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.

Following the Pipeline

Abstract Contributing to the fields of eco- and petro-criticism, this article argues for significant connections in the Arabic novel between fantastical and uncanny aesthetics, on the one hand, and ecological awareness and energy anxiety on the other. Moving from nation-based comparisons, in recognition of how energy ecologies similarly traverse sovereign borders, it does so through Iraqi author Fāḍil al-ʿ⁠Azzāwī’s Ākhir al-malāʾikah (1992) and the Palestinian Imīl Ḥabībī’s Sarāyā, bint al-ghūl (1991). Set at either end of the Kirkuk-Haifa oil pipeline, in their authors’ home cities, these novels were completed within a few weeks of one another, during the first months of the petroleum-driven Gulf War (1990–1991), to which they allude. Through phantoms, jinn, angels, and zombies, they dramatize the emotional, environmental, and social disturbances of petro-modernity.

Governing the Extraterritorial: Global Environmentalities of China’s Green Belt and Road Initiative

This article proposes a global environmentality framework to critique efforts to “green” the Belt and Road Initiative (or Green BRI) by examining the Chinese state’s environmental governance of extraterritorial spaces. The article transcends a focus within governmentality studies on domestic processes to reveal the relations between governance techniques and environmental subjects, including state and nonstate actors, beyond sovereign borders. Drawing on interviews, observations, and analysis of policies and reports, we identify three ways in which global environmentalities operate and are negotiated through the Green BRI. First, the Chinese state is embracing international sustainable development criteria to gain global legitimacy while seeking to export its domestic environmental governance model, making the Green BRI a dialectic policy. Second, the state is targeting and disciplining BRI participants, including Chinese financial institutions, construction companies, the renewable industry, and foreign state actors in BRI countries. Third, Chinese and BRI partner country participants’ variegated subjectivities arise out of the negotiation of their own interests, Chinese state interests, and BRI host country concerns. Our analysis contributes to understanding of how China, as a rising power, engages in global environmental governance and produces extraterritorial environmental subjects.

Balanced Security and Humanity: an Analysis of Australian Policies in Handling of Boat People and Its Impact on Indonesia

The rise of Boat People arriving in Australia made the Australian government issue a policy called a policy Operation Sovereign Border, the policy is a policy used to deal with asylum seekers by preventing and expelling asylum seekers. This policy reaped controversy because it violated the provisions of international law. This legal writing analyzes how efforts to deal with boat people and their rights and obligations according to international law as well as the influence of Australian policies in dealing with boat people and the impact of Australian policies on Indonesia. This research uses a normative juridical method which is carried out through a literature study with a statutory, historical approach, and conceptual. Australia has also ratified the 1951 Convention which has become the basis of international law for refugees, and has also regulated the protection of refugees and has become a reference for many countries in developing their refugee laws and policies. Australia's policy on preventing migration by boat has several significant effects, such as: (1) Reducing the number of migrants via; (2) Impact on the people smuggling business; (3) controversies and issues of human rights; and (4) Regional effects.

Contested worldmaking from ‘above’ and ‘below’: Bordered spaces and bordered subjects in search of asylum

Based on extensive field research with forced migrants who are living precarious lives in Indonesia while their refugee claims are assessed by UNHCR, the following article considers both the political construction and maintenance of so-called asylum-seeker ‘transit’ countries and the everyday experiences of forced migrants immobilised within them. In doing so, the article draws attention to the worldmaking power of borders and bordering practices that operate from both above, within, and below the state, sustaining transit migration as a global phenomenon. It is argued that transit states like Indonesia are co-constituted through both domestic bordering arrangements and the exclusionary migration agenda pursued by the Global North, focused on the diversion of potential asylum-seekers before they reach the sovereign border. The lack of formal reception policies, societal protections, and durable solutions in these transit spaces to which they are diverted further marginalises already vulnerable populations creating worlds defined by differentiated subjectivities and neglect. Yet worldmaking is not solely conceptualized as a tool wielded by powerful actors implemented from the top-down, rather it is understood as a multidirectional process. Drawing on Troeung's concept of refugee worldmaking, which she defines as ‘the reparative acts of creativity that refugees deploy to remake themselves and their worlds’ (2021:53), the article also considers some of the ways forced migrants contest their exclusion in Indonesia, developing emancipatory strategies capable of reshaping the everyday experiences of displacement and thus calling attention to the contested nature of these spaces.

