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The Embrace of Border Security:Maritime Jurisdiction,
NationalSovereignty, and the Geopolitics ofOperation Sovereign
BordersPeter Chambersaa School of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Deakin University, WaurnPonds, AustraliaPublished online: 06 Apr
2015.
To cite this article: Peter Chambers (2015) The Embrace of
Border Security: Maritime Jurisdiction,National Sovereignty, and
the Geopolitics of Operation Sovereign Borders, Geopolitics, 20:2,
404-437,DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2015.1004399
To link to this article:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2015.1004399
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Geopolitics, 20:404437, 2015Copyright Taylor & Francis
Group, LLCISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 onlineDOI:
10.1080/14650045.2015.1004399
The Embrace of Border Security: MaritimeJurisdiction, National
Sovereignty, and theGeopolitics of Operation Sovereign Borders
PETER CHAMBERSSchool of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin
University, Waurn Ponds, Australia
Border security has become one of the key means by which
thesovereignty and security of powerful nation-states is projected.
Thispaper offers a set of observations of the Australian
Commonwealthsdescriptions and instructions for its embrace of
border security.Border security is legible here as a geopolitics
that transforms therights and responsibilities of maritime
jurisdictions into a spaceof security that projects national
sovereignty through the interdic-tion of boat arrivals. Its
intensification as Operation SovereignBorders is read as a further
variation within national sovereignty,one that elevates the
decisionist prerogative into total deterrence.Operation Sovereign
Borders pushes the limits of sovereigntys exis-tence in the state
toward a total domination of space, perceptionand human life in
Australias maritime jurisdictions, in the nameof the nation. This
necessitates the development, defence and rein-forcement of a
regionally engaged materiality that is embodied,extended, enacted,
and distributed. The intended effect of thiscoordinated effort is
to secure the nations sovereignty as a unity,but the broader effect
has been to devalue offshore life to secureonshore interests, in a
way that now necessitates indefinite offshoredetention.
For those whove come across the seas,weve boundless plains to
share
Advance Australia Fair, Australian National Anthem
Address correspondence to Peter Chambers, School of Humanities
and SocialSciences, Deakin University, 75 Pigdons Road, Waurn
Ponds, VIC 3216, Australia. E-mail:[email protected]
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can
be found online at www.tandfonline.com/fgeo.
404
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The Embrace of Border Security 405
Fuck off, were full!bumper sticker and Facebook group
INTRODUCTION
Over the past decade and a half, Australia has been one of a
growingnumber of countries that have embraced border security. In
September2013, Operation Sovereign Borders was instituted. The
policy, announcedin July 2013 and disseminated as a PDF pamphlet,
formed a key plankof the Australian Liberal-National Coalitions
successful election campaign.Operation Sovereign Borders is
described in the pamphlet as a military-ledresponse to combat
people smuggling and to protect our borders. The pam-phlet
describes the situation as of July 2013 as a national emergency,
andpromises that a Coalition government, if elected, would tackle
it with thefocus and energy that an emergency demands. The scale of
the problem,the pamphlet asserts, requires the discipline and focus
of a targeted militaryoperation.1
The problem to which the pamphlet refers is the attempted
arrival byboat of people seeking to be processed by Australian
immigration authoritiesin the hope of being found to be refugees.
Onshore, these people are mostlyreferred to as either asylum
seekers or illegals. Operation Sovereign Bordersis currently
attempting to prevent any would-be arrivals by boat a policyof
total deterrence.
This paper argues that the emergence of Operation Sovereign
Bordersis legible as an intensification of a set of political
tendencies nameable globally as border security. My understanding
of borders here has drawninspiration from Mark Salters theorisation
of border as suture, at once adivision and a knitting together of
legal spheres, sovereignties and authori-ties.2 With Salters
paradoxical conception of the border as a stalking horsethroughout,
the starting point for my positioning of the observer is
MatthewSparkes perceptive synthesis, where he asserts that borders
are consequen-tial condensation points where wider changes in
state-making and the natureof citizenship are worked out on the
ground.3 These wider changes havebeen traced through a number of
other jurisdictions, regions, and polities4:this paper focuses on
the contemporary Australian case, from a critical theo-retical
perspective that remains focused on border security, not just
bordersor security.
I emphasise border security as a conceptual unity in part
because thisforegrounds traces from transformations of one state
border for border secu-rity, guided by Salters assertion that the
state border is the sine qua non ofsovereignty, the political and
the human.5 I also emphasise border securityas a conceptual unity
because it renders visible a point of observation fromwhich we can
see its political agency as such.6 In circular fashion,
Operation
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406 Peter Chambers
Sovereign Borders is in many ways seeking sovereign closure on
the matterof Australian borders by enacting Operation Sovereign
Borders. But it does soas border security, which, in inflicting
domestically constructed conceptionsof sovereignty both on the
regions nation-states and non-citizens whowould arrive opens
fundamental questions of sovereignty. Simultaneously,the enaction
of border security enforces national sovereignty in a numberof ways
that Operation Sovereign Borders cannot question, but that are
fun-damentally questionable. In chasing the tail of these
operations, this paperseeks to break out of the viciously circular
logic that Operation SovereignBorders enacts and the cruelty it
inflicts as it does so. Jacques Derrida writesthat the sovereign is
alone in exercising sovereignty. Sovereignty cannot beshared, it is
indivisible. The sovereign is alone (sovereign) or is not.7
Thequestion of national sovereignty, enacted as border security,
poses the fol-lowing research question: how does a nation secure
its unity by sharing itssovereignty with itself?
To speak of border security is also to speak of people, for it
is people,actual people, who are detained and who suffer the
cruelty8 of Australianauthority as border security in the name of a
people, as sovereign andnation. As Niklas Luhmann phrases it, in a
way that echoes the insightsof the work of Alison Mountz, Whereas
human beings count as personsin the space of inclusion, in the
space of exclusion they seem to countonly as bodies.9 I want to
hold open the tension here in the seeming,because as Salter rightly
asserts in speaking of the suturing of sovereignty,Even as
citizenship stretches and strains, it remains a way of
connectingrights, responsibilities, and provides a foregrounding
for democracy.10 PaceMountz and Salter, I also I want to emphasise
the differential experience andvisibility of bordering as a
transitive world-making, world-dividing processcalled border
security: the border is not everywhere for everyone.
Border securitys worlds, all over the world, are also connected
toimmigration detention and processing apparatuses that deal out
belonging,exclusion, protection, ejection, suspension. Though this
distribution of lifechances cannot be the focus of the paper, it is
the broader context framingthe critical concerns driving what
follows. Border security has become a keymeans of suspending and
withholding meaningful life for some, in the nameof the life of the
nation and those securely onshore within it. The mean-ing and value
of life itself in the eyes and forms and practices of certainagents
of states is what is at stake in contemporary state work as
bordersecurity. Whose living, moving and free circulation must be
secured anddefended? Who must be impeded, interdicted, detained;
who is exposed tocruelty and death? Australian border security
currently attempts to negate thepolitics implied in such questions
by suspending the political status of thoseit interdicts not least
of all by detaining all boat arrivals offshore, when-ever it is
possible to do so. But in this attempted negation there is also
themess, tensions, passions and contradictions driving a key
emergent site of
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The Embrace of Border Security 407
political contention, full of agency. A world in which national
border secu-rity is unnecessary might also be a world in which
global political justicebecomes possible.
In practice, Australian border security is unthinkable without
consider-ing its unique regional geography, as well as its
isolation and relative wealth.Total deterrence of all would-be boat
arrivals only becomes possible becauseof the storm-prone,
shark-infested moat that separates the island continentfrom
Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. In this sense, Australia is
uniqueamong the wealthy, powerful nation-states of the contemporary
as a nation-state in which border securitys ideals can be realised,
where the dream oftotal deterrence expressed by stop the boats can
come true. This means that,while the claims here are related to
general transformations of sovereignty asborder security, we should
never lose sight of the specificity of the case andthe onshore
peculiarities of contemporary Australian parliamentary politics.One
onshore Australian peculiarity emerges because of the dominance
ofMurdoch-owned mass media, which has been nakedly partisan in its
supportof border security slogans such as stop the boats, which are
made sensicalthrough the near complete dominance of a deterrence
script11 developedover more than a decade and a half. Onshore this
always-already pre- andre-mediated reality of mass media is
politically indissociable from, and fullyunintelligible without
recourse to related factors such as immigration deten-tion,12 the
politics of human mobility,13 the agency and motivations of
peoplemoving across borders,14 the possibility of escape,15 and
Australias responsi-bilities under international law16 and
migration law.17 Much of the scholarlyliterature on the Australian
case conflates these issues; very few treat bor-der security in and
on its own terms. For these reasons, this paper remainscommitted to
rendering the specificities of Australias contemporary
bordersecurity arrangements intelligible in terms of the general
conditions withwhich they are enabled and enacted, in order to
disclose the transformationsof sovereignty of which they are both a
part and an agentic contributor.
