Operation Sovereign Borders Research Articles

Civil Society Silos

Abstract Operation Sovereign Borders imposes protracted precarity on people seeking asylum stuck in Australia on restrictive visas. Civil society actors form a movement offering them crucial support, filling a vacuum amplified by neoliberalized welfare. Drawing on fieldwork in Naarm (Melbourne), I provide an intersectional and ethnographic exploration of power dynamics within movements by examining the creation of “civil society silos” based on diverging claims to expertise. I identify and critically analyze five forms of movement expertise—professional, lived, societal, relational, and Indigenous—alongside my own production of research expertise. These forms encompass both an encroachment of racialized neoliberal logics into movement spaces and a channel to subvert bordering regimes. The findings in this article contribute to scholarship on the political potential of civil society movements in neoliberalized migration settings, and to widening definitions of expertise to include marginalized knowledges.

‘Preventing people from risking their lives at sea’: Forced migration and the securitization of asylum seekers in Australia

There has been a tremendous increase in the treatment of asylum seekers as security threats following the 9/11 attack. Australia represents an example of a country that perceives asylum seekers as a threat to the national sovereignty of the country, and this has further exacerbated a new dimension in the securitization of asylum seekers in the country. This securitization has culminated in a range of border security programmes, and Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB) represents the most recent of these. This article interrogates the OSB policy from the point of view of the rationale for its implementation. The article identifies that, contrary to the mission of the OSB, the detention of asylum seekers and the turn-back operations represent the variants of risks that asylum seekers are subjected to. The article therefore calls for a more accommodating approach in the treatment of asylum seekers in Australia.

Asylum Seeking, Border Security, Hope

AbstractAsylum seeking galvanises brutal state responses. The challenge of confronting the brutality of border security is understanding the elusive interlocking of knowledge and power that normalises technologies of securitisation, detention, and defiance of international conventions. In this paper we employ Marxist philosopher Ernest Bloch to interrogate the temporal horizon of border security discourse revealing the act of asylum seeking as a form of activism threatening breakthrough to an alternative future. In this analysis we expose discourses, such as Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders, as formations marked by temporal closure as much as by a specific imbrication of knowledge and power. Drawing on nine vignettes, we discern opposing versions of hope as people seeking asylum, politicians, activists, practitioners, and Australian citizens are enrolled into the diffuse and multifaceted global response to asylum seeking. We demonstrate differing temporalities distinguishing and advocating the overwhelming vision of hope in the act of asylum seeking itself.

People smuggling by a different name: Australia's ‘turnbacks’ of asylum seekers to Indonesia

ABSTRACT The decline in the smuggling of people from Indonesia to Australia since late 2013 is primarily attributable to unilateral deterrence policies under Australia's Operation Sovereign Borders. When seeking to prevent asylum seekers from coming to Australia to enjoy the right to asylum there, the Australian government has tested a number of deterrent mechanisms that sometimes border on illegality and even state crime. In May 2015, for example, Australian authorities intercepted an Indonesian boat carrying 65 asylum seekers and allegedly paid the six smugglers to return their passengers to Indonesia. In this article, we reconstruct what happened at sea, and put forward a number of arguments that categorise this ‘turnback’ as explicitly-commissioned people smuggling against Indonesia. Our article also points to further implications about looming risks if the policy was to be employed more widely by states in other areas of the world where people cross the sea to seek asylum. Not only would the practice severely undermine international collaborations that have developed to prevent and combat people smuggling, but it would also create additional safety risks for those who are turned back.

