Agamben's Camp

Building on the work of Sandro Mezzadra, Nicholas De Genova (Reference De Genova, De Genova and Peutz2010, 39) writes that:

It is this evasion of state control that makes irregular migration the object of the migration and border policy that has found its expression in the formation of the Camp. Dennis Broeders (Reference Broeders2007, 73) argues that control depends upon the ability to make society “legible” so that the state can act. By consistently and persistently evading state frameworks, however, irregular migrants evade the coding systems that make them legible; they directly challenge the capacity of the state to exert control. They thus become a challenge to state security, both in contesting the inviolability of borders and in challenging the sovereign power to define, code and classify.

Soguk (Reference Soguk1999, 187) observes that neither state sovereignty nor the sovereign state is permanent; they each require practices of statecraft to sustain not simply their presence but their normalcy within the international regime. They operate to make society legible. Importantly, it is not just the domestic society that is ordered and made legible, but also the international. Practices of statecraft code society in binaries: insider/outsider, national/foreigner, citizen/non-citizen. Each of these classifications is determined, decided upon, by the sovereign power. Nyers (Reference Nyers2006, xi) writes that “[s]overeignty also provides a powerful historical answer to the question of what kind of political subjectivities we possess (citizenship) and where political relations can be practiced (state)”. The political subjectivities decided upon and made legible are those that are allowable, that are functional to the stability of the sovereign order. In their disruptions, interruptions and evasions of these practices of statecraft, irregular migrants are expressing an agency and subjectivity that is disallowed, threatening and unwelcome. The state response to this disruption has been, most commonly, to label irregular migration as “illegal migration”, treating the two as synonymous in an attempt to re-code, re-classify and so re-capture irregularity within legible codes. The continuous challenge levelled at this encoding by irregular migrants themselves, however, reinforces the necessity of locating irregularity outside of and prior to the space of the state. The response of the sovereign, as explained by Soguk (Reference Soguk1999, 187), is to locate disruptions and dangers to the margins and impose an order within the territorial geography of the state. The focus on the border is simultaneously a focus on entry and on exit, and so the control of mobility; this, as Agier (Reference Agier2011, 15) argues, both de-politicizes and de-humanizes statelessness.

The formation of a Camp space is not simply a matter of controlling errant political subjectivities; it is also one of security, as, to use the terminology of Ole Wæver (Reference Wæver and Lipschutz1995) and others, border politics and migration have been securitized.

James Hollifield (Reference Hollifield, Brettell and Hollifield2008, 191) writes:

As Bigo (Reference Bigo, Rajaram and Grundy-Warr2007, 91) observes, “security is not only a state affair, it is a boundary function”. He argues that internal and external security are converging as state borders move inside the state to exist socially and symbolically between populations, rendering the Other less and less acceptable. This convergence is occurring over the body of the irregular migrant; for Jennifer Hyndman and Alison Mountz (Reference Hyndman, Mountz, Gregory and Pred2007, 78), “migrants have come to stand in for all that threatens state security”. This is producing the broadening of immigration policy and its connection to border control discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. The question becomes one of how to respond when deterrence and interception fail and the irregular migrant reaches the sovereign territory of the state. It is at this moment that the Camp emerges as the central technology of migration control in the contemporary politics of migration and asylum.

The Camp is the spatial expression of the politics of asylum and migration that concretizes the exclusionary and exceptional powers of the sovereign laid bare at the border into a particular place. As Agier (Reference Agier2011, 187) argues, it is at the same time both metaphor and concrete realization of separate treatment. The Camp is not simply a penal model, taking the form of punitive, prison-like structures in which incarceration is justified in discourses of criminality (as is the case in the detention regime in Australia); it is also representative of places that operate within regimes of protection and discourses of humanitarianism (such as the refugee camp), but which are no less spaces of containment, control and exceptionality. The Camp, therefore, is representative of the overlap between regimes of border control and of protection, testimony to the ways in which they mirror each other within the global migration regime. The model of containment that has emerged is one of both administrative detention and protection; in either case the exercise of executive rather than judicial power over space (see Dauvergne Reference Dauvergne2007). This marks the regime of the Camp as being entirely within the capacity of the sovereign to decide, without the “normal” checks on sovereign power that exist within “normal” space. As Broeders (Reference Broeders2007) pithily observes, the aim of the Camp is not to discipline or correct undesirable migrants but to exclude them. De Genova writes that:

