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Resumo

The Republic of Nauru, the world's smallest island state, was almost entirely economically dependent on the phosphate industry in the twentieth century as part of a colonial extractive arrangement. After the wealth Nauru derived was depleted by the 1990s, the by then sovereign state resurged on the back of the refugee industry, agreeing to process and resettle Australia's maritime asylum‐seeker populations. In this article, I explore how forms of refugee extractivism factor into Nauruans' ontological experiences of climate change. While Nauruans are imbricated in managing refugees—with an extensive program of financialization and institutionalization in place—environmental changes are heightening the prospect of islanders becoming refugees. I argue that Nauruans' understandings of refugeehood are entangled in the operations of a local industry in refugees but also humanitarian philanthropic portrayals. In Australian activist campaigns, Nauruans are distanced from refugees through representations of savagery and underdevelopment. These discourses intersect with how islanders see and experience refugeehood, while also revealing the fetishizing logics employed by refugee rights campaigners.

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