Land of the deportable. Repression and protection Inside French Immigration Detention Centers   This talk will draw on the conclusions of a recently published book on immigration detention centers in France, to address a general tension they are now facing as repressive institutions in a democratic realm: they are detention facilities designed to control deportable immigrants while state officials prepare their forced removal, but as such, they are supposed to follow the “rule of law” and provide inmates with legal protection and counsel. The presentation will focus on a set of actors who incarnate this tension: Human Right advocates who have been authorized since 1984 to intervene on a daily basis inside detention centers to propose legal relief to the detainees. The talk will start with a general presentation of the European and French situation on immigration detention, between an ever-toughening detention regime, and the development of protective legal provisions since the 1980s. The main part will draw on the ethnographic material presented in the book to describe the organization and main issues of advocacy inside detention centers: how does it affect activist work, since independent actors entering the institutions have to accept its rules and limit themselves to exclusively legal contention of deportation policies? And how does it impact the enforcement of deportations itself, and the negociated definition of state borders that separate “legal” immigrants from those who are not authorized to stay? Referent: Dr. Nicolas Fischer (CESDIP, Université Versailles). Nicolas Fischer is a tenured researcher in Political Science at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), appointed at the Centre de recherches sociologiques sur le droit et les institutions pénales (CESDIP), at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin in Guyancourt. His research deals with political violence and the sociology of law and the state, focusing on immigration detention and detention policies in France and in Europe, and on the more general control of Human Rights violations in detention facilities. He has published in 2016 Les politiques migratoires (with Pr Camille Hamidi, Paris, La Découverte, coll. Repères) and in 2017 Le territoire de l’expulsion. La rétention administrative des étrangers et l’Etat de droit en France (Lyon, ENS Editions, coll. Le gouvernement en questions). Kommentar: Irina Mützelburg (CMB). Ort: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Raum A 310, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785 Berlin