The death of asylum

Migration or refugee ‘crises’ have hit the news worldwide in recent years, showing images of people on the move, desperately trying to cross borders and being pushed back, beaten or detained by state or private security forces trying to prevent them from entering national territories. As the number of people on the move continues to increase, measures to prevent their mobility also multiply. Alison Mountz's timely book makes sense of such images by placing them within a global geography of detention and exclusion. What we are witnessing, she argues, is not just a ‘crisis’ of asylum but its demise: ‘the right to asylum is being buried, disappearing in public discourse and in the closure of geographical and legal routes to safe havens’ (p. xi). The death of asylum is threefold: physical, ontological and political. It is physical through the contribution of offshore policing and detention of people on the move to deaths at borders; ontological through the extinction of all paths to becoming an asylum-seeker; and political through the disappearance of asylum as a possibility worth fighting for. These three interlocking deaths are explored through the book within various geographical spaces—specifically islands and archipelagos of offshore border control and detention

Archipelago · Closure (psychology · Criminology · Demise · Enforcement · Geography · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics

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