The Denial of Human Dignity in the Age of Human Rights under Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders

The Denial of Human Dignity in the Age of Human Rights under Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders J C Salyer (bio) In 2017, Mohammad was working in exchange for room and board at a small surf resort in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea (PNG). An Australian lawyer had made this arrangement for him so he could spend some time off of Manus Island, where he had been detained since attempting to reach Australia by boat from Indonesia to claim asylum. Four years earlier in Iran, Mohammad had been a university student who was politically active both by writing against the government and by participating in protests. When his father saw him on a television news broadcast attending a protest, he realized it was no longer safe for him in Iran, and at the age of twenty-five, he fled his home. Because, at that time, Iranians could obtain a visa on arrival in Indonesia, Mohammad went there and arranged to go to Australia by boat. His boat was intercepted by an Australian vessel on 23 July 2013, four days after the prime ministers of Australia and PNG signed the Regional Resettlement Agreement, which stipulated that Australia would refuse entry to asylum seekers who arrived by boat and instead send them to PNG. Under this policy and a similar agreement with Nauru, 3,127 asylum seekers were sent to Manus and Nauru as part of Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders (Amnesty International 2019). By January 2014, there were 1,353 people being detained at what the Australian and PNG governments called the Manus Regional Processing Centre at the Longbrum Navy Base on Manus Island, which had been an Australian naval base during the colonial period and became a PNG naval base after independence (Crowe 2019). How and why Manus Island became a cornerstone of Australian policy toward asylum seekers stems from the complex relationship between political economic dispossession and the biopolitical strategies and ideologies [End Page 512] that are used to justify global inequality and to relegate the wretched of the earth to spaces of exception. For the refugees and asylum seekers subject to the Regional Resettlement Agreement, how they are seen and described both by Australian policy and by people in PNG is not how they see themselves. As a result, not only are their material prospects sharply curtailed, their own subjective personhood is defined by narratives and assumptions not of their own making, and the aspects of their life that they see as most salient are ignored, erased, and denied (West, this issue). At the same time, the decision to use PNG as the site for the Regional Resettlement Agreement is premised on it being seen as a deterrent to future would-be asylum seekers, which requires PNG to be seen as a site of danger and despair. Since the detention center was opened in 2013, the people of Manus have had their home and themselves denigrated as dangerous and undesirable—a narrative deeply at odds with their perception of themselves (Dalsgaard and Otto, this issue). For both asylum seekers and Papua New Guineans, the narratives, images, and ideologies that have so substantively and materially affected their lives have their origins in broader narratives of fear. Sara Ahmed’s idea of affective economies describes how feelings and emotions are not properties innate to subjects or objects but rather circulate between subjects and objects so that the affective value of feelings and emotions get “stuck” to particular objects (2004). Particularly, Ahmed has shown how discourses around the category of asylum seeker circulate to create emotional responses of fear and hate toward individual asylum seekers as invaders, threats, and potential terrorists. Similarly, Paige West has shown how the dual image of “savage nature and savage native that derives from this nineteenth-century episteme endures today in the representational practices and rhetorical strategies that surround Papua New Guinea” and results in material dispossession and the denial of sovereignty (West 2016, 5). The siting of the Regional Resettlement Agreement in PNG links and magnifies both of these narratives and constructs both asylum seekers and Papua New Guineans as ontologically different kinds of people who are not entitled to the same sort of...

Is Australia's Transfer and Detention of Refugees to Camps in Manus and Nauru Legitimate?

Refugee Crisis is one of the global issues over recent years. The continuous increase in the number of refugees is distressfully alarming. According to the Global Trends report of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the world's population of refugees raised to 25.4 million at the end of 2017, out of which19.9 Million comes under the UNHCR mandate. Developing countries, despite economic instability, has hosted 85% of the refugees. Turkey, Pakistan, Uganda and Iran are the top four countries to host refugees, respectively. Whereas, on the contrary, Australia is the only country which is not only sceptical in hosting refugees but also, detain them on the offshore camps of Nauru and Manus and Christmas Island. The detention camps, where Human Rights abuses are at its peak. The objective of this essay is to investigate the reasons for the Australian white supremacy policies on the borders; as well as the legitimacy of transferring and detaining refugees to the offshore detention centres in the name of so-called operation sovereign borders. Also, exploring the mindset of inhuman treatment with the refugees as well as asylum seekers in the off-shore detention where the officials lack evidential justifications for such treatment; focusing mainly on the detention centres of Nauru and Manus.