The boundaries of the carceral state: Accounting for the role of military incarceration

This article extends the study of carceral expansion—currently encompassing criminal, civil, and immigration enforcement—by examining the role of military (and, within that, extraterritorial) incarceration. Drawing on the case of military incarceration of civilians in Israel/Palestine, which since 1967 has accounted for between one-third and one-half of the entire prisoner population, it demonstrates the consolidation of a single carceral apparatus that normalizes military detention and incorporates non-citizens detained in extraterritorial locations. Involving both institutional and spatial dimensions, the article illuminates how the boundaries of the carceral state are relatively independent of formal sovereign borders, legal categories, and institutional arrangements, identifying the military as a carceral state agency. The study thus suggests a framework for an integrated study that accounts for the actual scope of the carceral state and its paradoxical modes of exclusionary inclusion.

ГЕОПОЛІТИЧНА ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКА КРАЇН АФРИКАНСЬКОГО РОГУ

B a c k g r o u n d . The article provides a description of the Horn of Africa and examines recent security transformations for a number of states in the region. The Horn of Africa is a strategically important region for African and global trade and security. The organization of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development is the main platform for the settlement of complex interstate relations for the countries of the region. M e t h o d s . The following methods were used: analytical, historical, generalization. During the research, the authors relied on the principle of objectivism. R e s u l t s . In the region of the Horn of Africa, intense rivalry and competition between states is observed, which does not contribute to the consolidation and solution of security challenges, and as a result to the economic growth of the region as a whole. Numerous conflicts both within individual states of the Horn of Africa and between them undermine the stability of the region. Competition for the influence of extra regional powers also does not contribute to the consolidation of the states of the Horn of Africa. C o n c l u s i o n s . The conflictogenicity of the Horn of Africa develops according to the "spillover" effect, which emphasizes the interdependence of the security situation of the states of the region. Conflicts developing in different states of the region have a tendency to spread beyond the sovereign borders of the countries and have an impact on the destabilization of other states of the region. In particular, the long-term conflict in Somalia is affecting the destabilization of neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia. The conflicts in Sudan affect the security situation in South Sudan and Ethiopia, etc.

Space, nature and hierarchy: the ecosystemic politics of the Caspian Sea

The Anthropocene has given rise to growing efforts to govern the world’s ecosystems. There is a hitch, however, ecosystems do not respect sovereign borders; hundreds traverse more three states and thus require complex international cooperation. This article critically examines the political and social consequences of the growing but understudied trend towards transboundary ecosystem cooperation. Matchmaking the new hierarchy scholarship in International Relations (IR) and political geography, the article theorises how ecosystem discourse embodies a latent spatially exclusive logic that can bind together and bound from outside unusual bedfellows in otherwise politically awkward spaces. We contend that such ‘ecosystemic politics’ can generate spatialised ‘broad hierarchies’ that cut across both Westphalian renderings of space and the latent post-colonial and/or material inequalities that have hitherto been the focus of most of the new hierarchies scholarship. We illustrate our argument by conducting a multilevel longitudinal analysis of how Caspian Sea environmental cooperation has produced a broad hierarchy demarking and sharpening the boundaries of the region, become symbolic of Caspian in-group competence and neighbourliness, and used as a rationale for future Caspian-shaped cooperation. We reason that if ecosystemic politics can generate new renderings of space amid an otherwise heavily contested space as the Caspian, further research is warranted to explore systemic hierarchical consequences elsewhere.

How Far Can Chicken Feet Travel?

Abstract This article analyses Chinese women's e-entrepreneurship of trading nostalgic and/or contested goods in the disputed sovereign borders and virtual marketplace in the borderland between China and Taiwan. Using physical and digital ethnography, and drawing on the case study of the journey of chicken feet and other goods traded through WeChat by Chinese women in Taiwan, this article shows how the online and offline trails of these goods and the virtual marketplace generate new forms of transnationalism and connectedness between the two rivaling societies. Calling attention to Chinese women's emotions and nostalgia embedded in their e-entrepreneurship, their goods’ geographical movements, and their social networks, these findings enrich our understanding of transnational entrepreneurship as well as migrants’ agency-making and digital connectivity. However, highlighting how the worsening Taiwan-China relationship has diminished micro e-entrepreneurship, this article also reveals the vulnerability, instability, and uncertainty of the virtual marketplace, which is threatened by the politics of sovereignty contestation.