Giorgio Agamben is an Italian political theorist who has been central to contemporary studies of migration that take a critical approach to examining the exceptionality and exclusion of the migrant, particularly by examining the relationship between the state, asylum seekers and refugees. Drawing upon the work of Carl Schmidt, Agamben (Reference Agamben2000) argues that sovereign power is founded upon the ability to decide upon the state of exception. He goes on to assert that the Camp is the space in which this is permanently realized. He understands “the Camp” as a spatial arrangement of the permanent state of exception that remains outside of the normal state of law. Founded not out of prison law, but of martial law (Agamben Reference Agamben1998, 166–7), the Camp is a space of containment that operates not only to exclude individuals from the normal juridical order of the nation-state but also to keep them outside and to prevent any possibility of their bridging this gap. Significantly, Agamben (Reference Agamben1998, 43) cites the birth of the Camp as occurring at the same time that new citizenship laws were being established throughout Europe, just prior to the Second World War. As states began to de-nationalize certain elements of their populations in an attempt to control them, Agamben (Reference Agamben1998, 44) argues that the Camp became a necessary part of the order of the nation-state, along with nation, state and territory. He goes on: “The state of exception, which used to be essentially a temporary suspension of the order, became a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabited by that [bare] life that increasingly cannot be inscribed into the order” (Agamben Reference Agamben1998, 43). The Camp, then, is a site of control in which elements that are disruptive to the nation-state, such as irregular migrants, can be managed. While Agamben's initial analysis arose in reference to the Nazi concentration camps, he argues that the Camp is an abstracted structure that “consists of the materialization of the state of exception and the consequent creation of a space for [bare] life” (Agamben Reference Agamben1998, 41). It is not the crimes committed within it that define a Camp, but instead how the space functions and how it is situated within the juridical and sovereign structure of the nation-state. Further, the Camp is not defined by its capture of disruptions defined by criminal law – disruptions that break clearly defined laws are, after all, also clearly definable as criminal. The prison is sufficient to manage such disruptions. The Camp, however, contains disruptions to the larger order of the state – the foundational concepts, categories, institutions and structures that underlie both its stability and its power.

The impact of living in a Camp space is to be rendered, in Agamben's terms, as “bare life”. Agamben (Reference Agamben2000, 4–8) argues that state power is founded upon the ability of the state to keep bare life safe and protected to the degree that it submits itself to the sovereign's right to decide life and death. A state of exception exists when this life is put into question, and is revoked as the foundation of political power. As such, bare life no longer matters; it does not justify or support power, and so is ultimately vulnerable to power. It “cannot be inscribed into the order” (Agamben Reference Agamben2000, 43). Agamben (Reference Agamben2000, 42) writes that this existence means that literally anything can happen within the Camp, as the exercise of sovereign power is arbitrary. The operation of sovereign power is also different within the Camp; it is not located firmly in the particularities of law or presided over by a constant, identifiable authority. Rather, Agamben (Reference Agamben1998, 174) argues that whether or not atrocities such as those of the concentration camps are committed is not a matter of law, but of the “civility and ethical sense” of the police, who temporarily act as sovereign. These “petty sovereigns” (to use Judith Butler's (Reference Butler2006) term) introduce an additional element of uncertainty and unpredictability into the Camp space, taking the sovereign capacity to decide to its ultimate extent. The decision made for one individual – to deport, to detain, to grant status – is or may be entirely different to that made for the next. Every case is an exception. For Agier (Reference Agier2011, 82), Camps are in this way zones of exceptional rights and power for those in control. A sense of arbitrariness comes to characterize the life of the migrant within the Camp, emphasizing the powerlessness of the individual and their exceptionality.

The lived consequence of this state of being is that irregular migrants caught within the space of a Camp are denied the capacity for political agency, and are instead laid bare to the will of the state to not simply exclude them, but also to remove them entirely. Hyndman and Mountz (Reference Hyndman, Mountz, Gregory and Pred2007) are eloquent on the impact-by-design of the geography of Camps. They write:

Camps are “space[s] of pure waiting, devoid of subject” (Agier Reference Agier2011, 145). Pécoud and de Guchteneire write that the Camp space originates from the sovereign right of states to control the entry and residence of non-citizens. However, they observe, while Camps traditionally have been rare responses to exceptional circumstances such as war, “[t]oday, they are common practice” (Pécoud and de Guchteneire Reference Pécoud, de Guchteneire, Pécoud and De Guchteneire2007, 3). For William Walters (Reference Walters, De Genova and Peutz2010, 75), Agamben's work gestures towards a growing disjuncture between a politics organized in terms of nation-states and bare life; the Camp is both a symptom of and a response to this condition.

The acceptability of such spaces is marked by the relative lack of objection to their creation. As Galina Cornelisse (Reference Cornelisse, De Genova and Peutz2010, 101) observes, criticism of immigration detention centres revolves primarily around the conditions of detention, rather than the actual practice. Even when these concerns are raised, however, they are too often easily dismissed with the argument that in order for detention to serve its deterrence function, the conditions must remain difficult (Wigley Reference Wigley, Crépeau, Nakache and Collyer2006, 165).

