Bordering Borderscapes

Australia's Use of Humanitarian Aid and Border Security Support to Immobilise Asylum Seekers

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3948534
AutoresJosh Watkins (0000-0003-1003-5189, Geography Graduate Group, University of California, Davis, Davis, California, USA, autor correspondente)
Ano2017
Volume22
Fascículo4
Páginas958-983
Data de publicação2017-10-02
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650045.2017.1312350
OpenAlexW2608687205
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas24

This article documents Australia’s use of border security support and humanitarian aid as border externalisations immobilising asylum seekers as far from Australia as possible. The Australian Government frames border securitisation through regionalism, as an effort to achieve a “regional solution” to asylum seeking irregular migration. Correspondingly, scholars have documented Australia’s externalisations in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. However, Australia’s efforts are not regionally circumscribed and this article analyses the spatial and temporal flexibility of Australia’s border externalisations; Australia’s strategy of targeting borderscapes of asylum seeking as they emerge and change. In doing so, the article examines how the Australian Government has assembled externalisations in South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Australia’s use of humanitarian aid to make places housing asylum seekers more hospitable, yet confining, to the displaced is detailed. Also analysed is Australia’s border security support to source countries and countries of first asylum to immobilise asylum seekers. The article demonstrates that Australia has sought to manifest not only a territorial buffer zone in Southeast Asia, but use border externalisations in the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa to secure places and displaced populations. This is argued to be a preventative strategy of risk management designed to preempt future asylum geographies and forge extraterritorial migration control

Development economics · Economic growth · Economy · Ethnology · Humanitarian aid · Humanitarian crisis · Irregular migration · Political science · Refugee · Repatriation · Sociology · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration