Leanne Weber
Biographic Data
| ID | 3760368 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Leanne Weber |
| GIVEN NAMES | Leanne |
| FAMILY NAME | Weber |
| SIGNATURE | WEBER L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3120-2137 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 316 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Securitising Crimmigration
In late 2023, Australia's High Court overturned longstanding precedent allowing indefinite immigration detention. In response, both major political parties launched an alarmist narrative about the exceptional threat posed by the 92 non-citizens, dubbed the NZYQ cohort, who were due for immediate release. This article details how this disparate group of non-citizens came to be considered an unmitigated threat to Australian society and were met wit…
A Research Agenda for a Human Rights Centred Criminology
This edited collection articulates a future direction for research at the nexus of criminology and human rights.
Robodeport or surveillance fantasy
Australia has been widely condemned for its harsh and comprehensive external border controls that seek to control the inward mobility of would-be asylum seekers through visa denial, interdiction and offshore detention. Less widely discussed is the fact that internal controls have been repeatedly ramped up over the past two decades. This includes the administrative removal of lawfully-present non-citizens following visa cancellation on character g…
Bordered welfare in Australia
In this article we investigate the imposition of compulsory income management on racialised categories of welfare recipient in Australia, identify the contribution made by neoliberalism and settler colonialism in shaping that policy, and characterise income management as a form of ‘bordered welfare’. We begin by acknowledging that key features of neoliberal governance include an ideological aversion to the provision of welfare and the shifting of…
Exemptions from Compulsory Income Management
The historical study of exemptions has focused on escape from protectionist policies designed to control and monitor Aboriginal people in Australia — restricting their freedom of movement, intruding into their family life, and reducing their ability to participate on equal terms in the labour force. In this paper, we consider a contemporary policy — income management — which primarily restricts the freedom to dispose of personal income and has ta…
Ana Aliverti, Policing the Borders Within
Handbook of Migration and Global Justice
In this chapter I consider debates concerning migration and global justice in terms of the governance of transnational migration. The relationship between migration and global justice is not simply a question about ‘justice in migration’, that is, the rights of individuals to engage in transnational migration or the rights of states to control such movement, it is also a matter of the value of migration as an instrument for realizing other ends o…
Policing biosecurity
In this article we consider the enforcement of COVID-19 measures as an instance of security policing, characterised by a pre-emption paradigm. Whilst COVID-19 measures are directed towards the goal of 'biosecurity' to stop the spread of the disease, in practice, COVID policing appears to rely on long-standing criminalisation strategies at odds with public health. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary data sources, we provide a critical acco…
Beyond deportation
Manuel Castells (1996) famously argued that human processes are increasingly operating according to the logic of flows and it has now become commonplace to analyse movements of people, information and commodities in terms of flows. However, scholars have been slow to capture the dynamics of border enforcement practices in these terms. In this article, we argue that 'deportation' can best be understood, not as a discrete practice that is unidirect…
Humanitarian borderwork’
This article challenges the common assumption that non-government organizations (NGOs) are ‘natural allies’ to asylum seekers in transforming borders from below by examining theories of humanitarianism within the context of securitization. Our article examines the theoretical and policy implications of the ‘humanitarian borderwork’ of NGOs, defined as practices that contain a security logic that construct, shift and erase internal and external bo…
My Kids Won’t Grow up Here’
Police researchers have long posited a connection between policing and belonging, or between policing and related concepts such as citizenship. However, much of this literature does not include empirical data demonstrating the actual impact of policing experiences on individuals and communities. Where it does, belonging is rarely located at the centre of analysis. In this article, I explore the role of policing in generating experiences and perce…
Penal power and border control
This article provides a critical review of key theoretical positions relevant to border control and sets out an agenda for developing these ideas. In 2005 Mythen and Walklate published a theoretical milestone for the study of terrorism in their article ‘Criminology and terrorism: Which thesis? Risk society or governmentality?’. Those authors reviewed two theories of risk, considering how each might contribute to understanding ‘new terrorism’. Ins…
From state-centric to transversal borders
In this article, I present new research that extends our understanding of the ‘structurally embedded border’ by identifying acts of resistance to restrictive federal policies perpetrated by providers of health and education services for asylum seekers in Australia. Situating the analysis within the theorization of borders, rather than the politics of resistance, reveals that opportunities for resistance are inherent within borders themselves, and…