Crisp (Reference Crisp and Spencer2003, 77), a policy officer with the UNHCR, writes that:

He acknowledges that the industrialized world took the lead in building policy regimes to keep asylum seekers away, rendering other regimes that systematically isolate and exclude asylum seekers and refugees acceptable, if not necessary, for other host states (Crisp Reference Crisp and Spencer2003). However, what is missed in this analysis is that such a violation of rights and separation from the citizen population is not simply present but the central feature of the Camp structure as it exists in the West, in the form of detention centres, processing centres and other spaces that place migrants in exceptionality. The Camp defines its own space as an out-place in which people become nameless victims, stateless precisely because they have no framework within which to enact citizenship, as Agier (Reference Agier2011, 213) argues; that is to say, the framework for normalized and validated agency is removed. The detention centre is not simply a mechanism of border control unconnected to the politics of asylum and protection (except through its population, which “may” include asylum seekers) but a direct reflection of the African refugee camp in a different geography and context.

In the words of Cornelisse (Reference Cornelisse, De Genova and Peutz2010, 121), “the camp is still the only place that we have to offer those people who do not fit in our particular image of the world”. In Agamben's analysis, these “people who do not fit” are refugees. Building upon my argument in Chapter 1 that Convention refugees are “regular” migrants in the contemporary regime, however, I suggest that it is not the refugee who cannot be coded, classified or made legible, who cannot be ordered; instead, it is the irregular migrant, including, at the limit of irregularity, the asylum seeker, or the prima facie refugee given group status. It is those who lack permanent status that are caught within the cracks of the modern order of nation-states and that are increasingly confined to the Camp.

Exception in refugee camps

As described in Chapter 5, the refugee regime in Tanzania is characterized by large numbers of prima facie refugees granted group status who, by virtue of this indeterminacy and the temporary nature of their status, experience irregularity in ways strikingly similar to that of asylum seekers and migrants at the borders of Europe and Australia. As a technology of control and containment, the mandatory residence in “designated areas” of refugees in Tanzania is a classic example of the location of migrants in the state of exception. The Kibondo Refugee Project, initially five camps but by 2007 only two, was established by TCRS to provide basic survival services for over 144,000 Burundian refugees in the region. This included the provision of camp infrastructure and management, water and sanitation services, food and non-food provision distribution, shelter and primary and secondary education (TCRS 2005). Although Burundians are the largest population in the Kibondo camps, there are also migrants from the DRC, Cameroon and Somalia, as well as some scattered Rwandans and others from farther afield, in Nduta camp. At the creation of the project, TCRS was responsible for the road network that serviced the camp and for income-generating projects including the raising of cattle, basket weaving and pottery making. In the years leading up to 2008, emphasis was placed on the peace and reconciliation programmes that were designed to underscore the repatriation of refugees to Burundi. Jonas, a camp support worker involved in the repatriation efforts, explains that in support of the repatriation and “to encourage participation” other services were gradually cut (“Jonas” (false name), interview December 2007). The market that brought local Tanzanians to the camp closed. Secondary education was closed and the camps consolidated, creating conditions of greater population density and, for some, poorer-quality housing. Food rations were also cut; at the time of my visit in December 2007, the rations were at seventy-two percent of recommended levels. Meanwhile, “go and see, come and tell” visits were organized that sent individuals to Burundi so they could witness the conditions and then return to share their observations with others, with the intention of encouraging people to participate in the repatriation.

Any assessment of the basic structures of Nduta and other camps in Tanzania reveals what refugee camps generally share in common: they are constructed to provide for the basic survival of the refugees, to facilitate the provision of minimum protection. They are not spaces designed to foster political agency or to integrate (or even to transition) refugees into the local population. They are holding centres. The prevailing consideration is that it is easier to deliver services if the recipients are concentrated in one location. When in camps, it is easier to register refugees, to carry out any census deemed necessary and to organize for repatriation (or, rarely, resettlement) efforts. As Amanda, a member of one of the service NGOs working in the camp, says, “the camps are to manage…and for control” (“Amanda” (false name), interview January 2008). They emerged because of the large numbers of refugees arriving in the mid-1990s and, she argues, have become so established that there is now no protest over the model. Andrew, a member of the TCRS administration agrees, but expands upon this statement. The camps were for security, he says. The government accused the refugees of assisting the rebels in Burundi (“Andrew” (false name), interview December 2007). Camps prevented this support, allowing for the surveillance of activities and control over mobility. At the Ministry of Home Affairs in Dar es Salaam, the security emphasis is echoed. “It's a security issue. Not as much as in the past, but [things are] still unstable…it's an ongoing issue to manage” (“Craig” (false name), interview January 2008). All of this operates, therefore, to maintain a separation between the refugees and the local population and to contain the refugee “problem”. “The purpose of the camps is to control the movement of the refugees and to keep them together to assist them” (“Alex” (false name), interview January 2008).