They key document under close analysis throughout this paper is
theGuide to Australian Maritime Security Arrangements (GAMSA),
which isplaced in relation to Australias stated, mapped
responsibilities. GAMSA givesorder and orientation to Australian
border security by giving a full explica-tion of the roles and
responsibilities government agents must undertake foreach of the
eight categories of civil maritime threats it identifies. For the
pur-poses of clarity, brevity, and alignment with Operation
Sovereign Borders,this paper focuses on the fifth listed threat,
irregular maritime arrivals.
GAMSA is read as prescriptive and descriptive for Operation
SovereignBorders. It is prescriptive in that it provides a set of
instructions for theCommonwealths stakeholders on how to do border
security. But in doingso, it is descriptive in that it lays out
elements for a generalisable apparatusof border security. It is so
first of all because it is intelligible, portable andreplicable, in
a way that can be further developed and re-applied by other
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408 Peter Chambers
agents working for nation-states and in the name of security.
Second, it isgeneralisable insofar as it partakes of and adds to an
existing set of popular,already-instituted responses to human
mobility as border security. It shareswith these responses a
language containing a set of assumptions, instructionsand
descriptions. In these ways, it is an iterative iteration, a
recursive formof communication18 that becomes agentic as it is
attached to specific andintelligible parts of apparatuses. In both
these ways, border security is aparadigm, and increasingly, it is
the dominant paradigm for responding toforms of mobility judged
problematic or threatening by public and privateagents of states
and their security. With this characterisation in mind,
themethodological aim with the close reading undertaken here is to
producea critical and spatial account of border securitys
instructions for itself anddescriptions of itself: it is a set of
second-order observations on orders foroperations,19 which the mess
and complexity of enacted practice and politicalrhetoric
continually perturbs and reiterates.
The approach taken here follows the international political
sociology ofDidier Bigo, Mark Salter, Louise Amoore and others,20
and has also learnedmuch from the methodology and presentational
style of Stephen Collierstopological analysis of the spatial logic
of domestic security in the UnitedStates.21 Common to these
approaches is the simultaneous presentation oftwo emphases. The
first emphasis is on close empirical attention to theways and means
by which data appears and is translated into and realisedas
actionable, portable forms of knowledge expertise, risk factors,
nat-ural facts, operating environments, threat objects which can be
handledto assure the safe passage of authority through a complex
set of powerrelations. The second emphasis develops critical
theoretical analyses of theeffects of these assembled elements as
deployed: what they do politically,and, schematically, how they do
it.
This methodological approach has also been further enriched
byapproaches to critical geography which emphasise the extensively,
inten-sively spatial dimensions of apparatuses.22 With Dalby,23
this takes shapehere as an attempt to render explicit the
geographical language implicitin the formulation of contemporary
policy. Of course words are deeds,but here, I seek to go beyond
language and formulation and also showkey points of border
securitys materiality, and how that is constitutively anenacted
politics that is about the domination of space. My intention here
isto offer a grounded theory sufficiently critical and spatial for
understandinggeneral transformations that border security names.
This is a critical geopol-itics, because it encourages us to employ
a reflexive understanding that,potentially at least, offers a way
of reconceiving key geopolitical notions ofjurisdiction and
sovereignty. To do this I also employ insights from
criticaljurisprudence,24 which I introduce in the following
section. But it is also anenacted geopolitics, because it consists
in an actual domination of regionalspace by agents working in the
name of a nation and its sovereignty: it is
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The Embrace of Border Security 409
a concrete order of domination.25 To begin as a critical
geopolitics tracingthe actual geopolitical domination border
security involves, the analysis nowbegins with an articulation of
the space and jurisdiction of Australian bordersecurity.
MAPPING MARITIME JURISDICTION AND NATIONALSOVEREIGNTY
National Objective, Maritime Security, Australian Law
GAMSA begins with the following sentence: Australias national
objectivefor maritime security is to deter or prevent illegal
activity from occurring inAustralias maritime jurisdiction and
where necessary to interdict and enforceAustralian laws.26 This
places GAMSAs ordering firmly on the side of law.Metonymically,
this siding also evinces a compression of nation, ocean, secu-rity,
activity, jurisdiction, and a territorial order of law. It is this
compressedset of factors which are asserted as the national
objective. Jerry Brotton hasasserted that a map always manages the
reality it tries to show.27 GAMSAs2013 edition includes a variant
of the following Geoscience Australia map,Australias Maritime
Jurisdiction (Figure 1). GAMSA shows how this vastspace according
to the deputy commander of Border Protection Command(BPC) 11% of
the earths oceans28 might be managed for the nationalobjective in a
way that would secure this avowed 11% as border
securitysreality.
Managing to show Australias maritime jurisdictions in a way that
is legalfrom an Australian perspective means Australian law must be
present, at leastin some sense. For activity to occur in the
maritime jurisdictions that GAMSAnominates as Australias in a way
that deterrence measures would haveto be applied Australian laws
would already have to be present. Bordersecurity cannot respond
lawfully without a space and time of Australian lawthat is
spatio-temporally already and sovereignly there.
This is because the way in which this space and time of state
lawis conventionally given is through state sovereignty, where
sovereignty isco-extensive with the modern state, and indivisible
the entire power ofthe state has to be vested in a single locus, a
centralized legal authority.29
Authority and responsibility for certain spaces as maritime
jurisdictions isheld in this conventional account to emanate from
the territorial order ofstate sovereignty. Australian border
security moves to the offshore oceaniclimit from its onshore
territorial centre. When sovereignty was embodiedin a monarch, this
centre was the living body of the King or Queen; in anation-state
such as Australia, sovereignty is centred equally and
evenlythroughout the territory, where it remains or does it?
The following assertion from the Operation Sovereign Borders
pam-phlet rhetorically aligns the commitment of the Liberal Party
with the most
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FIGURE1
Australiasmaritimejurisdictio
n(source:
Geo
science
Australia).
410
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The Embrace of Border Security 411
conspicuous assertion of sovereignty in recent Australian
political life. In away that will become crucial for this analysis,
it is also, note well, an assertionof national sovereignty:
It was Prime Minister John Howard who declared that we will
decidewho comes to this country and the circumstances in which they
come.This was a statement of national sovereignty and the need for
Australiato control our borders. A Coalition government will
restore real policiesthat live up to this declaration.30
In the past five years, this decisionist prerogative has been
synthesised inAustralian onshore politics in the compressed
repetition of the rhetoricalphrase stop the boats, which is
ubiquitously known because of mass media:spokespeople from the
Coalition repeat the phrase, and news media dis-seminate it. Both
the repetition and the dissemination are crucial phasesinvolved in
the articulation of national sovereignty. Onshore, through
theeffective synthesis achieved by dint of repetition, stop the
boats has becomea synecdochal phrase that compresses the entire
semiotic process thatsecuring national sovereignty through border
security has actually involved,throughout the history of its
present.
Stop the boats tells its addressees what is necessary, what is
desirable,once accession to the decisionist prerogative to decide
who can arrive andhow has been reached or agreed to, whether
explicitly or tacitly. And yet: Wewill decide . . . and stop the
boats can be read, I am arguing, as indicatingnot merely an
expression, but a transformation of sovereignty not theeffect, but
an actual change that generates effects. In order to understandthis
shift, we need to first re-think jurisdiction.
Jurisdiction and Sovereignty: Ordering, Law, Land,
Population
Jurisdiction is the inaugural topological gesture that delimits
the law: anordering of space and a localisation.31 The assertion of
jurisdiction is theprimary imposition of order and place.32 We can
think of this through acompressed reenactment of the order of
events establishing the territorialorder of law in any
colonial-settler nation-state, in three stages. Jurisdiction
isexpressed; the colonisation of space is enacted; sovereignty is a
later expres-sion over that space in a way to paraphrase Dorsett
and McVeigh thaterases any memory of a time in which the laws
jurisdiction was anythingother than complete and unified.33 In this
account: jurisdiction first, thensovereignty.