Review: Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks

Review: <i>Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks</i>

Contested administrative capacity in border management: China and the Greater Mekong Subregion

This article investigates China’s efforts to develop the administrative capacity of its border agents to effectively provide border security. It does so by contextualizing national efforts in relevant multilateral cooperation on border and immigration management. Regional frameworks such as ASEAN and Greater Mekong Subregion follow a regional border management approach that challenges Beijing’s notion of sovereign border management. However, China and the border provinces selectively engage in cross-border cooperation. These cooperation projects include training programmes for immigrants, standardizing and facilitating immigration procedures at the border, joint efforts against human trafficking and illicit border mobilities, and enhancing local cross-border relations. Against this background, this article investigates how norms – such as administrative capacity and cooperation through border liaison mechanisms – are negotiated, adapted, and practised in the different regional organizations, as well as how they are implemented locally in national immigration laws and procedures in Yunnan Province. The analysis builds on a multi-method approach including fieldwork, policy, and institutional analysis. The article finds that while Chinese local and regional security interests are closely intertwined, norm dynamics are not.

Global health diplomacy and North Korea in the COVID-19 era

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed increasing global inequality in responding to the issues of health. How do we resolve the tension between normative concerns for global responsibility and strategic concerns for national interest in facilitating health aid to vulnerable populations in low-income countries in the COVID-19 era? This article presents global health diplomacy as a conceptual framework that could overcome the dichotomy of humanitarianism and international politics, using health aid to North Korea during COVID-19 as a case-study. Health is a critical component of human dignity and can be a normative motivation for cooperation beyond sovereign borders. However, health is also an important element of national interest and can be a strategic motivation for transnational cooperation. The overlap between the moral and rational spaces in global health diplomacy demonstrates how COVID-19 assistance to North Korea's vulnerable population is in the enlightened self-interest of donors to prevent resurgences of new COVID-19 variants. Moreover, this framework imbues all parties, including aid recipients such as North Korea, with the global cooperative responsibility to address health. In this sense, global health diplomacy can reframe the tensions between humanitarianism and politics, morality and rationality, and cosmopolitanism and nationalism, from antithetical to complementary.

Політичний простір угорської нації: ресурс споріднених діаспор

The article presents the process of reformatting the practices of national development through an expanded interpretation of the endogenous political space of the national community. It is noted that the EU spatial strategies have a significant impact on the revision of the priorities of regional development of modern states, which, seeking to ensure the sustainable development of their own political systems, turn to the socio-political capital of related foreign diasporas and border regions. In the context of the spatial revolution and the recognition of the actual political space as a constructed system, the nationalpolitical space acquires the characteristics of a flexible network system where new practices of national cohesion are formed, which are not limited by the sovereign borders of the state.&nbsp;An example of the transformation of the process of national cohesion in Hungary is presented, which involves the incorporation of related foreign diasporas of Southern Slovakia, Transylvania, Vojvodina and Transcarpathia into a single socio-political system without revision of state borders. The socio-political development of Hungarian diasporas abroad is managed centrally through state institutions and programs. On the example of the creation of an extensive network of Hungarian political parties and NGOs within the socio-cultural spaces of the Hungarian diasporas, the process of building a system of autonomous projects along the perimeter of the borders of Hungary is shown, through which it seeks to modernize its own national doctrine by providing it with a transnational component. Hungarian policy considers Hungarian communities as a resource that can provide a political transit for the national doctrine, which provides a modern component of the ethno-national idea, and makes it possible to respond to the spatial transformations of the EU.

‘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.

Border dialectics and the border multiple

Questions related to hybridity, creolization, and the porosity of cultural forms have long concerned anthropologists. More often than not, these issues have been explored at sites within the boundaries of national cultural spaces even when those sites are multiplied to achieve a transnational scope that spills over nation-state borders. Looking at the clash of American migrant interdiction agents and Haitian smugglers in the northern Caribbean, this article shifts focus away from the insides of territorial units and aims to illuminate the entanglements that emerge in the often hyperregimented spaces of the sovereign border itself—as distinguishable from the more amorphous spaces of the borderlands. In these interstitial seams of the global system of nation-states, one finds an ontological multiplicity but also an oppositional dynamism that sheds light on the possibility of emergent formations within this and other sites of highly contentious border confrontations.

