The Embrace of Border Security

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The Embrace of Border Security:

Maritime Jurisdiction, National
Sovereignty, and the Geopolitics of
Operation Sovereign Borders
Peter Chambers
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Waurn

Ponds, Australia
Published online: 06 Apr 2015.
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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
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Geopolitics, 20:404437, 2015

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ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online
DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2015.1004399
The Embrace of Border Security: Maritime

Jurisdiction, National Sovereignty, and the
Geopolitics of Operation Sovereign Borders
PETER CHAMBERS
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, Australia
Border security has become one of the key means by which the
sovereignty and security of powerful nation-states is projected. This
paper offers a set of observations of the Australian Commonwealths
descriptions and instructions for its embrace of border security.
Border security is legible here as a geopolitics that transforms the
rights and responsibilities of maritime jurisdictions into a space
of security that projects national sovereignty through the interdiction of boat arrivals. Its intensification as Operation Sovereign
Borders 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 existence in the state toward a total domination of space, perception
and human life in Australias maritime jurisdictions, in the name
of the nation. This necessitates the development, defence and reinforcement of a regionally engaged materiality that is embodied,
extended, enacted, and distributed. The intended effect of this
coordinated effort is to secure the nations sovereignty as a unity,
but the broader effect has been to devalue offshore life to secure
onshore interests, in a way that now necessitates indefinite offshore
detention.
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 Social
Sciences, Deakin University, 75 Pigdons Road, Waurn Ponds, VIC 3216, Australia. E-mail:
peter.chambers@deakin.edu.au
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.
tandfonline.com/fgeo.
404
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 growing
number of countries that have embraced border security. In September
2013, Operation Sovereign Borders was instituted. The policy, announced
in July 2013 and disseminated as a PDF pamphlet, formed a key plank
of the Australian Liberal-National Coalitions successful election campaign.
Operation Sovereign Borders is described in the pamphlet as a military-led
response to combat people smuggling and to protect our borders. The pamphlet describes the situation as of July 2013 as a national emergency, and
promises that a Coalition government, if elected, would tackle it with the
focus and energy that an emergency demands. The scale of the problem,
the pamphlet asserts, requires the discipline and focus of a targeted military
operation.1
The problem to which the pamphlet refers is the attempted arrival by
boat of people seeking to be processed by Australian immigration authorities
in the hope of being found to be refugees. Onshore, these people are mostly
referred to as either asylum seekers or illegals. Operation Sovereign Borders
is currently attempting to prevent any would-be arrivals by boat a policy
of total deterrence.
This paper argues that the emergence of Operation Sovereign Borders
is legible as an intensification of a set of political tendencies nameable
globally as border security. My understanding of borders here has drawn
inspiration from Mark Salters theorisation of border as suture, at once a
division and a knitting together of legal spheres, sovereignties and authorities.2 With Salters paradoxical conception of the border as a stalking horse
throughout, the starting point for my positioning of the observer is Matthew
Sparkes perceptive synthesis, where he asserts that borders are consequential condensation points where wider changes in state-making and the nature
of citizenship are worked out on the ground.3 These wider changes have
been traced through a number of other jurisdictions, regions, and polities4 :
this paper focuses on the contemporary Australian case, from a critical theoretical perspective that remains focused on border security, not just borders
or security.
I emphasise border security as a conceptual unity in part because this
foregrounds traces from transformations of one state border for border security, guided by Salters assertion that the state border is the sine qua non of
sovereignty, the political and the human.5 I also emphasise border security
as a conceptual unity because it renders visible a point of observation from
which we can see its political agency as such.6 In circular fashion, Operation
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Peter Chambers
Sovereign Borders is in many ways seeking sovereign closure on the matter