What then is sovereignty? Sovereignty is a retrospective
expression ofpast, present and future unity that screens the
actual, non-unified, het-erogeneous processes of land appropriation
that enabled it, including theexpressions of jurisdiction that
ordered the land appropriation that became
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412 Peter Chambers
the territory. In order for there to be sovereign territory that
can be threat-ened, bordered, protected, secured there had to be a
colonising populationtransforming the assertions of jurisdiction
over land by occupying and devel-oping that land into territory. In
the case of Australias history, all of thiscame across the sea by
boat, at least until the advent of civil aviation as masstransport
in the 1970s. Australian sovereignty was a boat arrival. How canwe
think about the relation between jurisdiction and sovereignty,
territoryand law, based on the re-ordering suggested by critical
jurisprudence?
Let us rethink the order as follows: sovereignty emanates from
terri-torial law, but territorial law emanates from land
appropriation, and landappropriation was enunciated through
jurisdiction, prior to any sovereignty.Sovereignty becomes the
effect of an appropriation process that transformsa population into
a people a nation through the domination of space.Operation
Sovereign Borders shows one among many contemporary casesin which a
nation is seeking to secure a space for itself through
enactingdomination of space as border security, using jurisdiction
in a way thatmakes sovereignty effective.
Maritime Jurisdictions, Non-sovereign Conditions, Spatial
Limits
What of the contemporary ocean and its jurisdictions? GAMSA
explicatesAustralias maritime jurisdiction by placing it within the
ambit of the1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
(UNCLOS). Theimportance of UNCLOS is described in GAMSA as
follows:
UNCLOS provides a comprehensive international legal regime for
useof the sea and its resources. UNCLOS establishes a legal order
of theseas that seeks to balance the rights and responsibilities of
coastal statesagainst the rights and responsibilities of other sea
users in areas suchas navigation, conservation and management of
living resources and thestudy, protection and preservation of the
marine environment. It alsoclearly establishes and delineates the
various maritime zones over whichstates may exercise different
degrees of jurisdiction.34
As a comprehensive international legal regime and as a legal
order of theseas UNCLOS is strikingly unlike the legal order of a
territory and nation-state such as Australia. Like all state-based
law, Australian law has to expressitself as sovereign in order to
be law. But as a topological gesture that estab-lishes and
delineates those spaces that can lawfully be treated as
Australias,UNCLOSs is an ordering of space that does without
sovereignty, though onlyas the effect of a convention agreed to by
a number of sovereign nation-states. Recalling the opening sentence
of GAMSA, Australian border securityexists in order to secure the
national objective, and this has and has tohave sovereignty
standing behind it. But in delineating the zones overwhich
Australia can exercise different degrees of jurisdiction,
non-sovereign
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The Embrace of Border Security 413
UNCLOS offers Australian sovereignty an authorised place to sit
and speakand act as border security, in order to secure itself and
its interests aplace GAMSA accepts by acceding to the above. In a
way, GAMSA allowsUNCLOS to tell Australia where and to what extent
it can be sovereign, forthe purposes of border security.
GAMSA describes the following maritime jurisdictions, consistent
withUNCLOS norms: territorial sea baseline (TSB); internal waters;
coastal waters;territorial sea; contiguous zone; exclusive economic
zone (EEZ); continen-tal shelf. Also consistent with these
international norms, the Commonwealthexercises full sovereignty
over its territorial sea, its seabed and subsoil, andover the
airspace above it.35 Its worth pausing to consider the phrase
fullsovereignty and its spatial limit: the territorial sea extends
up to twelve nau-tical miles from the TSB. Beyond the territorial
sea for example, in theExclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which
stretches to 200 nautical miles fromthe TSB Australia exercises
sovereign rights for the purpose of exploringand exploiting,
conserving and managing all natural resources of the waters,seabed
and subsoil, together with other activities such as the production
ofenergy from water, currents and wind.36 GAMSAs assertion of
sovereigntyin the EEZ is interesting, because it suggests that
sovereignty can be under-stood in this zone as merely an exclusive
right to explore, exploit,conserve and manage resources.37 This
shows a conceptual alignmentbetween sovereignty, exclusivity and
the right to extract,38 but, pace Derridasinsistence on
indivisibility, can there be partial sovereignty? Australias
juris-dictional responsibilities depend on it; international
co-operation and Safetyof Life at Sea rely on it. But what of
national sovereignty, which depends forits effective expression in
Australian maritime jurisdictions on the decisionistprerogative,
which is a categorical assertion of a right to decide for all
arrivalsand the conditions of their arrival, given urgency by
background conditionsdescribed as a crisis and national
emergency?
The presence of partial sovereignty shows how rhetorical
expres-sions of national sovereignty such as Howards decisionist
prerogativenecessarily exclude partial spaces and overriding
responsibilities from theavowed wholeness Operation Sovereign
Borders seeks to secure as Australia.Australias maritime
jurisdictions are full of such rights and responsibilities,but
rhetorical assertions of national sovereignty are emptied of them.
We canthus observe one of the constitutive blind spots of the
Operation: nationalsovereignty is dispossessed of the fullness that
it claims for itself when itasserts itself categorically.
Jurisdictional rights and responsibilities necessar-ily fill up
Australia with conditions imposed upon it by non-sovereign
normssuch as UNCLOSs, and this diminishes national sovereignty in
the sense inwhich the decisionist prerogative expresses it.
If the zone in which maritime interdictions of irregular
maritime arrivalsoccur is not sovereignly Australia, in what sense
is border security beingpursued sovereignly, in a way that is
consistent with the national objective?
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414 Peter Chambers
Strictly speaking, for a vessel to threaten Australias
sovereignty, it wouldhave to arrive in the territorial sea. Such
boats seldom arrive. Arrivals thatreach as far as Australias
territorial sea constitute exceptional cases, such asthe vessel
that arrived in Geraldton, Western Australia, in June 2013. The
SriLankans aboard that boat arrived in Australia by accident; they
had intendedto sail for New Zealand.39 Does this then mean that
most arrivals, who eitherarrive in the EEZ near Christmas Island,
Cocos-Keeling Islands or AshmoreReef, are partial threats to
partial sovereignty?
Further, arrivals seldom arrive in Australia precisely because
they areprevented from doing so: they are interdicted so that they
do not arrive. Thisis consonant with the deterrence aspect of the
national objective for maritimesecurity, but as it complicates any
talk of arrivals, let alone of those arrivalsbeing threats to
sovereignty. It also complicates and renders ambiguous thefull
legality of what is being undertaken. In the case of illegal
foreign fishingor whaling, Australia has sovereign rights within
the EEZ: to the extent thatsuch agents are extracting resources,
this is recognisably unlawful in a waythat is consistent both with
the extent of Australian sovereignty and the waythat sovereignty is
recognised in UNCLOSs norms. But in the absence offull sovereignty,
how does BPC interdict boat arrivals in a way that is fullylawful?
In order to approach this question, we have to consider two
furtherjurisdictions, the Australian Search and Rescue Region (SRR)
and the SecurityForces Authority Area (SFAA).
SFAA: Authority Beyond Sovereignty or Responsibility?
Beyond the EEZ, there exist two further jurisdictions, SRR and
SFAA. Spatially,they are co-extensive. Functionally, they differ.
GAMSA explicates this dif-ference as being one of safety and
security, respectively. GAMSA refers tothe SRR as that part of the
world in which a nation has responsibility forthe safety of life at
sea . . . and for assistance to people in distress,40 butis also
careful to emphasise that the GAMSA deals solely with security
inAustralias maritime jurisdiction and does not address maritime
safety issues,including the Safety of life at Sea (SOLAS)
Convention.41 Discursively, thedistinction of the SFAA maintains a
space for GAMSA to write of maritimearrivals as matters for border
security.
The SFAA is the Area that refers to the SFA, an agency that
GAMSAdescribes as a national agency in charge of providing the
response tomaritime security incidents. In Australia this role is
undertaken by BorderProtection Command (BPC).42 The SFAA is the
Area in which the SFA hasauthority over maritime security
incidents; in Australia, this is BPC. BPC is theSFA, and it
operates in the SFAA against threats, including boat arrivals.
Butthis is circular. In order to break out of this circle, what has
to be recognisedis that SFA was an area of authority generated as
the negotiated effect aimedat developing regional cooperation for
combating piracy and violence at
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The Embrace of Border Security 415
sea, facilitated by the International Maritime Organization. But
in what senseare piracy and violence at sea comparable to irregular
maritime arrivals assecurity threats?