Policing immigrants
As any student of comparative policing will tell you, American policing is a peculiarly local affair. The authors of this ground-breaking book note that around 12,500 policing agencies operate in t
Fluid Security in the Asia Pacific
This book explores the experiences of temporary migrants in the Asia-Pacific region. It develops the original concept of 'fluid security' to analyse the way in which persons carry a set of tools, stra
The Routledge International Handbook of Criminology and Human Rights
Calls for governments and government agencies to be ‘human rights compliant’ have a long history, and since they were established in Britain in the nineteenth century, the ‘new police’ (what we now call ‘public police’) have been in the sights of rights activists. What is understood by the term ‘human rights’, however, has evolved substantially in recent decades, and so is what is understood by the term ‘policing’. Most specifically, in the latte…
Every Death Counts
The Australian Institute of Criminology (‘AIC’) is the Australian Government's designated monitoring body responsible for reporting on deaths in custody in Australia under the National Deaths in Custody Program (‘NDICP’). Although the Border Crossing Observatory1 has recorded the deaths of 77 persons in Australian immigration custody since 2000, these deaths are not included in NDICP annual reporting. In Australia, official deaths in custody moni…
New Deterrence Scripts in Australia's Rejuvenated Offshore Detention Regime for Asylum Seekers
As the Global North experiences a real or manufactured crisis in asylum, deterrence has become the central plank in border control policies. Following a resurgence of boat arrivals and faced with serious overcrowding in detention centers and a spate of drownings, the Australian government returned to the use of offshore detention for asylum seekers. In this article, the official media releases of the major political parties from the period surrou…
Policing Non-Citizens
Criminologists are increasingly turning their attention to the many points of intersection between immigration and crime control. This book discusses the detection of unlawful non-citizens as a distinct form of policing which is impacting on a growing range of agencies and sections of society. It constitutes an important contribution not only to the literature on policing but also to the field of border control studies within criminology. Drawing…
V isible and V irtual B orders
Evidence is accumulating from Australia and elsewhere that border-control policies aimed at preventing arrival, when they fail to deter asylum seekers and other unwanted migrants from attempting illegalised1 crossings, significantly increase the risk of fatalities. However, the chains of responsibility for border-related deaths are difficult to discern because the visible face of offshore border control is underpinned by a virtual border that is …
Trans-Tasman denizens
(2013). Trans-Tasman denizens: human rights and human (in)security among New Zealand citizens of Samoan origin in Australia. Australian Journal of Human Rights: Vol. 19, Special issue: Human mobility and human rights: the intersections, pp. 51-77
Judicial discretion in sentencing
The detention of asylum seekers in the United Kingdom takes place in a context of wide and largely unrestrained discretion. The majority of asylum applicants are granted temporary admission into the UK while their claims for refugee status are being considered. However, some are detained in prisons or detention centres from the time of their arrival. The lack of effective external review and the frequent failure by the Immigration Service to disc…
Conclusion
Yaguine Koita and Fodė Tounkara did not have the opportunity to present their polite request to European leaders. Their terrible deaths illustrate in dramatic fashion the structural violence that prevents large populations from the Global South from ‘realizing their actual potential’. The violence of borders is most immediately apparent in the boys’ fatal choice of transportation. Borders, and the inequalities they help to sustain, are also impli…
Suspicious Deaths
In this chapter we discuss instances where illegalized border crossers are believed to have died directly at the hands of others, including state agents, private contractors working for the state, people smugglers, border vigilantes and other private individuals. Although the chains of responsibility leading to these deaths may be more clearly discernible than the examples of ‘death by policy’ discussed in the previous chapter, they must also be …
Charting the Global Frontier
Individual borders have their own specific histories, and the policies designed to defend them are shaped by local as well as global factors. As Pratt (2005, p. 185) reminds us: ‘The border is an ongoing accomplishment, yet the processes by which it is continually produced are erased by its apparent self-evidence.’ Constituting borders through geographical barriers or in terms of other taken-for-granted physical referents presents them as ‘primor…
Globalization and Borders
This book analyzes the political and material conditions driving contemporary border control policies and discusses the processes that mediate popular and official understandings of border-related fat
Valiant beggars and global vagabonds
Attempts by governments to control unwanted border crossings are a defining feature of late modernity; but the suppression of cross-border mobility is not new. In pre-industrial England the `masterless men' and `valiant beggars' were subjected to harsh measures designed to curtail their mobility. In this article, we observe that border control intensifies at times of tumultuous structural change when institutions capable of preserving the emergin…
