International Refugee Law in Crisis: Islands, Incarceration and Neo-Refoulement during COVID-19

Attempts by states to deter refugee movement have evolved to a point that routine and systematic breach of non-refoulement and associated human rights frequently constitutes a central pillar in their asylum architectures. The expansion of state policies and practices under which people seeking asylum are prevented from reaching safe places and lodging asylum claims has accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on examples from Australia and Europe, this article uses neo-refoulement—a concept introduced by geographers Jennifer Hyndman and Alison Mountz—to signal not only the rise in pushbacks at land and sea borders, but also practices that occur well within the boundaries of sovereign territory. These include the use of island incarceration, fast-track border procedures, and denial of legal presence on sovereign territory, even where physical presence is achieved. Such measures have often been introduced under the pretext of responding to situations of ‘mass influx’. And yet, far from providing an adequate response to a so-called ‘refugee crisis’, they serve only to facilitate a greater humanitarian crisis.

The Influence of Corporate Universities on the Formation of the Competitive Advantages of Higher Education in the Russian Federation

Competitive advantages predetermine the success of the implementation of the tasks assigned to higher educational institutions that have developed under the influence of the globalization of the world economic space. Using the experience of corporate universities in the work of state and non-state educational institutions of higher education will improve the quality of educational processes, as well as the integration of theory into the practice of producing socio-economic systems. This process will increase the economic security of the sovereign territory, as well as the success of higher education adaptation to new challenges that have arisen as a result of the socio-economic crisis that arose as a consequence of the pandemic. The introduction of new educational standards in the field of higher education creates new tasks for the entire system of higher education in Russia. The experience of corporate education in foreign countries is invaluable in planning an effective strategy for the development of educational processes in our territory.

A Secret War in the Mediterranean

This chapter recounts thirty coordinated attacks and bombings that took place in Algiers on 1 November 1954, in which seven people were killed and five of them were white colonists (pied-noir). It analyzes the statement of French Prime Minister Mendes that there should be no compromise when it came to the integrity of the sovereign territory of the republic after France had suffered a terrible defeat in Indochina. It also mentions the peasant army of the brilliant Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap that captured 11,000 French troops after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. The chapter talks about thirty-eight-year-old Ahmed Ben Bella, who stood out among the top leaders of FLN, a socialist party founded in Switzerland. It investigates the French counterintelligence and executive illegal groups that was used to solve the Algerian question with counterterror all over Europe.

'Boat People' and Discursive Bordering: Australian Parliamentary Discourses on Asylum Seekers, 1977-2013

This article draws upon content analysis of Australian parliamentary transcripts to examine debates about asylum seekers who arrived by boat in three historical periods: 1977–1979, 1999–2001, and 2011–2013. We analyze term frequency and co-occurrence to identify patterns in specific usage of the phrase “boat people.” We then identify how the term is variously deployed in Parliament and discuss the relationship between these uses and government policy and practice. We conclude that forms of “discursive bordering” have amplified representations of asylum seekers as security threats to be controlled within and outside Australia’s sovereign territory. The scope of policy or legislative responses to boat arrivals is limited by a poverty of political language, thus corroborating recent conceptual arguments about the securitization and extra-territorialization of the contemporary border.

Modern Threats to the National Security of Ukraine Related to Incomplete Legal Formalization Process of Ukrainian State Border

The border issue has become particularly urgent for Ukraine since 2014 with the beginning of military aggression by the Russian Federation, the illegal annexation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sebastopol, as well as the temporary occupation of the part of Ukraine's sovereign territory in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The problem of the legal formalization of the Ukrainian-Russian state border requires closer examination in the context of complex relations between two states. This article seeks to analyze the current situation of legal formalization of the Ukrainian state border with neigh bouring countries and highlights the main threats to Ukraine's national security arising from the incomplete process of formalizing the Ukrainian state border with the Russian Federation. It was revealed that the incomplete process of legal formalization of the state border threatened to lose the state part of sovereignty, territorial integrity in sovereign territory. It is concluded that there is a potential threat of escalation of border conflicts and military clashes in Ukraine's border regions, as well as at Ukraine's borders, and the spread of extremist, terrorist, and separatist demonstrations on Ukraine's state border.

Jurisdiction and Justiciability

This chapter describes the basis for the Court’s jurisdiction over petitions by residents of territory that is not the sovereign territory of Israel, but is ruled under a regime of belligerent occupation. The chapter examines the readiness of the Court to entertain such petitions, given that their subject matter falls within areas that are arguably non-justiciable. The chapter stresses the tension in the Court’s decisions created by its position that the legality of Israel’s most controversial policy in the West Bank—the settlement project—is not justiciable, and its ruling that the political nature of a government act cannot block the right of individuals to challenge the legality of acts that violate their rights.

Scientists Among Merchants: Linnaeus’s “Apostles” Aboard Vessels of the Swedish East India Company and the Advancement of Scientific Travels

In its 82 years of existence, the Swedish East India Company, neither large nor powerful with regard to its economic significance, made an impact on the pursuit of scientific knowledge that lasted beyond the 18th-century maritime trade world. As the “apostles” of Carl Linnaeus traveled amidst the sailors and merchants aboard the vessels to Asia, these 18th-century naturalists reified the spirit of scientific research in its most primordial form: to collect as much material as quickly as possible, and, ideally, in a manner characterized by discipline, order, and efficiency. This type of systematized scientific travel developed in the 18th-century East Indian trade was carried over into the Swedish intellectual tradition in the 19th-century polar exploration and the early 20th-century geological-turned-archaeological expeditions in Asia, motivated by “curiosity” instead of “utility”. This was not necessarily by their own choice, but at the constraint of the historical reality that Sweden, following the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, lacked both the means and the motivation to harbor any military or colonial aspirations beyond her sovereign territory. Against the greater geopolitical scheme of things since the Age of Enlightenment, while commercial, political, and strategic motives informed the exploration of distant continents by the European powers, Sweden was forced to rely on a more modest, but certainly no less vigorous, motive — science itself.

For granular geography

This article makes the case for developing granular geographies as an intervention into materialist geography. It does so by exploring sand extraction, which has so far been little explored within human geography, and how the granular dynamics of force chains, friction, and phase transitions make the discrete geographies of sand’s commodification porous to one another. By framing sand’s materiality through granular relations, I examine the ubiquity of sand in contemporary urbanization and its transformation into a resource. This is illustrated through a focus on Singapore’s excessive appetite for importing sand to fuel construction and its extensive land reclamation project, mapping sand’s trajectory as a resource from cheap nature to sovereign territory.

The Political Geographies of Migration: The Borders, from Static Lines to Mobile Entities

The article explores the border literature in political geography in order to understand the contemporary proliferation of bordering practices in the Western world. It takes the case of President Trump administration’s policies to show how borders can be concealed in social and political practices inside of sovereign territory. This expansion of geographical borders continually shapes the socio-spatial identities of migrants. The text also analyzes why the traditional bordering practice of building border walls is still an appealing resource aiming at keeping immigrants away from Western territories, even after the promise of a “borderless world” in the late 20th century. This article argues that the expansion of border walls is explained by the analysis of three factors: the transformations on the refugee protection framework after the 90s, the change in states’ perception of refugees as a threat to Western societies, and the fear of states to be perceived as actors non-capable to maintain their sovereignty. These contemporary practices are consistent with recent debates in border theory that see the border as a mobile entity instead of a static territorial line separating two units of land. This article aims at fostering the idea of border studies as a way to unveil new forms of power and control. It also pretends to foster an understanding of the interconnectedness of border practices around the world.