of Australian borders by enacting Operation Sovereign Borders. But it does so
as border security, which, in inflicting domestically constructed conceptions
of sovereignty both on the regions nation-states and non-citizens who
would arrive opens fundamental questions of sovereignty. Simultaneously,
the enaction of border security enforces national sovereignty in a number
of ways that Operation Sovereign Borders cannot question, but that are fundamentally questionable. In chasing the tail of these operations, this paper
seeks to break out of the viciously circular logic that Operation Sovereign
Borders enacts and the cruelty it inflicts as it does so. Jacques Derrida writes
that the sovereign is alone in exercising sovereignty. Sovereignty cannot be
shared, it is indivisible. The sovereign is alone (sovereign) or is not.7 The
question of national sovereignty, enacted as border security, poses the following research question: how does a nation secure its unity by sharing its
sovereignty 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 Australian
authority as border security in the name of a people, as sovereign and
nation. As Niklas Luhmann phrases it, in a way that echoes the insights
of the work of Alison Mountz, Whereas human beings count as persons
in the space of inclusion, in the space of exclusion they seem to count
only 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 connecting
rights, responsibilities, and provides a foregrounding for democracy.10 Pace
Mountz and Salter, I also I want to emphasise the differential experience and
visibility of bordering as a transitive world-making, world-dividing process
called border security: the border is not everywhere for everyone.
Border securitys worlds, all over the world, are also connected to
immigration detention and processing apparatuses that deal out belonging,
exclusion, protection, ejection, suspension. Though this distribution of life
chances cannot be the focus of the paper, it is the broader context framing
the critical concerns driving what follows. Border security has become a key
means of suspending and withholding meaningful life for some, in the name
of the life of the nation and those securely onshore within it. The meaning and value of life itself in the eyes and forms and practices of certain
agents of states is what is at stake in contemporary state work as border
security. Whose living, moving and free circulation must be secured and
defended? Who must be impeded, interdicted, detained; who is exposed to
cruelty and death? Australian border security currently attempts to negate the
politics implied in such questions by suspending the political status of those
it interdicts not least of all by detaining all boat arrivals offshore, whenever it is possible to do so. But in this attempted negation there is also the
mess, tensions, passions and contradictions driving a key emergent site of
407
political contention, full of agency. A world in which national border security is unnecessary might also be a world in which global political justice
becomes possible.
In practice, Australian border security is unthinkable without considering its unique regional geography, as well as its isolation and relative wealth.
Total deterrence of all would-be boat arrivals only becomes possible because
of the storm-prone, shark-infested moat that separates the island continent
from Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. In this sense, Australia is unique
among the wealthy, powerful nation-states of the contemporary as a nationstate in which border securitys ideals can be realised, where the dream of
total deterrence expressed by stop the boats can come true. This means that,
while the claims here are related to general transformations of sovereignty as
border security, we should never lose sight of the specificity of the case and
the onshore peculiarities of contemporary Australian parliamentary politics.
One onshore Australian peculiarity emerges because of the dominance of
Murdoch-owned mass media, which has been nakedly partisan in its support
of border security slogans such as stop the boats, which are made sensical
through the near complete dominance of a deterrence script11 developed
over more than a decade and a half. Onshore this always-already pre- and
re-mediated reality of mass media is politically indissociable from, and fully
unintelligible without recourse to related factors such as immigration detention,12 the politics of human mobility,13 the agency and motivations of people
moving across borders,14 the possibility of escape,15 and Australias responsibilities under international law16 and migration law.17 Much of the scholarly
literature on the Australian case conflates these issues; very few treat border security in and on its own terms. For these reasons, this paper remains
committed to rendering the specificities of Australias contemporary border
security arrangements intelligible in terms of the general conditions with
which they are enabled and enacted, in order to disclose the transformations
of sovereignty of which they are both a part and an agentic contributor.
They key document under close analysis throughout this paper is the
Guide to Australian Maritime Security Arrangements (GAMSA), which is
placed in relation to Australias stated, mapped responsibilities. GAMSA gives
order and orientation to Australian border security by giving a full explication of the roles and responsibilities government agents must undertake for
each of the eight categories of civil maritime threats it identifies. For the purposes 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 Sovereign
Borders. It is prescriptive in that it provides a set of instructions for the
Commonwealths stakeholders on how to do border security. But in doing
so, it is descriptive in that it lays out elements for a generalisable apparatus
of border security. It is so first of all because it is intelligible, portable and
replicable, in a way that can be further developed and re-applied by other
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Peter Chambers
agents working for nation-states and in the name of security. Second, it is

