The new Society and Space website launches a forum on ‘hotspot’ centers for the management of migrants and refugees in Italy and Greece, with a number of contributions coming soon.

This coincides with a heated debate in Spain about CIEs, the so-called ‘foreigner internment centers’ (actually detention centers), especially in Madrid and Barcelona in the wake of protests by migrants and activists, and institutional attempts to close them by mayors Manuela Carmena and Ada Colau, both in coalitions with diverse local branches of Podemos. Last week, for instance, Carmena declared that some of them present worse conditions than prisons in Madrid metropolitan area. While CIEs are different in many aspects from the ‘hotspots’ discussed in the Society and Space forum, they belong to the same carceral approach to transnational mobility and provide an illustration of a longer and painful trajectory not only regarding national and EU strategies for processing migrants, but also of ongoing resistance, solidarity and collective response against them.