Policing Migration
Criminologists are increasingly pointing to new forms of control that are associated with the regulatory-yet-punitive states of late modernity. This article starts from the premise that the policing of global population movements is an example of an emerging punitive regulatory system that demands urgent attention by criminologists. It articulates an agenda for the critical examination of "migration policing" in Britain set against the backdrop o…
Humanitarian borderwork’
This article challenges the common assumption that non-government organizations (NGOs) are ‘natural allies’ to asylum seekers in transforming borders from below by examining theories of humanitarianism within the context of securitization. Our article examines the theoretical and policy implications of the ‘humanitarian borderwork’ of NGOs, defined as practices that contain a security logic that construct, shift and erase internal and external bo…
New Deterrence Scripts in Australia's Rejuvenated Offshore Detention Regime for Asylum Seekers
As the Global North experiences a real or manufactured crisis in asylum, deterrence has become the central plank in border control policies. Following a resurgence of boat arrivals and faced with serious overcrowding in detention centers and a spate of drownings, the Australian government returned to the use of offshore detention for asylum seekers. In this article, the official media releases of the major political parties from the period surrou…
Stop and search in global context
Reflecting on the evidence presented in this collection, this overview explores the purposes for which stop and search powers are deployed, whether their use can be described as effective and whether the infringements of liberty and privacy that stop and search entails can be justified. We conclude by considering the impact of stop and search on citizenship and mobility and examining questions of fairness, legitimacy and justice
It sounds like they shouldn't be here’
Australian state police have historically held wide-ranging powers which reflect their origins as all-encompassing administrators and agents of control over unruly colonial subjects. Contemporary police powers to stop and question individuals to establish whether they are lawfully present stem from at least 1958 when they were incorporated into section 188 of the Migration Act. There is no official monitoring of the use of stop and search powers …
Stop and search in global context
Police, Stop! Halte! Igazoltatas! Thamba! Tomare! Pare! Alto! Halt! Arretez-vous immediatement! The command – issued verbally or in the form of a road sign, a roadblock, or a flashing light on the
Penal power and border control
This article provides a critical review of key theoretical positions relevant to border control and sets out an agenda for developing these ideas. In 2005 Mythen and Walklate published a theoretical milestone for the study of terrorism in their article ‘Criminology and terrorism: Which thesis? Risk society or governmentality?’. Those authors reviewed two theories of risk, considering how each might contribute to understanding ‘new terrorism’. Ins…
Beyond deportation
Manuel Castells (1996) famously argued that human processes are increasingly operating according to the logic of flows and it has now become commonplace to analyse movements of people, information and commodities in terms of flows. However, scholars have been slow to capture the dynamics of border enforcement practices in these terms. In this article, we argue that 'deportation' can best be understood, not as a discrete practice that is unidirect…
From state-centric to transversal borders
In this article, I present new research that extends our understanding of the ‘structurally embedded border’ by identifying acts of resistance to restrictive federal policies perpetrated by providers of health and education services for asylum seekers in Australia. Situating the analysis within the theorization of borders, rather than the politics of resistance, reveals that opportunities for resistance are inherent within borders themselves, and…
Surveillance, Risk and Preemption on the Australian Border
In this paper we will map and analyze Australian border surveillance technologies. In doing so, we wish to interrogate the extent to which these surveillance practices are constitutive of new regimes of regulation and control. Surveillance technologies, we argue, are integral to strategies of risk profiling, social sorting and "punitive pre-emption." The Australian nation-state thus mirrors broader global patterns in the government of mobility, w…
My Kids Won’t Grow up Here’
Police researchers have long posited a connection between policing and belonging, or between policing and related concepts such as citizenship. However, much of this literature does not include empirical data demonstrating the actual impact of policing experiences on individuals and communities. Where it does, belonging is rarely located at the centre of analysis. In this article, I explore the role of policing in generating experiences and perce…
Knowing-and-yet-not-knowing about European border deaths
Rapid changes associated with globalisation have led to the violent policing of territorial borders across the Global North. In Europe, the ongoing project of constructing a unified identity for an expanding European Union (EU) has created further pressure to separate included groups from surplus populations. The resulting fortification of external borders and intensification of internal controls have led to thousands of fatalities. But despite t…