Nduta also exists to suspend the political life of the refugee, excluding refugees from any form of participation in the politics that governs their lives. The management of political agency has impacts on multiple dimensions of life: cultural, economic and political. For example, the cultural activities in the camp are supported by the administration. Two music groups – one for children, one for adults – have formed and performed in town festivals. The adult group is part of the peace and reconciliation programme, bringing together individuals from different ethnic groups – including Hutu and Tutsi – who have been on opposing sides of conflict. These efforts have immensely positive dimensions. They remain, however, oriented towards “home” and maintain a separation between refugee and Tanzanian; no Tanzanian citizens participate. Access to news information is similarly focused on Burundi, and newspapers from both Burundi and Tanzania are consistently well out of date. Economic activities are also oriented towards separation. The economic and income-generating projects, including the market, are strictly regulated to conform to regulations against refugee employment and economic participation. Moreover, these are now suspended as part of the promotion of repatriation.

Agamben's observation that the management of the space of the Camp is reliant upon the civility and ethics of petty sovereigns is encoded directly into Tanzanian law. Even during the period of villagization that formed Tanzanian policy regarding the 1972 Burundian caseload, refugee areas were under the supervision and management of commandants and “competent authorities” who were given extraordinary powers to restrict refugee movements (Chaulia Reference Chaulia2003, 159). Several NGOs responsible for provisions in the camp have “no direct contact” with the refugees themselves (“Sarah” (false name), interview January 2008). The Department of Refugee Services oversees camp governance with monthly meetings with refugee working groups and periodic visits to the camp. At the meetings, concerns can be raised about the repatriation programme, gender-based violence, infrastructure and food (“Craig” (false name), interview January 2008). The overarching structure of governance of the camp does not appear to be discussed, however. The refugees themselves are not involved in policy (“Craig” (false name), interview January 2008), the consequence of which is that refugees have little to no impact on the daily activities of their lives or the structures that shape them. Widespread responses to my questions about whether they are listened to or consulted reflect this. Generally, people feel that if they have a problem they will go the UNHCR or TCRS, but that their concerns are often not answered. They note that whenever “the government” visits the camp, few if any refugees are spoken to, and that the opportunities for feedback are superficial (Burundian refugees, group interview December 2007). This disenfranchisement goes beyond contributions to policy development; one woman without a door to her house has been asking for weeks for help replacing it. It was lost, she says, when her neighbours burned her house because they did not want a neighbour who was HIV positive. She observes that the policy is that she has to be open about her status to participate in the treatment programme and to be eligible for additional rations, but that the disclosure has made her vulnerable (“Tasmiha” (false name), interview December 2007).

In understanding the political subjectivities of refugees in Tanzania, Liisa Malkki's (Reference Malkki1995) work is important. In Purity and Exile, she writes of the situation prior to the introduction of the new 1998 Refugee Act, but her work remains relevant in examining the impact of camp life on the political reality of refugees. She describes the conditions of the “old caseload” refugees, who lived in isolated settlements, observing that they referred to these settlements as “camps” as a form of resistance to the government characterization of them as villages. The isolation, supervision by government authorities and limitations on mobility, although not as extreme as the current “designated area” regulations, rendered these settlements as spaces that resembled Agamben's Camp. In her study of imagined identities, Malkki (Reference Malkki1995) found that refugees in the camp-settlements had a much stronger “Burundian” identity than did “town refugees” (those who settled among the Tanzanian citizenry in already existing settlements). The camp-settlement refugees located this identity as a form of authenticity and purity that the town refugees lacked. What this indicates is how isolation in the camp rendered settlement refugees politically isolated and distinct from Tanzania and its citizenship structures. They were fundamentally excluded to the degree that they excluded themselves in their own mythologies, self-identifying as different, with far more rigid identities than those of the more integrated town refugees. In contrast, the town refugees saw the camp refugees as “not free – that they [were] prisoners since they cannot leave, go anywhere, without permission…that they are always guarded, like that” (Malkki Reference Malkki1995, 200–1).

This lack of freedom and exclusion is concretized in the era of “designated areas”. While limitations on movement in the settlements could be overcome with an application for a permit, this is no longer a possibility. Refugees must remain within four kilometres of the boundaries of the camp. The right to freedom of movement, right to work and right to participate afforded to refugees with full Convention status are all denied to the residents of the camp. The camp thus becomes an exceptional space that represents a suspension of law by design of the sovereign (Tanzania) itself. As Edwin (“Edwin” (false name), interview December 2007), a refugee school teacher from Cameroon, eloquently states, “People are equal before the law, but here there is a special law for refugees”.

