Colonial afterlives of infrastructure: from phosphate to refugee processing in the Republic of Nauru

ABSTRACT

Recent years have witnessed the outsourcing of immigration and border controls to economically struggling states. Infrastructural projects around controlling migration are transforming localities in the Global South: from shifting legal and political economic systems to altering socialities between migrant and local populations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Republic of Nauru, this paper considers how past and present infrastructural forms give shape to the ways that (in)justices are created. Nauru, the world’s smallest island state, was almost entirely economically dependent on the phosphate industry in the twentieth century. After the wealth it derived from phosphate extraction was depleted in the 1990s, the sovereign state resurged on the back of the refugee industry by importing Australia’s maritime asylum seeking populations. In this paper, I examine the material life of infrastructure around managing migration in Nauru’s 21 km² locality, including the toxic interrelationships between phosphate and refugee processing, the industries’ built environments, and the people who live and work in them. I explore how Nauru’s refugee project has reconfigured colonial infrastructural forms, practices of dependency, and socio-legal affiliations as the country is refashioned as a company town in line with new forms of human production.

KEYWORDS:

• Offshore detention
• refugees
• migrants
• migration industry
• Australia
• Nauru
• infrastructure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. At time of writing, 120 asylum recipients still remained on the island, but Nauru was no longer being used as an offshore processing and resettlement site. In 2020, the Australian government moved their operations back to Christmas Island, an external territory of Australia, and another on-again-off-again phosphate turned refugee industry isle. They simultaneously increased maritime border enforcement and boat pushback policies across the region. Nauru continues to be financed under the understanding that their industry operations might be restarted in the future.

2. How migrants are framed has important effects, conjuring up a whole world of rhetorical tropes associated with ‘high risk’ or ‘suffering at risk’ subjects (Holmes and Castañeda 2016). In order to denaturalize the common-sensed notion of people as refugees (Malkki 1995), I refer to asylum seekers and refugees as migrants awaiting or having received asylum claims. This is certainly not to dispute the legitimacy of people’s legal claims to asylum nor to question the nightmarish experiences many have been through. Instead, I look to advance alternatives to demeaning representations of people as Other, which persistently conjure tropes of deservingness and difference. Nauru is also home to a mix of Pacific islanders, Chinese, South Asian, Australian, and New Zealander migrants from a long history of transnational migration flows and colonial industrialization. However, my focus in this paper is on migrants sent to and resettled on the island by the Australian government as part of the offshore asylum arrangement.

3. The concept of ‘entanglement’ has become a popular means for scholars in the social sciences to denote the contingent relations between substances that make up various environments (Roberts 2017).

4. Even with these low numbers, at time of writing, just one asylum recipient from Nauru remained in Cambodia.

5. In 2017, following international pressure and activist campaigning, the Australian government agreed with the United States government that the majority of migrants with refugee status in Nauru would be resettled across the U.S.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Oxford.