Introducing island detentions : the placement of asylum seekers and migrants on islands

This special issue is a collaborative endeavour undertaken by editors and authors. It arose as a response to a growing trend: the detention of migrants and asylum seekers on islands (Mountz, 2011). Historically, islands have long served as prisons, whether expansive penal colonies for colonial powers as Australia was to the United Kingdom, or smaller, more proximate, high-security sites for prisoners as Alcatraz was to San Francisco on the western coast of the United States. Scholars have attempted exhaustive lists of island prisons (cf Taussing, 2004). These lists are long because of the geography of the island, itself imagined as an isolated place. Of course, islands are far from isolated but the geographical imagination of nation-states holds them as a sort of punitive stage. Indeed, writing about Lampedusa, Paolo Cuttitta (2011) suggests that a kind of 'border play' transpires on the island, a stage where debates about national immigration policies and politics are performed.