Piracy involves people and assets in situations with a direct
potentialfor deadly harm, because it involves the expropriation of
vessels and theircargo. GAMSA asserts that violence is generally
intrinsic in acts of piracyand robbery at sea.43 It is for this
reason that GAMSA construes it as a secu-rity threat. Fishing and
whaling, meanwhile, are regarded as a direct threatto property-like
resources. We can see here a split analogous to the twocategories
of crime upheld by many domestic police forces: crimes againstthe
person and crimes against property. Many contemporary instances
ofillegal foreign fishing also involve organised crime networks,
large trawlers,and long nets. Japans state-backed commercial
whalers are virtual seabornefactories44 capable of industrial-scale
resource expropriation. Would-be boatarrivals lack such resources
and equipment as would be necessary to attackBPC or shipping
interests in Australias maritime jurisdictions. They also lackthe
organisational wherewithal and intent to extract any sovereignly
claimedresources in Australias EEZ: precisely because the fishing
boats are not fish-ing in this case, leaving aside the fact that
they are fishing boats involvedin resource extraction without
industrial methods. What then are these boatsthat must be
stopped?
Would-be arrivals typically attempt to arrive in Australia
aboard re-purposed fishing boats chartered by smugglers. In many
cases these boatsare poorly maintained and of dubious
seaworthiness. In most cases, theseboats are dangerously
overloaded, with passengers, including children andbabies, who are
unable to swim. This is one of the main contributors toshipwrecks
over the past decade between Indonesia and Australia, in
whichperhaps more than a thousand people have perished.45
Passengers aboardthese boats are often not given life jackets. In
recent years, many vesselshave sailed for Australia during swell
season, when conditions can deterio-rate very quickly. A situation
such as this is surely unsafe, and would seemon first glance to be
an ongoing, even chronic Safety of Life at Sea situation,which
would engage Australias responsibilities within the SRR and
transferjurisdiction to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority
(AMSA). And yet, rightup until the point at which either a person
aboard a boat raises a distresssignal or people end up in the
water, would-be arrivals are approached assecurity threats.
In maintaining the SRR as the SFAA for the SFA, BPC is including
boatarrivals within threat categories in a way that involves either
self-serving logicor ambiguity, especially as GAMSA concedes that
irregular maritime arrivalshave been driven by political unrest or
poverty in other countries, the limitedplaces available
internationally in migrant-receiving countries, and the safetyand
economic opportunity Australia offers.46 If boat arrivals do not
violentlythreaten people or maritime resources, if they are driven
by violence or
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poverty themselves, and if they are seeking safety, how can this
ambiguityabout their threatening nature be clarified? The following
section respondsto this in detail.
OPERATIONALISING SOVEREIGN BORDERS: LEGITIMATEACTIVITY,
INTEREST
GAMSA defines security threat in the maritime domain as any
action, deviceor event that has potential to cause consequences
adverse to Australias inter-ests.47 In explicating the nature of
boat arrivals as a threat, GAMSA states,Australias national
interests are threatened by any irregular arrival of peo-ple.48
Notable in this section is how the language of law and
sovereigntyhas been replaced by that of interest and threat though
the nation is stillpresent as the qualifier of interest. But
(again) the language is circular: boatarrivals are held to carry
the potential to cause consequences adverse toAustralias interests,
interests threatened by boat arrivals. To escape thiscircle, we can
interpolate from the national objective and say that GAMSAexpresses
an interest in avoiding irregularity irregularity would be
theconsequences adverse. This is consonant with the following, from
the samesection, elaborating the earlier assertion: The primary
risk is the potential forentry into Australia without having been
screened by border authorities.49
In what sense might entry without screening by border
authorities constitutethe primary risk of a compromise to
Australias interests in a way that wouldconstitute a security
threat? This becomes much clearer once we examinethe way in which
GAMSA recognises activity as constitutive, then codes it asgood and
bad.
The opening paragraph of GAMSA makes reference to Australia as
theworlds fifth largest shipping nation.50 Indeed, the volume of
total seabornetrade is estimated to have quadrupled over the past
few decades51; a commit-ment to expanding trade remains an avowed
policy commitment of nearlyall nation-states, including
Australia.52 It is this ambient background of accu-mulation and
distribution, governed by an economistic logic expressed asan
imperative, that constitutes what GAMSA recognises as activity.
Activityas interest is represented cartographically in GAMSA with
the following map(Figure 2), taken from the Australian Maritime
Safety Authority.
It is from this represented reality of activity that GAMSA draws
its pri-mary conception of interest: Australian and foreign ships
carry Australianpassengers, crew and cargo within and beyond
Australian waters. Australiatherefore has strong economic and
national interests in maintaining securitywithin and beyond
Australian waters.53 Australian passengers, cargo, crewand waters
here are all represented as property-like things with whose
beingAustralian makes and keeps them within this sphere of national
interest.As with fishing rights to scarce resources in the EEZ,
these are claims
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FIGURE2
Shippingmovemen
tto
andfrom
Australia
(source:
Geo
science
Australia).
417
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418 Peter Chambers
analogous to property. But the claim here is more an allowance
of mobilityof interest as activity. That is to say: because of the
nature of shipping asan activity, it must move. GAMSAs logic is in
preventing the impedance ofa constitutively mobile activity:
Interruption of or interference with inter-national shipping
operating in Australias maritime jurisdiction would havean
immediate and detrimental effect on Australias economy and its
exportcompetitiveness, and other consequences for lawful activity
within Australiasmaritime jurisdiction.54 Activity that is in
Australias interest must continueover space and time, indefinitely:
interruption of or interference with activ-ity at any point would
be detrimental, and must be prevented fromoccurring.
GAMSA develops the notion of activity by elaborating a
distinction setup by asserting an idea about legitimate activity,
which is read as a signifi-cant contributor to the Australian
economy.55 But what makes it legitimate?I would like to offer the
following counterfactual as a theory. GAMSA recog-nises an order of
things from the perspective of a self-serving retrospection.To wit:
such activity, because it benefits Australias economy, is then
coded aslegitimate, legislated for and defended as such, here using
the full resourcesof border security. We can see evidence of this
from recent developmentsin Australian shipping.56 Recognition of
the benefit comes first; legitimacy isthen coded accordingly.
If recognition of the benefit comes first, then we can define an
interestas a recognised benefit. Authority would then be the power
to recognise abenefit in a way capable of securing it, using such
resources as are avail-able. Such interests are complex investments
that involve all of us throughglobal supply chains.57 Like the
border security apparatus arranged in defen-sive relation to these
supply chains, these complex interests are embodied,extended,
enacted, and distributed.58 This means that interests, like bor-der
securitys, are necessarily and richly spatial. Further, temporally
andprocessually these interests are not a one off matter. That
activity mustcontinue means securing is an active, transitive
process that transforms thespace and time of the future according
to the needs of those interests thatpredominate in the present.
This gives us one minimalistic but cogent wayof understanding the
purpose of Australian border security according toits declared
interest: border security was established to order mobility
foraccumulation to secure circulation for interested stakeholders
in Australiasmaritime jurisdictions. Circulation must be
defended.
So what is a threat any action that threatens interests by being
irreg-ular? For GAMSA in regard to irregular maritime arrivals, it
would seemthat threat = arrival + irregularity, and that
irregularity also carries the fol-lowing though GAMSA never
explains how or why: Irregular maritimearrivals also pose a
significant threat in relation to illegal activity in
protectedareas . . . marine pollution . . . and compromise to
biosecurity . . ..59 But theirregularity is simply a condition of
legislation, whereby, according to the
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The Embrace of Border Security 419
Migration Act (1958) a non-citizen must have a visa to arrive in
Australia.The Commonwealth could remove this condition, and that
would allow theboats to stop by enabling the planes to start. But
irregularity is not simply aconsequence of not being screened by
border authorities, it is also a screenfor a desire for deterrence,
the achievement of which is sign and signal ofeffective
governmental control.60
What is a border? As GAMSAs understanding of threat constructs
it,border = interest + threat (where existence of threat calls for
a responseas security [interdiction]). If this is the case, unless
interest + threat =sovereignty, sovereignty = border. Should
Operation Sovereign Borders thenbe re-named Operation Securing
Circulation? This phrase deletes the nation,which is always behind
stop the boats, to the extent that it is a proclama-tion of
national sovereignty, as the pamphlet asserts. National
sovereigntygets taken along with border security, because
jettisoning it would depriveOperation Sovereign Borders of its
persuasive rhetorical force: would-bearrivals would then no longer
be a national emergency, just matters for rou-tine impedance. If
Operation Sovereign Borders is to be persuasive, thenperhaps
national sovereignty must be the unannounced passenger aboardall of
BPCs response assets. If this is the case, border security is not
peoplesmuggling, but it does smuggle a people into Australias
maritime jurisdic-tions whenever BPC performs interdiction. And
this, as I now turn to explore,must be enacted.