Territorial Presence As A Ground For Claims: Some Reflections

"Territorial Presence As A Ground For Claims: Some Reflections" returns to political theory to assess the moral and legal position of those individuals who are inside the territory of liberal democratic states, but whose very presence has been unauthorised by the state. The author asks the question as to what their bodily presence means and does from a political perspective. The paper is part of a broader political phenomenology of territoriality in liberal national thought and puts emphasis on the idea that it is migrants’ bodily presence within the state’s territory that lies at the analytical heart of the conversation about irregular immigrants. What is paradoxical about territorial presence of unauthorised migrants is that such presence is simultaneously (1) the source of the offence states invoke as a justification for making them ‘illegal’; (2) the basis for protections the migrants may claim against the state for basic fair treatment while present; and (3) the ground for claims they make (or are made on their behalf) to remain present – i.e., to stay in the territory. Territorial presence is thus a fertile ground for the analysis of arbitrary law-making in migration. The author sets out to analyse some recent legal developments pertaining to the governance of irregular non-citizen immigrants in the United States. These developments bear on the project of theorising "immigrant justice" as resistance to the growing illiberalization of migration policy. In her view, the very existence of a class of people designated as irregular migrants within state polities presupposes that such polities maintain formal exclusionary border regimes and that in such regimes, some persons are predesignated as ineligible for entry. And even though those exclusion rules do not function to fully preclude entry and presence of such persons, states do not treat their arrival as an automatic basis for full membership either. Hence, irregular immigrants are territorially present in a state that purports to eschew that presence. The author then explores how the idea of “sanctuary” relates to the kinds of claims that both liberal humanitarians and immigrant justice advocates have been making over the last few years. These are claims which ground protection in what exponents cite as the overriding ethical significance of immigrants’ territorial presence – their already-hereness – as the basis for recognition and rights. In particular, the author makes the case that even though "sanctuary" provides a logic of safe harbour, it fails to end the predicament of constitutive based in border exclusionism. For her, the political, social, but also philosophical, struggle for the idea of border abolitionism requires a figurative sword that must go beyond sanctuary so that borders are not just mitigated, but radically deconstructed and even destroyed. The author takes this to be the vital imperative that confronts all legal and political theorists who must engage the normative challenge of rethinking arbitrary law-making in view of the new inequalities that a global political order grounded on sovereign borders produces.

Liminal sovereignty practices: Rethinking the inside/outside dichotomy

Sovereignty is the core concept of international relations. Almost without exception, approaches to sovereignty in IR have followed a binary framing where sovereignty is seen to consist of two components: ‘internal’ versus ‘external’ sovereignty, ‘positive’ versus ‘negative’ sovereignty, and so on. These dichotomies stem from the prevailing understanding of sovereignty as the boundary between the inside and the outside of the state. This article builds on and expands these existing approaches by reconceptualizing the sovereign border line as a liminal border space. Relatedly, we theorize the concept of liminality in greater depth by distinguishing between four distinct kinds of liminality: marginal, hybrid, interstitial, and external. Each of these problematizes the dividing line of sovereignty in unique but comparable ways. We empirically illustrate these four kinds of liminality with reference to contested states, ‘tribal’ or ‘indigenous’ groups, NGOs such as Amnesty International, and extremist groups such as ISIS, respectively. Each of these types of liminality entails unique actors, practices, and consequences for the concept of sovereignty. We suggest that liminal sovereignty practices represent the most radical source of change for the concept of sovereignty, yet at the same time, somewhat counterintuitively, they also serve as the best means of clarifying existing, established meanings and practices of sovereignty.

Mobile sovereignty: The case of ‘boat people’ in Australia

State sovereignty, in terms of the organisation and expression of political authority by nation states, is traditionally interpreted as a political container that is being weakened by increasing human and non-human mobilities. However recent research indicates that states are themselves becoming more mobile as executive bodies move and sovereign spaces are tactically reduced and expanded to intercept and control global mobilities. While challenging dichotomous notions of mobility and sovereignty, such research frames the movements of governments, territory and sovereign agents as the tactics of already established states. This paper builds on extant research by drawing on both a mobile ontology and Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty to examine how mobilities constitute modern state sovereignty. To do so I examine Australian sovereignty and the related material and symbolic exclusion of asylum seekers arriving by boat. My analysis finds that mobilities, in terms of material movements and their representation, are essential to the construction of Australian sovereignty and the position of maritime asylum seekers as its outsider and limit identity. Through their mobile interception and management, and their representation as mobile ‘others’, maritime asylum seekers are used to create sovereign borders between specific types of movement; between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ (im)mobilities. I argue that this form of state sovereignty is disarticulated from space and follows populations who construct territories as being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of the Australian state as they move.

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.