Canadian Refugee Determination and Advanced Liberal Government

Abstract

AbstractSignificant changes in the refugee determination domain during the 1980s are made intelligible by deploying the concepts of programme, rationality, and technology drawn from the recent governmentality literature. Following a crisis of governability in the mid-1980s, refugee determination continued to move farther from the reach of political authorities. By 1989 it was reassembled in a manner involving a greater reliance on law, on the regular production of medical and psychiatric knowledge in new sites outside the state and a documentation centre, all of which is consistent with the onset of advanced liberal government. Closer examination of the documentation centre shows it permits scrutiny of information destined for use in legal oral hearings; is a form of political subjectification; and serves as a panoptic device that targets non-Western nations and populations consistent with advanced liberalism. In this way the documentation centre also illustrates the overlap of Canadian and international refugee regimes.