ENACTORS, INTENSIFIERS, AND ENABLERS OFBORDER SECURITY
Enactor I: Awareness Generators
Like the legitimate activities it defends, border security is
embodied,extended, enacted, and distributed. Where mitigating the
threat is concerned,border security begins with the Commonwealths
regionally dispersed eyesand ears. GAMSA understands these sense
functions by the term awareness indeed, one of the key avowed tasks
of border security is the generation ofawareness. To do this GAMSA
nominates generating awareness of activityas a function of
Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (ACBPS),which then
contributes assets and personnel to BPC.
In its work as assigned to ACBPS, BPC relies on inter-operative
setsof awareness generators, sense abilities. The most general of
these sets iscommon knowledge and open source information. One
interface for thetranslation of this knowledge and information into
actionable intelligenceis Customs Watch, ACBPSs national
information collection program thatdraws on the knowledge of
industry and the community to protect Australiasborders by
reporting suspicious border activities.61 The importance
ofcommunity engagement is stressed here: Customs Watch also values
its
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partnerships with community groups and individuals who observe
suspiciousactivities in their local environments. These groups
include accommodationproviders, coast guard volunteers, radio
operators, 4WD clubs, marina oper-ators and residents of coastal
communities.62 In the case of the arrival inGeraldton, Western
Australia, of the group of Sri Lankan men sailing for NewZealand,
BPC was explicit in its call for coastal community engagement
fromsuspicious individuals-cum members: Terry Price, deputy
commander of BPCoperations at the time, said that BPC had to patrol
11 percent of the earthsoceans, that detecting every vessel was a
vast challenge, and that the pub-lic should ring in if they see
anything. . . . We want people to call if theybelieve theyve seen
something.63 Mr. Price stated that the lesson learntfrom the
Geraldton incident was that Border Protection Command
neededresidents to act as spotters.64 This indicates that doing
border security suc-cessfully in Australias maritime environment
requires recruiting citizens asawareness generators who can feed
information to its own professionalstaff.
The second set of awareness generators for border security is
comprisedof Australias various intelligence gathering, analysis and
espionage agen-cies.65 Where irregular maritime arrivals are
concerned, the first active setof formal sense abilities are
located in southeast Asia, especially West Java,Indonesia, in the
form of a number of regionally engaged agents employedto watch,
wait, and respond. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) seek toknow,
surveil, and respond to arrivals through the transnational crime
prismof people smuggling.66 Just as Australian border security
eventually becomesa matter of mandatory detention for arrivals as a
matter of law, prior to arrivaland departure both its precondition
and prevention are reliant on a parallelset of enforceable
recognitions as criminal and transnational.
Responding effectively to people smuggling as a matter of
transnationalcrime which is more-or-less organised through fluid
networks of associ-ation67 means being pre-emptive, disruptive and
co-operative. Its worthnoting that the pre- and dis- elements of
these pillars rely on the co-, that is,they rely on inter-agency
co-operation and co-ordination with Indonesiansin Indonesia.
Effective co-operation requires ongoing good faith efforts
byIndonesian counterparts, which struggles to exist without trust
and respect.Responding effectively to people smuggling as a matter
of transnationalcrime requires engaging with these aspects of
transnational crime. It mayeven involve entanglement in
transnational crime, at the very least in thecourse of intelligence
gathering and undercover operations. The apparentclarity of border
security as asserted in Operation Sovereign Borders is shad-owed
beyond what GAMSA recognises as sovereignly Australia by
murkyassociations that reach out into the region and back into
Australia, embroil-ing Australian interests in an informal
political economy with a global reach.Securing national sovereignty
through border security is impossible withoutreaching into the
global shadows.
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The Embrace of Border Security 421
Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (ACBPS) also
runs anumber of awareness and capacity-building efforts, as well as
building andmaintaining relationships with its Indonesian
counterparts. The Departmentof Immigration and Border Protection
likewise has a number of agentsengaged throughout south-east Asia
working on the detention side of theborder security complex: this
may include informal arrangements for ware-housing would-be
refugees in Indonesia and Malaysia.68 As with AFPs effortsand the
concerted watching of Australias formal and informal informants,
thestatecraft that contributes to maintaining the territorial
integrity of Australiarequires a certain vigilant and pro-active
engagement in and with Indonesiaand Australias other neighbours;
Australian border security is always-alreadya regional
engagement.69 These are complex, fragile relationships; generat-ing
effective awareness for Australian border security would be less
effectivewithout them.
Australian and Indonesian agents of Australian border security
provideintelligence to ACBPS on vessels whose departure is known or
estimatedto be imminent, and this information shapes the posture of
BPCs deployedassets. There are many fishing vessels operating
throughout the Indonesianarchipelago; BPCs knowledge of certain
fishing vessels70 as containing, car-rying or conveying threats is
predicated on intelligence gathered in thecourse of intelligence
gathering, information sharing and enforcement worktaking place in
Indonesia, which in the case of People Smuggling StrikeTeam, takes
place in collaboration with Indonesias analogous people smug-gling
task force, co-formed as part of the Bali Process.71 Gathered
intelligenceis the key means by which ACPBS knows would-be arrivals
when they areimminent departures in a way it can communicate to
BPC: as with generat-ing awareness, knowing a departure to be more
than a fishing boat relieson agents working in Indonesia who must
rely, to varying extents, on theirIndonesian counterparts.
Commonly, all of the Commonwealths sense abilities play a
partial,formal role in generating awareness before the departure of
a vessel.ACBPS gathers and disseminates actionable intelligence to
BPC, a form ofinstrumental knowledge intended to enable relatively
safe and timely inter-diction of vessels by BPC. However, there is
a second, informal networkthat, depending on the voyage, may be of
equal or greater significance. Bothpeople-smuggling networks as
well as smuggled people and their friendsand families are in active
contact, mostly via mobile phone. In practice,this means that
certain of those aboard boats are in contact with peoplein
immigration detention in Australia (on Christmas Island, in Darwin,
onManus Island, on Nauru), relatives on the mainland, and smugglers
backin Indonesia and elsewhere (who, in turn, retain the phone
numbers ofsmuggled peoples relatives to follow up for payment).
This shadow communication network becomes significant for BPC
ingenerating awareness because any one of these people has the
knowledge
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422 Peter Chambers
and ability to place an anonymous call to 000 (Australias
emergency num-ber) in the event of an emergency. This aspect of
border security meritsanalytic attention in its own right, but for
present purposes its worth notingthat there exists a kind of
disjunctive symbiosis between BPC and asylumseekers, an uneasy
co-dependence between the interests of interdictors,interdicted and
their networks of associates at certain moments, in cer-tain cases,
they rely on one another to keep one another out of harmsway. In a
strange way all sides of the interdiction have common
interests;they look out for one another. Smugglers and the smuggled
are shadowstakeholders in border security, and this has definite
effects, because whenthe shadow communication network fails, along
with the Commonwealthsformal counterparts, people end up in the
water.
Another set of awareness generators is comprised of imagery
receivedfrom a number of satellites, both commercial and military.
While GAMSAconcedes these sources to be in use, no detailed
information about themis contained within the reports to which I
had access, either because itis classified or commercial in
confidence. A further set of sense abili-ties is airborne, and
consists of electronic, electromagnetic, electro-opticaland optical
means of surveillance. It includes the planes and helicopters
ofCustoms Border Protection division; aircraft of the Royal
Australian Air Force(RAAF) assigned to surveillance tasks by BPC;
Australian Army RegionalForce Surveillance Unit patrols; and air
patrols using aircraft contracted tothe Australian Maritime Safety
Agency (AMSA).
The next set of sense abilities is seaborne, what BPC calls
surfaceassets. These are taken from the full range of enforcement
agencies thatBPC is empowered to command and control in order to
respond to secu-rity threats. Surface assets are deployed in a
posture, both in line with thegeneral strategy of deployment for
patrol purposes,72 and circumstantially,as in the case where a
specific surface asset has been deployed to respondto a threat
object, so identified, either by any number or combination ofthose
awareness-generating sense abilities detailed above, or by the
senseabilities of the deployed surface assets. These sense
abilities include radar,two-way radio (VHF and UHF), mobile
telecommunications, binoculars (bothelectro-optical and optical),
and the naked eye.
