Abstract
The Australian government has spent over a billion dollars a year on managing offshore detention (Budget 2018–2019). Central to this offshore management was the transference and mandatory detention of asylum seekers in facilities that sit outside Australia’s national sovereignty, in particular on Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) and Nauru. As a state-sanctioned spatial aberration meant to deter asylum seekers arriving by boat, offshore detention has resulted in a raft of legal and policy actions that are reshaping the modern state-centric understanding of the national space. It has raised questions of sovereignty, of moral, ethical and legal obligations, of national security and humanitarian responsibilities, and of nationalism and belonging. Using a sample of Twitter users on Manus during the closure of the Manus Island detention centre in October–November 2017, this paper examines how asylum seekers and refugees have negotiated and defined the offshore detention space and how through the use of social media they have created a profound disruption to the state discourse on offshore detention. The research is based on the premise that asylum seekers’ use social media in a number of disruptive ways, including normalising the presence of asylum seekers in the larger global phenomena of migration, humanising asylum seekers in the face of global discourses of dehumanisation, ensuring visibility by confirming the conditions of detention, highlighting Australia’s human rights violations and obligations, and challenging the government discourse on asylum seekers and offshore detention. Social media is both a tool and a vehicle by which asylum seekers on Manus Island could effect that disruption.
Highlights
Australia’s policy of detaining people seeking asylum in offshore detention has attracted considerable public debate (Klocker and Dunn 2003; Pickering 2001; Chambers 2015; Bashford and Strange 2002; Dickson 2015; Mountz 2011)
I argue that asylum seekers use social media in a number of ways that are disruptive to the state discourse on seeking asylum: they use it to normalise the presence of asylum seekers in the larger global phenomena of migration, to re-humanise asylum seekers in the face of global discourses of dehumanisation, to ensure visibility by confirming the conditions of detention and the associated expectations of Australia’s human rights responsibilities, and to challenge the government discourse on asylum seekers and offshore detention
The facility was eventually closed in November 2017 due to a ruling by the Papua New Guinea (PNG) Supreme Court that declared the detention of asylum seekers in the Centre as ‘unconstitutional’ (Giannacopoulos and Loughnan 2019)
Summary
Australia’s policy of offshore detention for asylum seekers who arrive by boat is a longstanding government directive. You could apply Foucault’s conceptualisation of power and control to understand how the political and popular discourses in Australia have attempted to normalise offshore detention, and the general acceptance among the Australian public of a government policy of deterrence and securitisation to those seeking asylum Moving beyond these techniques of control, disruption allows me to examine ways in which these governing structures can be disrupted and to what effect. I use ‘disruption’ to capture actions that challenge the dominant narratives, norms, and structures in relation to how the state engages with and presents refugees and asylum seekers This paper examines these notions in the context of a disruption framework, arguing that asylum seekers in Australia’s offshore detention centres can challenge such norms and constraints through their use of social media which attempts to normalise their mobility at the same time as questioning the exceptionalism placed on them by the structures and operations of the state
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