Beyond the Horizon of the State: Listening to offshore detention’s longue durée

From the ‘stop the boats’ rhetoric of Operation Sovereign Borders to #KidsoffNauru and #BringThemHere to the 2018 Migration Amendment Bill (or ‘Medevac’ bill)—legal, discursive and temporal logics of crisis are used to both defend Australia’s border regime in the name of state securitisation and appeal to humanist calls for empathy and compassion. Yet the logic of crisis both obscures the ‘long emergencies of slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) of the settler-colonial carceral state, and renders disposable those whose lives endure beyond its shelter or under its duress. Responding this Special Issue’s call to consider the acoustics of justice, this essay aims to listen beyond crisis in response to the artwork how are you today (Manus Recording Project Collective, 2018), a collaboration between six men then detained on Manus Island, PNG, and three men in Melbourne. Parcelled out in eighty-four, ten-minute vignettes, the resulting fourteen-hour sound archive confounds expectations of what life in offshore detention might sound like. Focusing on attention, duration, and slowness, I suggest how are you today presses us to develop more sustained and situated ethics of attention—one oriented not towards empathy or compassion, but towards the more difficult, durational and justice-oriented listening (Thill 2018) needed to unsettle Australia’s settler colonial border regimes. Taken together, or heard collectively, the work invites us to listen beyond the horizon of the state to hear to the enduring-ness of life on Manus—the solitude and suffering, but also the sociality and solidarity—as well as the limits of what settler-colonial carceral logic and law can hear.

The Handling Impact Of Foreigners Seeking Protection According To Australian Policies And Its Impact On Indonesia

The existence of a conflict that occurs in a country makes the citizens of the country feel uncomfortable with their country so that some of them decide to run for protection. The flight has an influence on the State of Australia because it is one of the countries that are the destination countries for Asylum Seekers and so on. This then made the State of Australia make a policy in terms of maintaining sovereignty and fighting human rights crimes such as trafficking and people smuggling. The policy is Operation Sovereign Borders which turns out to experience a conflict harvest because it is not in accordance with the requirements of international law. The ratification of this policy aims at how to handle protection seekers in accordance with the requirements of International Law and law enforcement in the event of a violation based on the Operation Sovereign Borders policy. Writing KTI uses the normative juridical method. The specifications used are descriptive-analytic. Then the data used is secondary data. In its implementation, Operation Sovereign Borders is still inappropriate so that it violates the sovereignty of the Republic of Indonesia and violates the ethics of neighboring countries (good neighborliness), besides that it also violates the principles of international law contained in the 1952 Convention and instruments of International Human Rights (non-refoulement principle)

“I See Nothing but a Fence of Tears”: The Impact of Australia’s Immigration Detention and Border Protection Policies on the Asylum Seeker Child’s Geographies of Hope and Hopelessness

As a signatory to both the United Nation Refugee Convention and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Australia’s border protection policy to detain offshore asylum seekers who reach Australian borders by boat, including accompanied and unaccompanied minors, is under intense international scrutiny. In the context of Australia’s “Operation Sovereign Borders,” however, the asylum seeker child’s perspectives and their geographies of hope and hopelessness have not yet been fully explored. Drawing on recent literature within children’s geographies, which emphasizes the “emotional” matters within policy development and professional practice, and how they affect children, this paper seeks to contribute to emerging debates exploring borders, asylum seeker children, and children’s emotional geographies. Utilizing drawings, letters, and poems produced by children for an Australian Human Rights Commission’s National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention on Nauru, a child-centred approach was applied to privilege children’s own perspective of their indefinite internment. The primary focus of the paper is to emphasize the ways in which “the asylum seeker child” constructs their own emotional geographies within the inherently complex and restrictive context of Australia’s border protection policy.