The next set of sense abilities includes those of officials
stationed onChristmas Island and local residents, and usually
relies on a combinationof telescopes and binoculars, two-way radio,
and mobile telecommunica-tions (both intra-island and island-to-BPC
command) in order to function.As in the case of the shadow network
of mobile communications from thesmuggler-side of border security,
these means, far less spectacular in scalarterms (as well as
operating cost and complexity), have been of greater sig-nificance
than their scale would suggest: in the case of the shipwreck ofSIEV
22173 it was these sense abilities that saw an approaching vessel,
whenall the hi-tech failed. Armed ships and expensive74 drone-based
surveillance
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The Embrace of Border Security 423
programmes capture governmental resources and media attention,
but in theprevention of drowning, they may do little work relative
to their size andcost. Nonetheless, high tech appears to have a
gravitational pull that cor-relates with security apparatuses: in
the Coronial Inquest for SIEV 221, jetskis and rocket-propelled
life jackets were suggested as further appropriateresponse assets
for CI; both suggestions were received as prudent possiblemeasures
by the Coroner.75
Overall, the awareness generators of border security can be
understoodas comprising a regionally dispersed co-operation of
agents: embodied bysuspicious individuals, extended by high-tech
prostheses and undercoveroperations, enacted by interested
corporations, corrupt police and profes-sional staff, and
distributed throughout South-East Asia as a complex
regionalengagement, as well as being arranged in a strategic
posture in Australiasmaritime jurisdiction. Seen from this machinic
perspective, the sovereignunity projected as ideal by Operation
Sovereign Borders would appear tobear no relation to the dispersed,
heterogeneous materiality required toenact it.
But unity is also gathered in action: that is, by actually going
out andenforcing the border through interdiction, BPC contributes
to the restora-tion of the integrity of that border, and if it does
so reliably, it makes itselfindispensible for doing so. As explored
above, this cannot happen withoutco-operation, but it must
eventually be en-forced. This brings us to the sec-ond subsection,
where I describe those deployed aspects of border securitymost
directly concerned with enforcement.
Enactor II: Responsive, Responsible Responders
GAMSA divides BPCs operations into four phases: prevention,
preparedness,response and recovery. In this subsection I focus on
response, which in thecase of maritime interdiction primarily
consists in enforcement, but I amalso critically interested in what
happens in the space of thought betweenpreparedness and response.
To begin with on this point, its worth notingthe meaning that
response indicates by paying close attention to the shiftbetween
the pre- and the re-.
I take it that border security is active with action,76 and I
have beenreading these actions as complex transitive processes
unfolding as a geopol-itics in these sections with a distinct
materiality. As I see it, however,GAMSA tends to describe border
security for all threats as re-acting tothe prior, provoking
actions of others: reactions upon actions. This wouldmake enforcing
border security like the game design of Space Invaders, inwhich
alien invaders just keep appearing at the top of the screen,
regardlessof the efforts and points already scored by the engaged
player. But of course,border security is not a computer game, and
this reactive image is stronglyat odds with the actuality of the
complex, fraught regional engagements
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canvassed in the previous section which must be proactive,
preemptiveand cooperative in order to be effectively
disruptive.
In framing border security as a reaction for the purposes of
response,GAMSA tends to recode the security threat that boat
arrivals present as priorand ready made. This of course is part of
what makes decisive respond-ing possible and necessary, but more
broadly, it effaces the traces77 ofthe all-too-active and ongoing
works of construction that border securityrequires in order to be
effective. In action as response, BPCs assets might nothave
headspace to engage in critical reflection. Nonetheless, border
securityrequires complex forms of what might be considered
premeditation: inten-tions developed and actions carried out by
thousands of staff, entangled inthe region, even requesting that
citizens get out their binoculars and reportsuspicious
behaviour.
In effacing all traces of prior construction by moving from the
pre- tothe re- in order to generate effective response as
enforcement, individuals,prostheses, corporations, police and
communication networks are all effec-tively invisibilised: gathered
intelligence appears ready-to-hand, but only atthe cost of negating
border securitys constructed world. In order for it to beready,
everything not only has to be prefabricated, the processes of
fabri-cation have to be disregarded a priori. In the response phase
of operationsdelineated by GAMSA, all response can do is be
prepared for the momentat which the threat moves into BPCs theatre
of operations. Here we findanother constitutive blind spot
generated by the practice of border security.In order to respond as
security, BPC must not regard the world beyond itssecurity
operations. The following is a .jpeg (Figure 3) copied from a
pageof the Australian Navys website describing the effects of its
illegal foreignfishing work as assigned to BPC.78
In transforming threats into objects who can be responded to,
bordersecuritys response assets79 engage in objectification: SIEV
(Suspected Illegal
FIGURE 3 Illegals hauled in (source: Navy: the Sailors
Paper).
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The Embrace of Border Security 425
Entry Vehicle) offers one way in which this is done using an
acronym, theabove images shows another way this is represented, as
a sign of a job welldone. The obscuring of constructed conditions
that enables action is notonly a blinding to world; it also
transforms the world it makes visible as itresponds so that it is
visible another way. This is one of the key ways inwhich, as Salter
notes, the border as suture is about the way borders aremade to
appear and disappear.80 This it is not just a form of
representation;it is also another perceptual way in which threats
are maintained as such.The suture involves knitting and cutting,
stitching and ripping, interdictingand excising.
The patrol vessels actively deployed in Australias northern
waters eachcarry two Rigid Hulled Inflatable Boats (RHIBs) of
between six and eightmetres, which can carry crew and passengers of
between two (operationalminimum) and twenty-five (emergency maximum
of the largest of the threekinds). In most cases it is these RHIBs
and their trained personnel that aredeployed to perform the first
stages of interdiction on the high seas. Patrolvehicles also carry
a number of life jackets for the passengers and crewof interdicted
boats, as well as life rafts that can be launched as stagingpoints
between foundering boats, RHIBs and patrol vessels, in the event
ofan emergency. The presence of life jackets is, of course, a
prudent safetymeasure. But it is one that brings us to essence of
the lived contradictions ofall those who pass through the response
phase of the apparatus, the spacewhere interdiction is actually
enforced and risky threats are transformed intothat which is
processed; it thus bears closer comment.
Boat arrivals are construed as risky security threats who must
be caredfor, in the course of interdiction. Arguably the greatest
threat they present(to BPC and the Commonwealth) emerges precisely
because of their all-too-human vulnerability and the risk it
necessarily presents to the responders,who, should their actions in
the course of interdiction result in any loss oflife, injury, or
even large numbers of people in the water, be opened toquestioning
about their possible negligence, failure to adequately carry
outmission objectives, even criminal prosecution. BPCs responders
are actu-ally responsible for what they have authority over. This
lived contradictionis potentially a costly double bind for BPCs
responders; at the very least,from an ice-eyed mission objectives
point of view, there are difficulties anddelicacies involved in
these operations that are not typically experienced bycombat troops
on search and destroy missions. The security threat must notunder
any circumstances be eliminated. This generates further risks,
costs,and contradictions, mostly for BPCs responders in the course
of dischargingtheir responsibilities. We can see one representation
of this situation in thefollowing (Figure 4), which is a document
produced by ACBPS in order to bedisseminated to would-be
arrivals.81 It is recognisably a piece of governmentpropaganda, but
it also stages the situation I am describing here includingthe way
the split is sutured with graphical clarity.
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FIGURE 4 Afghan storyboard (source: Australian Customs and
Border Protection).
In practice, such a split holds safety apart from security. It
also opensonto a paradox at the heart of enforcement. It is an
existential paradox, bothin that the split does and does not exist,
and in that it profoundly shapesthe recognition of the existence of
living people on either side of the split.Procedurally it does
exist in the sense that, as we have seen, for BPC torespond as
border security, it must: BPC is not AMSA. But operationallyit
cannot exist in the sense that, as highly trained professional
staff, BPCsresponders must know very well when a SOLAS incident has
arisen theyknow when security threats are not. Further, their being
competent wouldalso require responders to know that boat arrivals
are not threats like others:not Somali pirates, not Indonesian
fishermen, nor Japanese whalers.
In unfolding border securitys paradoxes through interdiction,
BPCsresponders may know what a pamphlet such as Operation
Sovereign
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Borders cannot say: boat arrivals are security threats that are
not threat-ening or not threatening in any of the ways that other
threats are. Thevulnerability of national sovereignty is addressed
by operationally recognis-ing the vulnerability of boat arrivals in
a way that does not discursivelyrecognise their vulnerability. This
restores an observable unity to Australianborder security, but its
clarity can only be maintained by suppressing theemergence of
another that would violate it if it were allowed to be.
Bordersecurity involves its enforcers in the domination of space
and time. For this tobe successful, only some realities must be
seen, and not others. In this way,Operation Sovereign Borders is a
geopolitics of the maritime environment,but one that can also
colonise the mind. As it intensifies, this colonisationof maritime
space by national sovereignty has come to require the
followingfurther measures.
