immigrant in the role of a subordinate), who is strictly dependant on the officers (personnel) supervising their functioning. In effect, such conditions lead to different adaptation attitudes of the people detained in the GCFs, but above all, they do not promote their mental well-being. I call this last dimension of one’s stay at the GCF an ‘internal limbo’.

My reflections are concentrated on an analysis of official documents describing events concerning a young Woman detained in one of the six GCFs in Poland. I treat this material as an exploratoryexplanative case study on the topic of the attitude of detention institutions to persons ‘in a mental/ emotional crisis’ and I ask about the ‘external limbo’ as understood in psychiatric anthropology, focusing on sociocultural conditions legitimising institutional use of disciplining practices in relation to the people the personnel of GCFs consider as ‘raising concern’. In my interpretation, I refer to the context of the functioning of the guarded centres as a total institution and the ‘economies of morality’ that are disclosed there. As a result, my goal is to indicate the characteristic manifestations of the ‘external limbo’, which may affect the condition of the ‘internal limbo’, and I progress towards reflection on the sense of detaining persons who pose no threat to their surroundings in the GCF, which is connected with an answer to the question concerning the manner of functioning of the guarded centres (in view of the welfare of all the people who stay there, not only immigrants).

This text undertakes to turn the readers’ attention to one of the many training areas of the Border Guard and open up a discussion on the possibility to create, among the courses and training offered to the officers and civilian employees of this service, a special sub-system dedicated to people employed in detention centres. This is because even a preliminary analysis of tasks carried out by officers and civilian employees of detention centres indicates that users of this specific institutional space need to have special professional qualifications in situations involving close cultural contact. This paper highlights only a fragment of a very broad map of problems related to designing the knowledge, skills and abilities, as well as attitudes of people directly involved in the operation of these institutions. The necessity to build social processes between many social actors from such centres in the closed institutional space, and cooperation with external institutions, generate many factors hindering the performance of official tasks. For this reason, it is so vital to equip officers and civilian employees with the essential skills, abilities and knowledge so that they are able to appropriately react to the problems and needs of foreigners, and reduce the emerging threats and conflicts.

For eight years, employees and students of the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań have been providing support activities in guarded centres for foreigners in Poland. Their work involves organising play and art, craft and music activities for children and adult foreigners. This offer has benefited at least 500 foreigners. The second form of assistance is the organisation of workshops for police officers (expansion of their legal, socio-cultural and psychological knowledge, formation of tolerant attitudes, etc.).

The postulate of openness to Others is practiced both by anthropologists and active volunteers. In the case of the former, it is a condition for the acquisition of knowledge on the diversity of ways of life in the world and undertaking actions in the activist paradigm, while with reference to the latter, it is not only tantamount to assistance, but also the basic premise behind their actions. This common ethical perspective turned out to inspire reflections on how the anthropological knowledge can be useful for volunteer activity, which by the way is often understood in practice as ‘helping others out of one’s own accord’. As a result, in 2021/22 the didactic project An Anthropologist – an Expert in Voluntary Activity. Improving Communication Competencies in the Situation of Intercultural Contact was developed in the Department of Anthropology and Ethnology, Adam Mickiewicz University.