There have been efforts to establish some kind of leadership and participation within the camps. A system of block leaders and camp leaders was established that is attentive to both gender and ethnic divisions. There are also opportunities for “food leaders”, who oversee the distribution of rations, and for other positions within camp services. It is this group that is consulted when changes are made in the camp, and it is to this group that other refugees are expected to go with concerns, questions or complaints. As a form of community governance, however, the system comes up short. Hyndman (Reference Hyndman2000, 137) observes that a refugee camp is not a self-identified community. It is artificially constructed, mandated by the sovereign power of the host state to exist and managed by the UNHCR and government partners in the camp itself. Hyndman (Reference Hyndman2000, 138) argues that schemes that are designed to create or foster self-management assume that a camp can operate as a village. The lack of unity and robust civil society that these models rely upon transform these programmes into mechanisms for increased exclusion and marginality for refugee populations, however, even within their own “spaces”. The degree to which they continue to be legally subordinate and socially segregated is exacerbated, and genuine participation is precluded (Hyndman Reference Hyndman2000, 138). During interviews with refugee leaders, this is reinforced repeatedly. Their role, it is felt, is reduced to information dissemination, rather than genuine participation or contribution (“Basil” (false name), interview December 2007; “Christian” (false name), interview December 2007; “Edwin” (false name), interview December 2007; “Gordon” (false name), interview December 2007). The NGO workers and camp administrators put the participation gap down to a lack of skills and knowledge on the part of the refugees. After all, they point out, policies are based on international conventions and so some degree of knowledge is required in order to participate (“Craig” (false name), interview January 2008). Moreover, they argue that refugees from Burundi are not familiar with democracy and so “it is difficult to assess their needs”, and that they are unwilling to be open to any changes that are made (“Jonas” (false name), interview December 2007).

It should be noted, however, that some gains have been achieved. Richard, an administrator in the Department of Refugee Services, explains that while refugees are not directly involved, they are consulted over any change regarding service provision through their leaders and are responsible for information dissemination. When the block leaders raise problems with the village chairman, they can bring them to camp authorities. This has created positive change. For example, there is now improved efficiency in food provision (“Richard” (false name), interview December 2007). These changes seem to be limited to the practical questions of daily life, however, and do not go to barriers to participation and agency.

The implication of this approach to inclusion is that what participation refugees do have is limited to pragmatic concerns rather than to any policy development or governance. Meanwhile, whenever I ask whether the refugees feel that they are heard or consulted in decisions, or whether they are able to participate, the almost universal response is a smile or chuckle. Most say they would like to participate but are unable to. Edwin (“Edwin” (false name), interview December 2007) is eloquent on the issue:

The director of one of the contributing NGOs in Dar es Salaam observes, when asked about the policy of mandatory encampment, that:

This expectation of categorization linked to territorial containment expresses the dominant understanding that control of the “unknown” and irregular refugee population is both normal and necessary. The refugee camp is a space of exception within the Tanzanian state. Among the population, there is a sense of being excluded and controlled. The repatriation programme has only exacerbated the feeling of being unwelcome. Within the refugee camp, migrants are caught within a space of permanent temporariness and precarity, of being at the will of both the Tanzanian state and the international organizations that manage the camp.

Nduta, however, had been in place for almost fourteen years at the time of my visit. Despite their long-term presence (in the technical language of the field, despite representing a “protracted situation”), refugee camps are always understood as temporary. As Agier (Reference Agier2011, 71) observes, although it is only the emergency and its exceptional character that justifies the camp space, camps nevertheless reproduce themselves and become long-term as a form of “permanent precariousness”. They exist at the will of the government, and their shifting structures and conditions are similarly at the will of the sovereign. As one TCRS administrator says:

They are also not expected to be part of the change, and are contained within the space of exception of the Camp.

Detention in Australia

Hyndman and Mountz (Reference Hyndman, Mountz, Gregory and Pred2007, 88) argue that the state of exception that characterizes a Camp space is almost always justified by temporariness. Much like refugees themselves (see Chapter 3), these spaces are presented as being temporary necessities created in response to a crisis. While this is certainly the case in Tanzania, it is not so in Australia. The creation of exceptional spaces in detention centres that are, in Agamben's sense, “Camps” was part of the border protection regime created during the 1990s. The existence of these spaces has since become an absolutely normal – and often thought necessary – part of the border regime to control irregular migration. As Kathy, an asylum advocate, notes, “mandatory detention was not one of the effects of the Tampa crisis”. It was established by the Labour government in 1992, with bipartisan support. Governments, she argues, need to feel that they are in control of immigration and of borders, and it was felt that the arrival of unauthorized boats meant that they were not (“Kathy” (false name), interview July 2008).

All unauthorized asylum seekers are subject to mandatory detention. At its height, the detention regime included six immigration detention centres. The Department of Immigration and Citizenship's justification of the policy is clear on its foundation in sovereign power:

Although a time limit was originally included in the 1992 legislation that designed mandatory detention, it was removed by a second piece of legislation five months later (“Colin” (false name), interview July 2008).

An account of the more notorious onshore centres of the regime, Woomera, was given to me by Kirsten, a psychologist who worked with several detainees:

The Australian detention centres are spaces of exception where the normal rule of law is suspended. There are two distinct forms that they took after 2001, however: the offshore centres of the Pacific Solution and the onshore immigration detention centres. The offshore centres had the effect of transnationalizing the Australian border, displacing it outside of sovereign territory. They nevertheless remained under the sovereign power of Australia, as their existence depended entirely upon the will of the Australian state, and not of the host state. The offshore centres were exceptional in the capacity of the Australian state to decide when it would take responsibility for the conditions under which irregular migrants lived. Although the centres existed at Australia's behest, and the entry and exit of migrants from the space was entirely governed by Australia, the everyday character of the space was held at arm's length. Amanda Vanstone, the Immigration Minister in 2006, claimed, “We can't make rules in relation to facilities in other countries. We can influence them but we can't make rules…Nauru is another country” (Dastyari Reference Dastyari2007, 7).