Construction of risk in government advertising: A case study of Operation Sovereign Borders video advertisement

As a wide-spread perception of threat increases across a number of countries, risk management has become ever more prominent in the discourse of governments. The aim of this study is to examine the discursive construction of risk in an official federal Australian government video advertisement. Specifically, in the context of the large Operation Sovereign Border campaign, we use multimodal discourse analysis to show ways that seeks to deter irregular maritime arrival. Consistent with the social theories, our findings identify the discourse of governmentality to stress the role of individual self-regulation as well as technico-scientific discourse to highlight the value of expertise in controlling risk. Results of the study contribute to the use of multimodal discourse analysis in examining risk discourse within contemporary political contexts.

#LetThemStay#BringThemHere: Embodied politics, asylum seeking, and performativities of protest opposing Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders

The body is the object of border protection. Yet the body remains largely outside reigning notions of the political in debates on bordering practices and challenges to it. Exploring what bodies do in their performativity as they negotiate and resist the securitisation of forced migration can open up new ways of understanding the disruptive potential of the body. In this paper, I draw on Judith Butler’s seminal work on contingency and norms of existence, along with her musings on forms of assembly, and recent feminist scholarship on social movements, to think through what the #LetThemStay and #BringThemHere protests in Australia might signal as advocates for those seeking asylum put their bodies on the line to disrupt the federal government’s border protection policy – Operation Sovereign Borders. While people seeking asylum themselves are at the bodily forefront of opposition and resistance – their bodies and bodily tactics negotiating border enforcement technologies – it is the bodily performativities of advocates for those seeking asylum that are the focus of this paper. The paper describes the way linguistic and bodily performativity coalesce in these performativities of protest as advocates embody the sociality being asserted. By making explicit the embodied politics at play in these forms of assembly, I explore the transformative potential of the body in its myriad capacities adding to long-standing feminist calls for a ‘corporeal geopolitics’ in political geography, one that centres the already existing politics of bodies.

NEEDED TO REGIONAL COOPERATION TO COMBAT PEOPLE SMUGGLING IN INDONESIAN WATERS

People smuggling is a growing global crime that exposes thousands of migrants to unacceptable risks and challenges the integrity of international borders. In the last two decades, globalization and conflicts have seen an increase international migration flows. People smuggling is not a new phenomenon in Indonesia. It has developed steadily over the last 10 years in response to the increased demands of asylum seekers and refugees attempting to reach Australia by boat. Among the convicted people smuggling organizers are a number of rejected asylum seekers who stayed on in Indonesia for years. Some smugglers are former refugees but now hold Australian citizenship, granted to them after regular resettlement. Indonesia recorded nine boat accidents involving 728 asylum seekers in 2012, while in the following year the number rose to 23 involving 615 victims. Operation Sovereign Borders and they turn-back-the-boats policy from Australia, from December 2013 to March 2014, there were seven occurrences of boats being turned back to Indonesian waters. The result of research show that first, Indonesian government need regional cooperation to handling treated people smuggling in Indonesian waters. Regional cooperation would be a win-win solution for both countries. And second, the regional cooperation should be in line with prevailing Indonesian legislation

Needed to Regional Cooperation to Combat People Smuggling in Indonesian Waters

People smuggling is a growing global crime that exposes thousands of migrants to unacceptable risks and challenges the integrity of international borders. In the last two decades, globalization and conflicts have seen an increase international migration flows. People smuggling is not a new phenomenon in Indonesia. It has developed steadily over the last 10 years in response to the increased demands of asylum seekers and refugees attempting to reach Australia by boat. Among the convicted people smuggling organizers are a number of rejected asylum seekers who stayed on in Indonesia for years. Some smugglers are former refugees but now hold Australian citizenship, granted to them after regular resettlement. Indonesia recorded nine boat accidents involving 728 asylum seekers in 2012, while in the following year the number rose to 23 involving 615 victims. Operation Sovereign Borders and they turn-back-theboats policy from Australia, from December 2013 to March 2014, there were seven occurrences of boats being turned back to Indonesian waters. The result of research show that first, Indonesian government need regional cooperation to handling treated people smuggling in Indonesian waters. Regional cooperation would be a win-win solution for both countries. And second, the regional cooperation should be in line with prevailing Indonesian legislation.

