Report and deport: Public vigilance and migration policing in Australia

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Walsh

Recent escalations in migration control involve the criminalization of non-citizens. In assessing this punitive turn criminologists have highlighted drastic expansions in state sovereignty and coercion. Focusing on the Australian context, this article examines a less noticed trend: the civilianization of migration policing. To facilitate irregular migrants’ removal the government has created tip-lines that encourage private citizens to conduct surveillance and anonymously ‘dob-in’ or report unlawful non-citizens. Approaching the initiative as a distinct responsibilization strategy that enrolls the entire citizen body as policing agents, this article explores its instrumental and symbolic goals, whether expanding official gazes or restoring an exclusive sense of national citizenship. Assessing the functions and effects of public vigilance reveals important tensions and ambiguities within the responsibilization process. In particular the case of participatory surveillance demonstrates how ‘adaptive’ approaches to order maintenance are not external to, but potentially promote and perpetuate, punitive forms of sovereign power.

Author(s):  
Mary Bosworth

Since creating the Returns and Reintegration Fund in 2008, the British government has financed a variety of initiatives around the world under the rubric of “managing migration,” blurring the boundaries between migration control and punishment. This article documents and explores a series of overlapping case studies undertaken in Nigeria and Jamaica where the United Kingdom has funded prison building programs, mandatory prisoner transfer agreements, prison training programs, and resettlement assistance for deportees. These initiatives demonstrate in quite concrete ways a series of interconnections between criminal justice and migration control that are both novel and, in their postcolonial location, familiar. In their ties to international development and foreign policy, they also illuminate how humanitarianism allows penal power to move beyond the nation state, raising important questions about our understanding of punishment and its application.


Author(s):  
Sanja Milivojević

This chapter looks at the intersection of race, gender, and migration in the Western Balkans. Immobilizing mobile bodies from the Global South has increasingly been the focus of criminological inquiry. Such inquiry, however, has largely excluded the Western Balkans. A difficult place to research, comprising countries of the former Yugoslavia and Albania, the region is the second-largest route for irregular migrants in Europe (Frontex 2016). Indeed, EU expansion and global developments such as wars in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq have had a major impact on mobility and migration in the region. The chapter outlines racialized hierarchies in play in contemporary border policing in the region, and how these racialized and gendered practices target racially different Others and women irregular migrants and asylum seekers. Finally, this chapter maps the impact of such practices and calls for a shift in knowledge production in documenting and addressing such discriminatory practices.


In an era of mass mobility, those who are permitted to migrate and those who are criminalized, controlled, and prohibited from migrating are heavily patterned by race. By placing race at the centre of its analysis, this volume brings together fourteen essays that examine, question, and explain the growing intersection between criminal justice and migration control. Through the lens of race, we see how criminal justice and migration enmesh in order to exclude, stop, and excise racialized citizens and non-citizens from societies across the world within, beyond, and along borders. Neatly organized in four parts, the book begins with chapters that present a conceptual analysis of race, borders, and social control, moving to the institutions that make up and shape the criminal justice and migration complex. The remaining chapters are convened around the key sites where criminal justice and migration control intersect: policing, courts, and punishment. Together the volume presents a critical and timely analysis of how race shapes and complicates mobility and how racism is enabled and reanimated when criminal justice and migration control coalesce. Race and the meaning of race in relation to citizenship and belonging are excavated throughout the chapters presented in the book, thereby transforming the way we think about migration.


2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
Sarah M Hughes

Many accounts of resistance within systems of migration control pivot upon a coherent migrant subject, one that is imbued with political agency and posited as oppositional to particular forms of sovereign power. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the role of creativity within the UK asylum system, I argue that grounding resistance with a stable, coherent and agentic subject, aligns with oppositional narratives (of power vs resistance), and thereby risks negating the entangled politics of the (in)coherence of subject formation, and how this can contain the potential to disrupt, disturb or interrupt the practices and premise of the UK asylum system. I suggest that charity groups and subjects should not be written out of narratives of resistance apriori because they engage with ‘the state’: firstly, because to argue that there is a particular form that resistance should take is to place limits around what counts as the political; and secondly, because to ‘remain oppositional’ is at odds with an (in)coherent subject. I show how accounts which highlight a messy and ambiguous subjectivity, could be bought into understandings of resistance. This is important because as academics, we too participate in the delineation of the political and what counts as resistance. In predetermining what subjects, and forms of political action count as resistance we risk denying recognition to those within this system.


2021 ◽  
pp. 001041402110602
Author(s):  
David A. Steinberg

A burgeoning literature shows that international trade and migration shocks influence individuals’ political attitudes, but relatively little is known about how international financial shocks impact public opinion. This study examines how one prevalent type of international financial shock—currency crises—shapes mass political attitudes. I argue that currency crises reduce average citizens’ support for incumbent governments. I also expect voters’ concerns about their own pocketbooks to influence their response to currency crises. Original survey data from Turkey support these arguments. Exploiting exogenous variation in the currency’s value during the survey window, I show that currency depreciations strongly reduce support for the government. This effect is stronger among individuals that are more negatively affected by depreciation, and it is moderated by individuals’ perceptions of their personal economic situation. This evidence suggests that international financial shocks can strongly influence the opinions of average voters, and it provides further support for pocketbook theories.


2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 673-696 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Wilén ◽  
Paul D. Williams

AbstractIn December 2015, the African Union (AU) took the unprecedented step of threatening to use military force against the government of Burundi's wishes in order to protect civilians caught up in the country's intensifying domestic crisis. This article traces the background to this decision and analyses the effectiveness and credibility of the AU's use of coercive diplomacy as a tool of conflict management. After its usual range of conflict management tools failed to stem the Burundian crisis, the AU Commission and Peace and Security Council tried a new type of military compellence by invoking Article 4(h) of the Union's Constitutive Act. We argue that the threatened intervention never materialised because of (1) the Burundian government's astute diplomacy and (2) several African autocrats’ resistance to setting a precedent for future interventions where concerns about civilian protection might override state sovereignty.


1977 ◽  
Vol 17 (192) ◽  
pp. 111-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Zorgbibe

“Whenever a large organized group believes it has the right to resist the sovereign power and considers itself capable of resorting to arms, war between the two parties should take place in the same manner as between nations…” This statement by de Vattel in the 19th century seemed destined to take its place as a part of positive law, constituting part of what was known as recognition of belligerency, tantamount to the recognition by the established government of an equal status for insurgents and regular belligerents. When a civil war became extensive enough, the State attacked would understand that it was wisest to acknowledge the existence of a state of war with part of the population. This would, at the same time, allow the conflict to be seen in a truer light. The unilateral action of the legal government in recognizing belligerency would be the condition for granting belligerent rights to the parties. It would constitute a demonstration of humanity on the part of the government of the State attacked and would also provide that government with prospects for effective pursuit of the war. By admitting that it was forced to resort to war, it would at least have its hands free to make war seriously.


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