Asylum Seekers and Imagined Borders: Protecting Sovereignty not People

By Lauren Gumbs
 

The refugee is called into being as an essential and unavoidable outcome of a global system of state sovereignty. This is a system based on dichotomy, where states cannot create the concept of the citizen without the oppositional concept of the foreigner. Australia is preoccupied with the rhetoric of "border protection" not because refugees pose a major or easily identifiable threat to Australians but because they pose a threat to sovereignty. Sovereignty is autonomy and control, a powerful abstract concept whose hegemony must be constantly managed. The creation of national identities and bounded territorialised spaces requires the idea of the outsider to reinforce and strengthen the construct of the modern nation state. Furthermore, these identities are managed through the concepts of citizenship and nationalism.

There is no insider without a concomitant outsider. Since refugees can only become refugees by crossing international borders and availing themselves of state legitimacy, they must throw themselves into the gap produced by a territorially grounded states system to escape the tyranny of their state of origin. This is a failure of such a system. Refugees exist outside the norms of state sovereignty, a paradox whereby as an outsider they both reinforce and undermine sovereignty.

Because refugees are deviants in a system where normalcy is rooted in state citizenship, human rights inhabit a vacuum in the no man’s land between state borders. Rights are theoretically guaranteed in a social contract between state and citizen, but when the state absconds from the no-harm principle, it continues as sovereign while its citizens are forced to find refuge by first being at the mercy of recognition in weak international law and then reintegrated into another state system that will hopefully re-establish their rights through citizenship. International rights regimes inevitably yield to sovereignty, showing the immateriality of rights as abstract entitlements unless guaranteed under the protection of statehood.

The problem for today’s refugees is that sovereign states are reluctant to weaken their imagined borders and allow the stateless to pass through lest the whole notion of politically grounded, territorially enclosed space is destabilised.  States undertake elaborate processes to consolidate the outsider as legitimate, through various modes of belonging; temporary, such as protection visas, tourist visas and residency; permanent such as repatriation, resettlement and naturalisation. The maintenance of consent for such a system is reliant upon demarcation of legitimate identity which requires a bureaucratic administration of the citizen. The idea of citizenship reinforces sovereignty by championing shared identity and a territorial basis to political life. The logical other - the outsider - is managed via exclusion and boundaries. The refugee is not just an outsider, but a deviant outsider.

The category ‘refugee’ is not however, the epitome of extreme ambiguity and exclusion. 'Asylum seeker' is a status even more precarious than of the refugee, who at least has some recognition under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and a chance at receiving statehood again. An asylum seeker on the other hand has not been screened and processed and their in-betweeness is at its most profound. It is this in-betweeness, this inhabiting the gaps, that has allowed states like Australia to exploit the idea of deviance to reinforce territorial sovereignty and bar entry despite its obligations under international law. That this deviance could be interwoven with the criminality of people smugglers has proven a double edged sword.

States like Australia are inclined to facilitate sovereignty by deciding who they will protect as a matter of their strategic governance, but they do this over and above the needs of desperate people. It could only ever be legitimate for an Australian prime minister to reject people seeking asylum – by pushing them out to sea - through a system that gives precedence to sovereignty and manipulates the relationship of humans to territory.

Lauren is blog editor of Indonesia Today, she holds a Master of Communications, and is currently a postgraduate Human Rights student.