Walking Borders: Explorations of Aesthetics in Ephemeral Arts Activism for Asylum Seeker Rights

Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders vehemently enforces closed borders to asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia. Policed urban borders were enforced in Brisbane, Australia, during the G20 Summit in 2014, to protect visiting dignitaries from potential violent protest. The ephemeral arts intervention Walking Borders: Arts activism for refugee and asylum seeker rights symbolically confronted border politics by peacefully protesting against Australian immigration policy. Rather than focusing on the direct effects of the ephemeral arts intervention, this article attends to the affective workings of the aesthetic elements of the project through sensory ethnography and storying. Informed by Ranciere’s aesthetics of politics, this article explores the affective experience and potential educative gains of the ethical turn attended to in participatory arts such as ephemeral arts interventions.

VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW BY THE GOVERNMENT OF AUSTRALIA IN PRACTICE OF TURN BACK THE BOAT MANAGEMENT POLICY FOR ASYLUM SEEKERS

Conflicts in several countries in Asia resulted in increasing number of refugees and asylum seekers. The need for protection and a decent life makes them willing to take any way to get protection in other countries, including by being illegal migrants. Australia, as a destination country for asylum seekers, imposed Operation Sovereign Borders by intercepting and returning ships carrying asylum seekers to protect the border while reducing the rate of illegal migrants coming into the country. In practice, this policy violates various provisions of international law, namely the principle of non-refoulement, human rights law, SAR obligation, the handling of migrant smuggling and violations of Indonesia sovereignty.

Limited Resettlement and Ongoing Uncertainty: responses to and experiences of people seeking asylum in Australia and Indonesia

In the wake of the Coalition Government’s narrow victory in the first Australian election since the adoption of policies known as Operation Sovereign Borders, this special edition of Cosmopolitan Civil Societies focuses its attention on the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers . It explores some of the experiences of people both in Australia and Indonesia who are seeking a life of safety, as well as the responses of civil society groups and governments, following the commencement of policies that have vastly reduced the opportunities for refugee resettlement in Australia.

Introduction: Trans/formation and the graphic novel

In early 2014, the Australian government’s Department for Immigration and Border Protection launched a controversial graphic novel on their website, directed against those intending to enter the country “illegally”. Titled using simple, brutal phrasing carrying ironic echoes of lazy anti-Australian stereotyping, No Way was a wordless 18-page comic discouraging potential immigrants. Although there has since been a change of Australian Premier (in September 2015, Malcolm Turnbull replaced Tony Abbott, who had been outspoken in his opposition to “the boats” a metonymical reference to those entering the country by sea [Abbott 2013], the campaign around No Way – the ominously named “Operation Sovereign Borders” – remains active. This says much about the Australian people’s capacity for consuming anti-immigration rhetoric, but it is not only Australians who think like this. As has been clear in a range of responses to the recent refugee crises in North Africa and Europe – from the output of global news networks to the content of numerous internet comment sections – attitudes towards migrant peoples have seen a steady hardening in the face of perceived increasing threats to personal and financial security in the west: from the “War on Terror” to the “credit crunch”.

Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders: Discourse, Power, and Policy from a Crimmigration Perspective: Table 1.