Intensification: Tow Backs, Turn Arounds
Operation Sovereign Borders is an intensification of earlier
efforts at estab-lishing, developing and stabilising border
security in Australia. Prior to theSeptember 2013 election, the
then opposition canvassed the idea of turningboats back; when this
was mooted in 2011, discussion emphasised the oper-ational and
diffuse risks and costs involved with such an idea.82 In
practice,turn arounds are now occurring, and as of writing they are
doing so undera veil of stubborn secrecy, which is justified as
on-water operational mat-ters which cannot be discussed both on
grounds of national security andgiving tactical advantage to the
people smugglers and their business model.Turn arounds and towbacks
are being conducted when it is safe to do so,but how would it be
possible to know when that would be? Only responseassets can know
this, and never with certainty.
These intensifications are legible as unilateral offences
againstIndonesian state sovereignty, with all that entails for
effective co-operationin generating awareness. Turn arounds and
towbacks are also offensive toIndonesian national sovereignty, to
the extent that such a thing exists as theprecise counterparts of
what has been analysed here: minimally, the right todecide who
arrives and the conditions in which they do. Arguably, they
alsoturn people men, women, children into boats and illegals, mere
thingsthat can not only be hauled in but also moved around and
treated as theCommonwealth sees fit.
Tow backs and turn around are intensifications that move
Australianborder security beyond the domination of space and
perception toward thedirect domination of peoples lives in a way
that takes no responsibility forthat which it asserts authority
over: it is ejection, discharge. It is peopledumping. This is a
domination of space, perception, and human life thatis in violation
of the national objective set by GAMSA, because an expres-sion of
national sovereignty has reached beyond state sovereignty and
the
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limits of Australias maritime jurisdiction in a way that makes
it illegibleas legal or lawful. Tow backs and turn arounds are
matters of fact andwill, not of law. In this way, national
sovereignty is the determination of apeople to dominate in a way
that refuses to recognise a limit such as wouldcircumscribe that of
law. This also means showing contempt for, and evendirect violation
of, the sovereignty of others. To the extent it is successful
according to its own unilateral intentions it is total domination.
This raisesthe principle of deterrence to the level of an absolute.
Border security inAustralian maritime space can be regarded as a
self-defending world in itstotality and the unilaterally imposed
limits of what can be recognised withinthat world.
Administrative Enablers of Border Security: All, and, One
Administratively, Australian border security is an amalgamation:
of agencies,offices and officers, and their roles. It takes the
formerly distinct tasks ofmilitary work, policing and other
enforcement work and unites them withinthe border security paradigm
as BPC. From this perspective BPC is a multi-agency command
structure that conducts border security in concert witha
combination of enforcement agencies. It is a structure that enjoins
theintertwining of the thin blue line of policing with the uniform
green ofthe military in order to achieve the blended, effect of one
command,83 aprojected unity. In terms of intended structure and
projected effect, it iscrucial to note the relation here between
one and all: one command, allthreats. One command has been put into
place because of the complexityof the all. Operation Sovereign
Borders reinforces this projected impressionnot just through talk
of crisis and national emergency, but also by calling fora further
militarisation of the border.
Operation Sovereign Borders is a command structure that
appearsHobbesian insofar as it places an apparent one in command of
the allof sovereign Australias border security resources. But this
projected impres-sion is not consonant with the structures that
enable it. Operation SovereignBorders asserts that stopping the
boats cannot be achieved through inter-departmental committees,
working groups and international dimensionsalone. There must be one
person responsible with all the necessary resourcesof government at
his or her command.84 Just who is this person, and paceHobbes, what
would be their powers of personation85?
As implemented, the policy does not upset the nested hierarchy
ofcommittees that characterise Australian border securitys
administrative struc-ture: it merely adds a further task force, the
Joint Agency Taskforce, abovewhich remains the Secretaries
Committee on National Security, headed bythe Secretary of Prime
Minister and Cabinet, and the National SecurityCommittee, headed by
the Prime Minister. As implemented, the policy hasin fact generated
further bureaucratic complexity while abrogating to theexecutive
further and more secretive authority.
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Border security also involves Australian maritime security
governance.Indeed, it is a key task of GAMSA to explicate its
structures and functions.Maritime security governance is a
hierarchy of interdependent networksstructured by the committee
form,86 and these are characterised by theirown intra and
inter-committee hierarchies and internal politics, which
arecomplex.87 This means that Australian maritime security
governance hasstructures that preclude border securitys being
accurately characterised asa unity. Border Protection Command is
not the responsibility or expressedauthority of any one. It is
always also Customs and the Navy and theExecutive and the National
Interest and over thirty other nominated stake-holders and the many
other inter-active enforcement factors elaboratedearlier. This
iterated set of hierarchies, networks and functional
interde-pendencies and the incoherence, friction, turf wars, and
animosities theyperforce introduce needs to be described in more
detail to give a suffi-ciently precise sense of the disjuncture
between the multiplicity of relationsat play in making border
security a defensibly concerted effort and theimpression of
orchestrated unity crucial for sovereignty.
BPC is directly commanded by a Rear Admiral seconded from
Defence.But above this transparent, human, embodied point in border
security thestructure the one command, all threats unity generated
by BPCs intertwin-ing of green and blue begins to fade and blur. On
the blue side, under theprevious government, the Commander of BPC
reported to the Deputy ChiefExecutive Officer of Maritime,
Corporate and Intelligence, who reported tothe CEO of Customs and
Border Protection Service, who, in turn, reportedto the Minister of
Home Affairs. On the green side, the Commander ofBPC reported to
the Chief of Joint Operations, who reported to the Chiefof the
Defence Force, who reported to the Minister of Defence.
OperationSovereign Borders, adds the other aforementioned Taskforce
above BPC, theOperation Sovereign Borders Joint Agency Taskforce.
Is there an identifiableone here?
Operation Sovereign Borders places a military commander as the
headof the Taskforce: this is supposed to be the one commander
(currentlyDeputy Chief of Army Angus Campbell). But this commander
reports to theMinister for Immigration and Border Protection
(currently Peter Dutton), andthe Minister has forbidden General
Campbell from speaking publically abouthis responsibilities. If
General Campbell is the one, then his is a subordinatedand silenced
one. This may be expedient for the executive, but it speaksagainst
a Hobbesian account of personation as an instantiation of a
onecapable of sovereign speech.
The structural novelty of the task force is a formal one: a
military servicehas been made responsible to a minister other than
the Minister of Defence.This potentially places military assets at
the disposal of an immigrationminister, in this sense it could be
said to militarise immigration and theexecutive responsible for it.
The pamphlet explicitly states that the scale of
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this problem requires the discipline and focus of a targeted
military opera-tion, placed under a single operational and
ministerial command.88 Whereministerial command is concerned the
government has, on this occasion,been as good as their word. Or
have they?
Border security involves the decisionist prerogative, and
effectuatingthis means being able to decide. Who can decide
decisively? Certainly notthe Ministers subordinated commander. The
Minister himself, meanwhile,reports to Cabinet-level committees and
the Department of Prime Ministerand Cabinet. Border security is not
the one Operation Sovereign Borderssays it must be to be effective.
Rather, it is lodged in the Department ofPrime Minister and Cabinet
as follows.
At key moments, the order and orientation of border security
rests onpolitical decisions. The first component of the executive
that must be men-tioned here is the Attorney-General.89 The
Attorney-Generals department isgenerally responsible for the
formulation of policy and legal advice to thegovernment, including
on matters relating to national security (and, there-fore, border
security). If, as I have suggested, border security rests at
keymoments on decisions, then fundamentally it is the role of the
Attorney-General, their department, and the Crisis Centre to
provide the executivewith legally defensible standing for border
security, a sufficiently stable plat-form from which the decision
leaps, resolving the crisis situation eitherway. This raises
questions in relation to the department or the OperationSovereign
Borders pamphlet, where it speaks of crisis and national
emer-gency, but given that this advice is confidential, the only
trace we wouldhave of it would be in the public speech acts and
decisions of the PrimeMinister, or in formulations like GAMSA.
Which brings me to that which Itake to be the decider, the Prime
Minister and his or her department.