Trans-Tasman denizens
(2013). Trans-Tasman denizens: human rights and human (in)security among New Zealand citizens of Samoan origin in Australia. Australian Journal of Human Rights: Vol. 19, Special issue: Human mobility and human rights: the intersections, pp. 51-77
The Detention of Asylum Seekers as a Crime of Obedience
The Detention of Asylum Seekers
(2002). The Detention of Asylum Seekers: 20 Reasons Why Criminologists Should Care. Current Issues in Criminal Justice: Vol. 14, Refugee issues and criminology, pp. 9-30
Surveillance, Risk and Preemption on the Australian Border
In this paper we will map and analyze Australian border surveillance technologies. In doing so, we wish to interrogate the extent to which these surveillance practices are constitutive of new regimes of regulation and control. Surveillance technologies, we argue, are integral to strategies of risk profiling, social sorting and "punitive pre-emption." The Australian nation-state thus mirrors broader global patterns in the government of mobility, w…
Down that Wrong Road
The discretionary power to detain asylum seekers on arrival in the UK has been described by one human rights organisation as ‘extraordinary and largely unrestrained’ (Amnesty International 1996). Although decisions made by immigration officers can lead to long periods in prison or in prison‐like conditions, these actions are considered to be administrative and are therefore not subject to the legal constraints that apply to criminal justice agenc…
Policing Migration
Criminologists are increasingly pointing to new forms of control that are associated with the regulatory-yet-punitive states of late modernity. This article starts from the premise that the policing of global population movements is an example of an emerging punitive regulatory system that demands urgent attention by criminologists. It articulates an agenda for the critical examination of "migration policing" in Britain set against the backdrop o…
The Detention of Asylum Seekers as a Crime of Obedience
Borders, Mobility and Technologies of Control
Territorial borders are taking on a new significance, the implications of which are relatively unexplored within the discipline of criminology. This book presents the first systematic attempt to develop a critical criminology of the border and offers a unique treatment of the impact of globalisation and mobility. It focuses on borders and the significance of the activities which take place on and around them. For many the border is an everyday re…
Bridges or Bandaids? Another Death in Police Custody Reveals Fatal Flaws in the Aboriginal Liaison Officer Concept
The appointment of liaison officers to act as bridges to vulnerable or hard to reach communities is a standard application of a community policing philosophy, and one that would seem to have much to commend it. However, in the case of many Indigenous communities, the very nature of the role is historically suspect. This comment traces the role of the Aboriginal liaison officer Lloyd Bengaroo in the tragic death of Mulrunji in police custody on Pa…
Valiant beggars and global vagabonds
Attempts by governments to control unwanted border crossings are a defining feature of late modernity; but the suppression of cross-border mobility is not new. In pre-industrial England the `masterless men' and `valiant beggars' were subjected to harsh measures designed to curtail their mobility. In this article, we observe that border control intensifies at times of tumultuous structural change when institutions capable of preserving the emergin…
Knowing-and-yet-not-knowing about European border deaths
Rapid changes associated with globalisation have led to the violent policing of territorial borders across the Global North. In Europe, the ongoing project of constructing a unified identity for an expanding European Union (EU) has created further pressure to separate included groups from surplus populations. The resulting fortification of external borders and intensification of internal controls have led to thousands of fatalities. But despite t…
Conclusion
Yaguine Koita and Fodė Tounkara did not have the opportunity to present their polite request to European leaders. Their terrible deaths illustrate in dramatic fashion the structural violence that prevents large populations from the Global South from ‘realizing their actual potential’. The violence of borders is most immediately apparent in the boys’ fatal choice of transportation. Borders, and the inequalities they help to sustain, are also impli…
Suspicious Deaths
In this chapter we discuss instances where illegalized border crossers are believed to have died directly at the hands of others, including state agents, private contractors working for the state, people smugglers, border vigilantes and other private individuals. Although the chains of responsibility leading to these deaths may be more clearly discernible than the examples of ‘death by policy’ discussed in the previous chapter, they must also be …
Charting the Global Frontier
Individual borders have their own specific histories, and the policies designed to defend them are shaped by local as well as global factors. As Pratt (2005, p. 185) reminds us: ‘The border is an ongoing accomplishment, yet the processes by which it is continually produced are erased by its apparent self-evidence.’ Constituting borders through geographical barriers or in terms of other taken-for-granted physical referents presents them as ‘primor…
Accounting for Deaths at the Border
