Forced migration management and politics of scale: how scale shapes refugee and border security policy

ABSTRACT

This article shows how politics of scale influence states’ conceptions and performances of asylum-seeker and refugee responsibility and risk. The resettlement and border security initiatives that result have dramatic consequences for the forcibly displaced, shaping their experiences in displacement based on who they are, where they are and how they got there. Using Australia’s refugee, asylum-seeker, and border externalization policy from 1976 through 1999 as a case, I document the Australian Government’s embrace of the idea that proximity engendered special responsibilities to ‘regional’ asylum-seekers, yet that over time the Government came to reject ‘the regional’ as a unique scale of responsibility, replacing it with ‘the global’. The article also demonstrates how social contexts influence conceptions of risk and obligation and become codified into moral geographies of forced migration management; embodied and territorialized through programmes of refugee resettlement, border militarization and externalization.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics of scale
• migration management
• moral geography
• border externalization
• refugee resettlement

Acknowledgements

I thank the editors for their invitation to contribute to this special issue. I would also like to thank the three reviewers and PEAS reading group at NUS for their significant help.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Over the years, the Australian Government department in charge of immigration and refugee policy has had numerous name changes. Currently, the department is called the Department of Home Affairs. In the text, for the sake of clarity I will consistently use ‘Department of Immigration’ when referring to the department.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Josh Watkins

Dr. Josh Watkins is a Lecturer of Global Studies at National University of Singapore. His research examines the politics, policies, and outcomes of forced migration management, specifically the migration management logics and practices of Australia, the IOM and UNHCR.