The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet is the site of
the cen-tral enabling condition of border security, and the Prime
Minister is the axisaround which the department turns. Within the
department, the Committeethat oversees the co-ordination of border
security is the National SecurityCommittee of Cabinet, chaired by
the Prime Minister. Below this is theSecretaries Committee on
National Security, known as SCNS, the peak inter-departmental
committee. It is chaired by the Secretary of the Departmentof Prime
Minister and Cabinet; its deputy is the National Security
Advisor.Below this is the National Intelligence Coordination
Committee, chaired bythe NSA (National Security Advisor). The Prime
Minister receives advice andintelligence directly from the National
Security Advisor and the Office ofNational Assessment (ONA). Policy
and strategic responses are formulatedwithin the Department of
Prime Minister and Cabinet; the key group hereis the Homeland and
Border Security Policy Coordination Group (HPCG).Using these
systems, processes, and assemblies, is it the Department itself,and
the Prime Minister him or herself, directing border security?
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Throughout this paper I have been describing the necessarily
embod-ied, extended, enacted, and distributed elements nameable by
theCommonwealth as border security in relation to BPC, which as we
cansee in these sections is also a complicated matrix of elements
and acronyms,requiring extensive collaboration to co-ordinate. As
we have seen, OperationSovereign Borders emerged from the
decisionist prerogative and the elec-toral success of the stop the
boats slogan, which, in the response phase,has intensified to the
point of total domination and the violation of thesovereignty of
others. According to this ideal, nothing and no one can enterexcept
on a sovereign say so. This leads to the following question: who
canspeak in the name of the nation, in a way that resonates as
sovereign?
Sovereignty is said in many ways; it must be said by many
peoplein a way that is believed, otherwise it would cease to be,
like the silencethat would be the law of an extinguished people. In
order for it to besaid believably, it must resonate. As agents of
Operation Sovereign Borders,the executive may speak in the name of
the nation, but to date successiveexecutives have only done so by
expressing unconditional support for theintensifications of border
security it involves. In the space made and kept fornational
sovereignty in this way, no one speaks, except on terms and
con-ditions favourable to border security. Border security is
sovereign speechon the condition of border securitys defence and
expansion.
CONCLUSION
Border security has been characterised here as a transformation
ofsovereignty. Examined as space, materiality, and administrative
form,Operation Sovereign Borders has been explored as a set of
border securitypractices that tries to suture the world back
together as sovereign. In doingso, it knits its addressees as
subjects into the bordered world.90 To returnto our research
question: through border security the nation secures its unityby
sharing that which is indivisible.91 A logic that insists on the
elimina-tion of paradoxes would insist: this is incoherent. How can
that whichis indivisible be apportioned into shares? By allowing
paradoxes to abideat the heart of our analysis of border securitys
logic, we can show whatnational sovereignty does without exception.
As border security, nationalsovereignty is that form of power
capable of processing its paradoxes byinterdicting them and
detaining them offshore. Through the division of theworld into
shores, and the enforcement of these shores as border security,
adefended space has been constituted for the foreseeable future in
which thesovereign is alone and is not.
The global embrace of border security is indicative of a
transformedappreciation of the value of human life. Border security
actively contributes
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to mutations within and among the terms of belonging, exclusion
and domi-nation, from ones predicated categorically on citizenship
by either blood orsoil to ones enabled by a differential
recognition of the value of human lifebased on explicitly economic
and tacitly moral criteria.92 In these senses,93
border security can be described as an enacted
biopolitics.94
Citizenship in the wake of these transformations is not merely
economic.Precarious and marginal publics within many domestic
populations now fallback on blood-and-soil narratives of belonging
in order to establish dis-tinctions for inclusion and exclusion: we
grew here, you flew here was aslogan used by locals after one
prominent race riot in Sydney, Australia the Cronulla Riots. For
those with sufficient capital economic, social, sym-bolic
assertions of such locality-rooted conditions are unnecessary
whereglobal mobility is concerned. What has been set up for this
class of personis a mobility regime that ensures their low friction
accumulative movement.There are classes of people for whom
circulation has been secured, and thisis producing categories of
person who must be removed from circulation.
Securing circulation on behalf of this class, what John Urry
calls the richclass,95 is generating a world of proliferating
borders96; in circular fashion,this strengthens calls for the
further development and intensification of bor-der security
policies. Securing circulation requires the accumulative mobilityof
some, and this necessitates the impedance, forcible ejection, or
indefinitedetention of others.97
Offshore detention is an interface of open systems and living
people.Following Deborah Cowens lead, this paper has attempted to
observe keypoints in this interface from the perspective of the
border security systemsinvolved in producing offshore and offshore
detention, and in this context,threats to circulation are treated
not only as criminal acts but as profoundthreats to the life of
trade.98 Offshore detention centres are places of media-tion that
translate border security into human suffering so that the life of
trademay continue to grow, accelerate, and intensify, with as
little impedance asis possible. This makes of offshore detention
centres key global sites wherecomplexity becomes brutality99 in the
name of a lifeless circulation of goodsthat must be secured. The
circulation of goods has been made synonymouswith the securing of
the good. Offshore there is exposure, cruelty the sus-pension of a
normal ordering of life as past, present and future. Onshore,there
is still a horizon of justice visible from the shores of politics,
beyondthe immediate privilege of a position of relative comfort,
the spectacle of theshipwreck, and the ability to look away.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the careful reading of Jenny
Chambers, OhadKosminsky and Caitlin Overington, without whom this
would have been a
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The Embrace of Border Security 433
lesser manuscript. I would like to acknowledge the mentoring and
supportI have been given by Alison Young, Peter Rush and the
Research Unit inPublic Cultures, without whom I would be an even
more imperfect academicand scholar than I am. Around campus, I
would like to acknowledge thesustaining intellectual support of the
Territory, Authority, Population (TAP)reading group, where many of
the ideas presented here were reality testedand developed, over
many years of robust interlocution. More generally,I would like to
acknowledge that this paper was written on land that
wasappropriated as part of a land appropriation process that
continues to bepolitical, contested, and unsettled. This paper is
located in the midst of this,with hope.
NOTES
1. Liberal Party of Australia, The Coalitions Operation
Sovereign Borders Policy, 2013, availableat , accessed 8 March
2014.
2. Mark B. Salter, Theory of the /: The Suture and Critical
Border Studies, Geopolitics 17/4(2012) p. 750.
3. Matthew Sparke, A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security and the
Biopolitics of Citizenship onthe Border, Political Geography 25
(2006) p. 152.
4. Cf. Jason Ackleson, Constructing Security on the USMexico
Border, Political Geography24/2 (2005) pp. 165184, Rhys Jones,
Agents of Exception: Border Security and the Marginalizationof
Muslims in India, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
27/5 (2009) pp. 879897; Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola, Technologies of Border
Management: Performances and Calculation of Finnish-SchengenBorder
Security, Geopolitics 18/1 (2013) pp. 7784; S. M. Reid-Henry, An
Incorporating Geopolitics:Frontex and the Geopolitical
Rationalities of the European Border, Geopolitics 18/1 (2013) pp.
198224;Nick Vaughan-Williams, The UK Border Security Continuum:
Virtual Biopolitics and the Simulation of theSovereign Ban,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28/6 (2010) pp.
10711083; Henk VanHoutum, Human Blacklisting: The Global Apartheid
of the EUs External Border Regime, Environmentand Planning D:
Society and Space 28 (2010) pp. 957976.
5. Salter, Theory of the / (note 2) p. 750.6. For a full
explication of the epistemology I am working with here, see Heinz
von Voerster,
Understanding Understanding (New York: Springer 2003) as well as
Bruce Clarkes excellent explica-tion of von Foersters epistemology
and its implications for sociology in Bruce Clarke and Mark B.
N.Hansen (eds.), Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on
Second-Order Systems Theory, (Durham: DukeUniversity Press 2003)
pp. 3462.
7. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press2011) p. 8.
8. The United Nations recent report on Australias offshore
processing has described conditions inoffshore detention centres as
cruel, inhuman, degrading and in violation of international law.
See NickCumming-Bruce, U.N. Office Criticizes Australia Detention
Policies, New York Times, 22 Feb. 2014, avail-able at , accessed 28
Feb. 2014. See also Amnesty Internationals full report on
conditions, Thisis Breaking People: Human Rights Violations at
Australias Asylum Seeker Processing Centre on ManusIsland, Papua
New Guinea, available at , accessed 28 Feb. 2014.
9. Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Vol. 2 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press 2012) p. 26.10. Salter, Theory of the / (note 2)
p. 751.11. Sharon Pickering and Leanne Weber, New Deterrence
Scripts in Australias Rejuvenated
Offshore Detention Regime for Asylum Seekers, Law and Social
Inquiry, issue number and pagesunassigned, (2014).
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12. Cf. Alison Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and
Bureaucra