These conditions were extreme. Graeme, a member of the political staff of an Australian senator, visited all of the detention centres activated during the Pacific Solution. His recollections are vivid. He describes Manus Island (of Papua New Guinea) as being extremely isolated. The local people were happy because the centre gave them jobs, but his delegation was unable to gain access to the centre itself after “being waved off with guns”. There were able to enter the centre on Nauru, ostensibly to visit the nuns working there. It was undergoing changes at the time, but the sewage system had broken down. It was, he said, “a god-forsaken hell hole” in its isolation and lack of freedom (“Graeme” (false name), interview August 2008).

These descriptions stand in contrast to the IOM's assessment of conditions, which were in their estimation up to international standards. The IOM officer I speak to is at pains to point out that the island centres were processing centres and not detention centres, which would have been against the IOM's Charter. To drive this point home, he describes how the IOM management refused to allow the erection of a fence around the centre as it was not a prison; the isolation was enough to provide the population control (“Lee” (false name), interview August 2008). The UNHCR also characterized the conditions in the island centres as being “better than the onshore sites” (“Amy” (false name), interview August 2008). Despite these assessments, however, a psychologist who visited the centre says that he had never before seen such devastation. It was a timebomb, in his estimation, and anyone in one of the centres for more than six months would begin to deteriorate (“Adam” (false name), interview August 2008). Most detainees were interned for well over two years.

Although the United Nations Human Rights Commission examined the policy of detention and concluded that the centres “do not per se constitute a breach of Australia's international obligations” (Illingworth Reference Illingworth and Kneebone2003, 104), the conditions of detention have been the subject of international and domestic condemnation for breaches of internationally defined human rights. Detainees were denied dignities as simple as their names – they were called more regularly by their case numbers – or translators, who were often not provided to individuals undergoing medical examinations or procedures. Children were confined in an environment widely held to be inhospitable to their development and growth. Contact with the outside world, including the ability to contact home and confirm arrival or to access communities of support, was limited and difficult (Amnesty International 2005; HREOC 2002a; Mares Reference Mares2002).

The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (now the Australian Human Rights Commission) analyzed the detention system and concluded that it was in violation of human rights. However, as Kristie, a case worker, states clearly, “the government doesn't have to listen to our recommendations”. The centres are outside of normal avenues of politics. A report, including several recommendations for changes, was filed at the conclusion of the study. None of the recommendations were taken up, and the government reply asserted its sovereign right to control its borders (“Kristie” (false name), interview August 2008).

Since 2001, changes have been made in response to public pressure that have improved the conditions at the various centres and have been applauded by the HREOC as steps in a positive direction (HREOC 2002a; Mares Reference Mares2002, 33, 87). The most recent changes were announced in June 2005 and focus on the conditions of children's lives. Children in detention are now moved to supervised housing rather than an institutional centre, in an effort to establish what the Department calls a more “positive” environment (Grewcock Reference Grewcock2009; HREOC 2005). These changes came about as a result of an HREOC report and an NGO campaign, led by the group ChilOut. The decision to focus on children was strategic. Kristie elaborates:

Children were thought to be both the most likely group to generate public support and the least threatening to the regime; children are not usually understood as possessing political agency, and are thus excluded from politics generally. Moreover, the legal guardian of all children in detention is the Minister. As Kristie (“Kristie” (false name), interview August 2008) observes, “this is ridiculous, given that he's the one detaining them”. This does mean, however, that an appeal to changes in matters regarding children is more easily incorporated into the discourse of sovereignty.

Although terrible, the conditions of the detention centres are not what fundamentally defines detention as a state of exception within Australian sovereignty. Rather, it is the legal framework and structure that has been created around detention that is most effective in managing the subjectivity of unauthorized asylum seekers. Paige observes that “in most places, it could be said of the detainees that they were not ‘there’” (“Paige” (false name), interview August 2008). Villawood, for example, is not “legally” in New South Wales; it is outside of its jurisdiction. For Carol, a lawyer, this means that any work done with detainees is pro bono (“Carol” (false name), interview August 2008). For the detainees, it means that they are outside of normal jurisprudence and exposed to the machinations of the federal state. As Carol observes:

Upon arrival in Australia, unauthorized, irregular arrivals are assessed and interviewed, but without access to legal advice. They have no right to legal advice until after they have entered the asylum process, unless they specifically request it while in detention and the advice they seek is regarding detention rather than a broader asylum issue. There is no legislative right to an oral hearing, and submissions and applications must be made in writing and in English (Crock Reference Crock and Kneebone2003, 64–6). As unauthorized arrivals frequently do not speak English and are unfamiliar with the Australian system, these measures may present insurmountable barriers to achieving a successful asylum application.

