‘Let’s not be afraid to sort them out’: analysing Australia’s carceral representations of RAMSI

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) was an Australian-led and largely Australian-funded state-building project, which included the strengthening of the police force and state bureaucracy and which took place over a 14-year window from 24 July 2003 to 30 June 2017. A few months beforehand, former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer argued that the deployment of Australian troops to the Solomon Islands would be unjustifiable to Australian taxpayers and likely resented in the region. In this article, I argue that RAMSI became thinkable and legitimate through representations of Solomon Islands in Australian political discourse and media during the mission’s early years (2003–2007) which depended on carceral and colonial logics of containment, control and intervention. The credibility of RAMSI depended on the existence of a perpetrator of violence to be contained and innocents to be saved. These representations reproduce colonial constructs of the dangerous, racialised Other and depend on the carceral assumption that criminality is an individual aberration or failure, rather than one which is socially, culturally and historically produced. These discourses have carceral effects as they contribute to the naturalisation of policing and (neo)colonial control as solutions to social and economic problems.