This article examines the role of discourse in Australia’s current border control policy, “Operation Sovereign Borders”. From a crimmigration perspective, it examines how discourse contributes to the dichotomous understanding of crimmigration as combining “loud panicking” and “quiet manoeuvring”. A Critical Discourse Analysis is applied, thereby examining not only the discourse at a textual level, but also how the discursive setting and the socio–political context influence the effects of discourse. The results show that Operation Sovereign Borders focuses on border protection and securitization through a “strong and consistent” deterrence policy. It creates “loud panic” vis-à-vis crimmigrant others and draws border securitization into the field of administrative immigration control. Immigrants are distinguished on the basis of their mode of transportation, creating an image of a homogeneous crimmigrant group of illegal and non-deserving boat migrants buying places from human traffickers. Through offshore processing and a dominant discourse, the Australian Government is simultaneously able to “quietly manoeuvre”, thereby leaving little room for alternative discourses or critiques. Discourse thus plays a pivotal role in creating “loud panic” and in enabling “quiet manoeuvring”, which are much more interwoven and mutually reinforcing than sometimes suggested. This fosters the Government’s ability to effectively implement restrictive immigration measures.

Die Ökonomie des ausbeuterischen Transits. Lebensbedingungen von Migrantinnen und Asylsuchenden in Indonesien und Libyen

The economics of exploitative transit: conditions for migrants and refugees in Indonesia and Libya. Abstract Faced with increasingly restrictive border protection measures, such as Australia’s “Operation Sovereign Borders” and externalised border controls in “Fortress Europe”, more asylum seekers and refugees attempt to reach their destinations by unauthorised means. Smuggling networks, funds to pay for journeys, and access to transit sites where onward passage can be negotiated, are critical to the success of irregular migration. This article explores access to transit sites by comparing Indonesia and Libya – two key transit locations for people seeking to reach Australia and Italy respectively. It investigates practices in such sites and focuses on the exploitation of transit migrants, especially on the economic benefit they bring to smugglers, corrupt officials, and locals. Through analysis of the unintended consequences of border protection measures, it argues that while the economics of exploitative transit are unique to each country, in both Indonesian and Libya they operate to encourage informal networks that prey on transit migrants. Increased understanding of the economics of exploitative transit should help ensure a more protective environment for transit migrants, one that reduces their reliance on irregular means and the risk of getting stuck in unsafe environments. If the reality of exploitative transit is acknowledged, steps can be taken to reduce reliance on transit sites. Keywords: transit migration, Indonesia, Libya, exploitation, border protection ----- Schlagworter: Transitmigration, Indonesien, Libyen, Ausbeutung, Grenzschutz ----- Bibliographie: Missbach, Antje/Phillips, Melissa: Die Okonomie des ausbeuterischen Transits. Lebensbedingungen von Migrantinnen und Asylsuchenden in Indonesien und Libyen, PERIPHERIE, 2-2015, S. 170-192. https://doi.org/10.3224/peripherie.v35i138-139.24295

The Embrace of Border Security: Maritime Jurisdiction, National Sovereignty, and the Geopolitics of Operation Sovereign Borders

Border security has become one of the key means by which the sovereignty and security of powerful nation-states is projected. This paper offers a set of observations of the Australian Commonwealth’s descriptions and instructions for its embrace of border security. Border security is legible here as a geopolitics that transforms the rights and responsibilities of maritime jurisdictions into a space of security that projects national sovereignty through the interdiction of boat arrivals. Its intensification as Operation Sovereign Borders is read as a further variation within national sovereignty, one that elevates the decisionist prerogative into total deterrence. Operation Sovereign Borders pushes the limits of sovereignty’s existence in the state toward a total domination of space, perception and human life in Australia’s maritime jurisdictions, in the name of the nation. This necessitates the development, defence and reinforcement of a regionally engaged materiality that is embodied, extended, enacted, and distributed. The intended effect of this coordinated effort is to secure the nation’s sovereignty as a unity, but the broader effect has been to devalue offshore life to secure onshore interests, in a way that now necessitates indefinite offshore detention.