In addition to the limitations on the legal rights of unauthorized arrivals, the Migration Act (and particularly the 2001 amendments) severely limits the power of the courts to intervene in migration decisions (Crock Reference Crock and Kneebone2003, 74). Appeals may be made to various tribunals, such as the Refugee Review Tribunal, but at the final instance the only figure with the power to overturn a bureaucratic decision in favour of the asylum seeker is the Minister for Immigration (Crock Reference Crock and Kneebone2003, 60, 74). In the state of exception where the “normal” order is suspended, the sovereign power is all that is able to take decisions and establish the border between included and excluded, or entry and forced exit. This injects significant arbitrariness into the process, exacerbating the state of exception embodied by detention. Further to this, the Department has a policy of keeping new arrivals separate from longer-term detainees in order to prevent what it terms “coaching”. Despite official justifications in terms of health quarantines, Peter Mares argues that the underlying motivation for this separation is to keep new arrivals from being informed of what rights they can access, or how to effectively claim asylum (Mares Reference Mares2002, 45).

The ultimate result of these initial measures for a significant proportion of unauthorized arrivals is that they are “screened out” at the beginning of the process. If, during the initial interview conducted at arrival, an individual does not explicitly mention “refugee” or “asylum”, or otherwise indicate any serious fear of returning to their homeland in the judgment of immigration officials, they are excluded from the process of asylum seeking entirely and are removed “as soon as is practicable” (Mares Reference Mares2002, 51). These measures are made more punitive by the introduction of legislation in 2001 that allows officials to make “negative inferrals” about the identity and nationality of a claimant in the absence of proper documentation that cannot be “reasonably explained” (Commonwealth of Australia 2005a). If an applicant is “screened out”, or if their claim is rejected but they cannot be returned to their country of origin due to a lack of diplomatic ties or a condition of effective statelessness (as is the case for many Palestinian refugees), the High Court of Australia has confirmed that they can be held in immigration detention for the rest of their lives, so long as the Australian state maintains the intention of deportation (Amnesty International 2005).

The indeterminate nature of detention marks it fundamentally as a space of exception; there is no maximum time limit, and for some detainees incarceration may be indefinite. This not only keeps the potentially “disruptive” unauthorized asylum seekers separate from the “normal” order of the nation-state but also has a direct psychological consequences for the detainees, in terms of both their political subjectivity and their capacity for political agency. In August 1998, the federal Minister for Health, Michael Wooldridge, launched a general practitioners’ manual for refugee health. In his unveiling speech, he noted, “Creating uncertainty and insecurity…is one of the most dangerous ways to add to the harm that torturers do” (quoted in Mares Reference Mares2002, 26). One year later, the TPV system was introduced, which made the only status possible for unauthorized and irregular migrants a temporary one and thus extended the uncertainty of detention to their existence after release.

The exceptional nature of the waters surrounding Australia impacts migrants as they attempt border crossings, and is itself shaped by migrant presence and action. There is another side to this fence, however, which emerges for the lucky few migrants who pass through detention and are granted status and leave to live in the community. The exceptionality continues for these individuals. Under the TPV regime, their residence was not permanent, but always conditional. The limitations in place for TPV holders make them separate and excluded from the normal operations of societal practices, including basic work rights and access to education. As observed in Chapter 5, the TPV regime was cancelled in early 2008, but the 2013 election campaign has brought it back into the public consideration. The granting of a more permanent status seems to be a tenuous proposition, and even if the TPVs are not reintroduced, the continued denial of rights and access to services justified by irregular entry seems likely, if not certain. Indeed, one campaign platform of the Liberal Party, which won the election, was the outright refusal of permanent status for any irregular arrival (BBC 16 August 2013). The deterrence element of the policy works well. As one Iraqi man held at the Woomera facility told the HREOC in 2001, “I cannot tolerate this camp. That is why I have asked DIMIA to send me back. I know I will be punished but I have accepted to go back” (quoted in HREOC 2002b). Helpfully, the Department will provide asylum seekers who voluntarily withdraw their claims and agree to return to the country of origin a “resettlement package” that includes money and supplies to facilitate their return (Commonwealth of Australia 2005b).

The use of detention in Australia is clearly an assertion of the sovereign power over exception. As Kathy observes, there is no concrete evidence that mandatory detention has had any impact on arrivals, as it was not until long after it was introduced that the number of boats declined, and by then other factors were in play (“Kathy” (false name), interview July 2008). Nevertheless, for Paige, “immigration always trumped all. It became more explicit that detention was for deterrence and this was used to justify the harm done to those in the system. I have quotes…from the Minister to this effect” (“Paige” (false name), interview August 2008). She goes on to characterize the border policy as “macho” and “hard-line”. For the government, she says, the protection of national sovereignty was seen as underlying everything; a “fair go” was turned around and “these people were seen as cheats”.

