Freedom on a Thread: Living in limbo as part of the Australian “asylum legacy caseload”

Abstract

This thesis is an anthropology of policy, specifically, it is an examination of recent iterations of Australian asylum seeker policy. The contribution made through this thesis is to move beyond portraying the ‘suffering’ of refugee marginalisation, to examine how contested interpretations of international human rights statutes in national legislative and policy contexts, work to create refugee marginalisation.As an anthropology of policy, this thesis examines recent iterations of Australian asylum-seeker policy and legislation. Between 2011 and 2013, over 36,000 asylum-seeking people arrived in Australia ‘irregularly’ by boat. In contrast to refugee reception in 1970s Australia, policy towards ‘unauthorised maritime arrivals’ has become increasingly punitive, its latest iteration being refugee processing known as ‘fast track’, with key international human rights obligations removed from its processes.There has not yet been in-depth analysis of the impacts of ‘fast track’ refugee processing on asylum-seeking people. Nor has there been examination of how earlier policy iterations feed into ‘fast track’ processing.  Reviews of European refugee and asylum seeker policy have been conceptualised as ‘structurally violent’ and ‘necropolitical’: keeping people in policy ‘death-worlds’ of refugee limbo to discourage further forced migration. However, I argue that such conceptualisations obscure asylum-seeking and refugee people’s responses to policy constraints. This multi-sited study examines the intersectional complexities of ‘fast track’, accompanying people who must go through its processes, recording how they negotiate such policy.The contribution of this thesis is threefold. In examining the provenance of ‘fast track’ refugee processing, policy and legislation are understood as social creations curated by governments, with an eye to their electoral survival, with contesting visions of the role of the nation state and its global standing. Second, a legislative and policy focus moves beyond ‘refugee suffering’, to observe asylum-seeking and refugee people ‘speaking back’ to policy. Third, in exploring the impacts of legislation and policy, research uses storied conglomerations to safely describe strategies and tactics employed by people undergoing ‘fast track’ refugee processing. By focusing on the refugee processing of ‘fast track’, this study thus provides safer, more ethical methods of contributing anthropological research to examine refugee and asylum-seeker issues.   With unprecedented levels of displaced people worldwide, it is timely to examine such policies as they begin to be adopted elsewhere. The findings provide a nuanced, evidence-based contribution to help inform future refugee and asylum-seeker policy in Australia, and beyond.