We argued in the previous chapter that the process of counting border-related deaths is an inherently political act which makes (implicit or explicit) political claims about the border that align most closely with established accounts of border enforcement. This chapter considers the possibilities of developing a richer picture of death at the border to counter predominant managerialist methods of counting death, one that may not be easily co-opt…
Structural Violence
The passage from Roberts cited above encompasses within an ‘expanded definition of violence’ a broad range of harmful actions which may be either intended or unintended, and can be perpetrated through either direct or indirect means, by individuals or institutions. Structural violence is characterized primarily by the absence of visible actors and is associated with forms of violence that are largely unintended. In this chapter we identify many a…
Suicide and Self-harm
The above quote is not depicting a situation in a country experiencing war or conflict, or a region plagued by poverty or civil upheaval. Rather, it is describing the conditions inside immigration detention centres in Australia in 2003. If detention and deportation are the bodily sanctions imposed by the current migration regime (Khosravi, 2010), then suicide and self-harm are the means by which those bodies are (self)-marked as excluded and unwa…
The Ambiguous Architecture of Risk
Although they are closeted from many of the harmful consequences of contemporary border controls, populations of the Global North are occasionally confronted with the violent deaths of illegalized border crossers. Sometimes the grim reality is experienced first-hand when unidentified bodies wash up among holidaymakers on Mediterranean beaches, or when airline passengers observe fatal altercations between struggling deportees and security guards. …
Introduction
For every dead body washed up on the shores of the developed world, experts estimate there are at least two others that are never recovered. Nearly 14,000 people are known to have died between 1993 and 2010 trying to enter Europe, or while in detention or during forcible deportation. Across the three key border zones between the Global North and Global South (Europe, North America and Australia), drowning is by far the most frequent cause of deat…
Counting and Discounting Border Deaths
Nikolas Rose has argued that numbers make late modern modes of governance both possible and judgeable (Rose, 1999). According to Andreas and Greenhill (2010) we live in a ‘hyper-numeric’ world in which something counts because it can be counted. On the one hand, quantification can transform the political domain into a docile arena where the ‘apparent facticity’ of numbers can silence debate. On the other hand, in contemporary democracies, numbers…
It sounds like they shouldn't be here’
Australian state police have historically held wide-ranging powers which reflect their origins as all-encompassing administrators and agents of control over unruly colonial subjects. Contemporary police powers to stop and question individuals to establish whether they are lawfully present stem from at least 1958 when they were incorporated into section 188 of the Migration Act. There is no official monitoring of the use of stop and search powers …
Stop and search in global context
Police, Stop! Halte! Igazoltatas! Thamba! Tomare! Pare! Alto! Halt! Arretez-vous immediatement! The command – issued verbally or in the form of a road sign, a roadblock, or a flashing light on the
Stop and search in global context
Reflecting on the evidence presented in this collection, this overview explores the purposes for which stop and search powers are deployed, whether their use can be described as effective and whether the infringements of liberty and privacy that stop and search entails can be justified. We conclude by considering the impact of stop and search on citizenship and mobility and examining questions of fairness, legitimacy and justice
Globalization and Borders
This book analyzes the political and material conditions driving contemporary border control policies and discusses the processes that mediate popular and official understandings of border-related fat
Judicial discretion in sentencing
The detention of asylum seekers in the United Kingdom takes place in a context of wide and largely unrestrained discretion. The majority of asylum applicants are granted temporary admission into the UK while their claims for refugee status are being considered. However, some are detained in prisons or detention centres from the time of their arrival. The lack of effective external review and the frequent failure by the Immigration Service to disc…
Policing Non-Citizens
Criminologists are increasingly turning their attention to the many points of intersection between immigration and crime control. This book discusses the detection of unlawful non-citizens as a distinct form of policing which is impacting on a growing range of agencies and sections of society. It constitutes an important contribution not only to the literature on policing but also to the field of border control studies within criminology. Drawing…
V isible and V irtual B orders
Evidence is accumulating from Australia and elsewhere that border-control policies aimed at preventing arrival, when they fail to deter asylum seekers and other unwanted migrants from attempting illegalised1 crossings, significantly increase the risk of fatalities. However, the chains of responsibility for border-related deaths are difficult to discern because the visible face of offshore border control is underpinned by a virtual border that is …
Political science (41 works) · Law (35 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Criminology (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (17 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Migration, Health and Trauma (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (9 works)