In the end, about eighty percent of the Tampa asylum seekers – the group of irregular migrants who triggered the 2001 amendments – were given refugee status, but not until after they had lived through the “terribly destructive” detention system (“Anne” (false name), interview July 2008). Meanwhile, even some of those who advocate for the detainees, both in the NGO sector and in the government, remain committed to the notion of legitimate refugees and the idea that if “they have access to rights and laws [in detention], it is all right. As long as everything is in place” (“Alan” (false name), interview July 2008). “I have never known in Australia a greater sense of otherness of a group,” says Julie (“Julie” (false name), interview July 2008), an activist and advocate. This otherness only underscores the exceptionality of irregular migrants in Australia, and normalizes the space of the Camp.

Relations of power in the Camp

Soguk (Reference Soguk1999, 9) asks of the politics of migration and discourses of asylum and borders:

We have to ask, he argues, what impact the Camp has in the “real”. The spatial configuration of the Camp is designed to manage and control not simply the mobility of irregular migrants but also their capacity for political agency. In doing so, it functions as an attempt to re-capture the disruptive impact of irregularity, to re-inscribe it into the structures of the state. For Khosravi (Reference Khosravi2010, 70), “refugeeness” is imposed not as a category but as a mode of being in itself. The Camp does so by rendering irregularity exceptional. This re-inscription is reflective of the operations of power by the sovereign and the response(s) of irregular migrants that challenge its capacity to decide.

Foucault understands power relations as constituting the omnipresence of a dialectical relationship: wherever there is power, there is resistance. For Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin Fat (Reference Edkins and Pin Fat2005), the exceptionality of the Camp renders such resistance impossible. They argue that resistance requires a degree of freedom; indeed, for them, relations of power can only be exercised over free subjects, and only to the degree that they are free. Agamben's conceptualization of bare life within the Camp, and its “nakedness” against the imposition of sovereign power, suggests that exceptionality is characterized by a lack of this freedom, and thus by the impossibility of resistance. Evidence from an analysis of the structures of the refugee camp and the detention centre and their impact on irregular migrants seems, at first glance, to support this conclusion. Migrant narratives from both spaces suggest feelings of exclusion and powerlessness that are interpreted within the Agambian framework as precisely such a condition. For Edkins and Pin Fat (Reference Edkins and Pin Fat2005), the works of both Foucault and Agamben are gesturing towards the conclusion that bare life is a life in which power relations are, therefore, absent. The Camp is thus not a space of power relations, but one of the relations of violence (Edkins and Pin Fat Reference Edkins and Pin Fat2005).

This analysis renders the condition of irregularity profoundly abject and so makes a “politics” of irregularity impossible where “politics” is contestation and struggle. It is an analysis that accounts for the spatial structure of the Camp but that fails to account for the agency of the migrant, except to render it impossible. In this analysis, the political agency of the irregular migrant is not simply controlled, but excised. Power relations are about agency. They are about the contestation of action; relations of violence act directly upon the body of the Other (Edkins and Pin Fat Reference Edkins and Pin Fat2005, 3–10). To follow Edkins and Pin Fat, and in many ways Agamben, these two sets of relations are mutually exclusive. To assert that power relations are absent from the space of the Camp is to suggest that irregular migrants have not only been excluded and made exceptional but also been denied the capacity to act and to speak (cf Khosravi Reference Khosravi2010).

Such an understanding of exceptionality, and of irregularity, fails to begin from the position of the migrant. Relations of violence are certainly present in the Camp space; this is clear. Moreover, irregular migrants and asylum seekers are actively denied the capacity to legitimately engage in political acts or speech, to be recognized and heard, and as such are rendered as bare life. This does not mean, however, that migrants do not act, or speak. Indeed, persistent contestations of the sovereign power and the exceptionality of the Camp are perceptible throughout their everyday strategies and activities. Recent contributions from scholars such as Agier (Reference Agier2011), Khosravi (Reference Khosravi2010), McNevin (Reference McNevin2006), Rygiel (Reference Rygiel2010) and Squire (Reference Squire and Squire2011) are instrumental in revealing the ways in which non-citizen agency and power are not only present in the Camp space but also re-shape it. It is to this that the next two chapters turn; I propose that the space of the Camp can be reconfigured if migrant action and speech are taken seriously in our analysis, and examine how an understanding of the non-citizen agency this suggests reveals a potentially powerful politics. Chapter 7 rethinks the spatial dimensions of the camp, contesting the fixed borders asserted in analysis that affirms exceptionality as a relation of violence. Chapter 8 returns us to a consideration of time not as future-oriented but as a series of “moments” in the everyday, asking how this kind of localized analysis can contribute to our understanding of not only irregularity and migrant agency but also non-citizenship and citizenship.