Cross-national friendships in immigration detention can grow into collective political action against state power.

Evidence

Kemoy, like many other deported people I met, described making friends with people of different nationalities in detention, people he said he would have never met on the outside. Many people described the problems faced by Vietnamese and Eastern European nationals in detention, due to a lack of English literacy, and the ways in which other detainees helped them to understand and fill in their immigration forms. Often those assisting Vietnamese and Eastern Europeans were individuals from Britain’s former colonies, and/or those who grew up in the UK (like the men in my research). More than this, groups of detainees of various nationalities have protested, made demands, and gone on hunger strike several times in recent years, and in this way, the banal practices of conviviality in the gym can become the preliminary ground for more direct political action against coercive state power. — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 53

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my article on sacrifice and ritual as group-binding; here mundane convivial friendship in the gym prefigures collective solidarity and protest. — connects to: The shared condition of deportability forges affinity across racial and national lines in detention. — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 51; Political power requires people to live close enough to act together. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 597; Indefinite detention camps for non-citizens have deep antecedents in modern nation-state practice — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 406 (+3 more)
• STORYSTEM: A narrative angle: deported men whose shared literacy help across national lines in detention becomes the seed of a coordinated hunger strike.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 53

Related

• The shared condition of deportability forges affinity across racial and national lines in detention. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Building inward-facing social ties is a prerequisite for later outward political action #corroborates (0.80) — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1437
• Political power requires people to live close enough to act together. #expands (0.78) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 597
• Shared state violence can create fellow feeling across ethnic lines. #corroborates (0.75) — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 46
• Indefinite detention camps for non-citizens have deep antecedents in modern nation-state practice #complicates (0.72) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 406
• External political conflict can politicize a broad group identity into predicting collective action. #expands (0.72) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4451