generalisable insofar as it partakes of and adds to an existing set of popular,
already-instituted responses to human mobility as border security. It shares
with these responses a language containing a set of assumptions, instructions
and descriptions. In these ways, it is an iterative iteration, a recursive form
of communication18 that becomes agentic as it is attached to specific and
intelligible parts of apparatuses. In both these ways, border security is a
paradigm, and increasingly, it is the dominant paradigm for responding to
forms of mobility judged problematic or threatening by public and private
agents of states and their security. With this characterisation in mind, the
methodological aim with the close reading undertaken here is to produce
a critical and spatial account of border securitys instructions for itself and
descriptions of itself: it is a set of second-order observations on orders for
operations,19 which the mess and complexity of enacted practice and political
rhetoric continually perturbs and reiterates.
The approach taken here follows the international political sociology of
Didier Bigo, Mark Salter, Louise Amoore and others,20 and has also learned
much from the methodology and presentational style of Stephen Colliers
topological analysis of the spatial logic of domestic security in the United
States.21 Common to these approaches is the simultaneous presentation of
two emphases. The first emphasis is on close empirical attention to the
ways and means by which data appears and is translated into and realised
as actionable, portable forms of knowledge expertise, risk factors, natural facts, operating environments, threat objects which can be handled
to assure the safe passage of authority through a complex set of power
relations. The second emphasis develops critical theoretical analyses of the
effects of these assembled elements as deployed: what they do politically,
and, schematically, how they do it.
This methodological approach has also been further enriched by
approaches to critical geography which emphasise the extensively, intensively spatial dimensions of apparatuses.22 With Dalby,23 this takes shape
here as an attempt to render explicit the geographical language implicit
in the formulation of contemporary policy. Of course words are deeds,
but here, I seek to go beyond language and formulation and also show
key points of border securitys materiality, and how that is constitutively an
enacted politics that is about the domination of space. My intention here is
to offer a grounded theory sufficiently critical and spatial for understanding
general transformations that border security names. This is a critical geopolitics, because it encourages us to employ a reflexive understanding that,
potentially at least, offers a way of reconceiving key geopolitical notions of
jurisdiction and sovereignty. To do this I also employ insights from critical
jurisprudence,24 which I introduce in the following section. But it is also an
enacted geopolitics, because it consists in an actual domination of regional
space by agents working in the name of a nation and its sovereignty: it is
409
a concrete order of domination.25 To begin as a critical geopolitics tracing

the actual geopolitical domination border security involves, the analysis now
begins with an articulation of the space and jurisdiction of Australian border
security.
MAPPING MARITIME JURISDICTION AND NATIONAL

SOVEREIGNTY
National Objective, Maritime Security, Australian Law

GAMSA begins with the following sentence: Australias national objective
for maritime security is to deter or prevent illegal activity from occurring in
Australias maritime jurisdiction and where necessary to interdict and enforce
Australian laws.26 This places GAMSAs ordering firmly on the side of law.
Metonymically, this siding also evinces a compression of nation, ocean, security, activity, jurisdiction, and a territorial order of law. It is this compressed
set of factors which are asserted as the national objective. Jerry Brotton has
asserted that a map always manages the reality it tries to show.27 GAMSAs
2013 edition includes a variant of the following Geoscience Australia map,
Australias Maritime Jurisdiction (Figure 1). GAMSA shows how this vast
space according to the deputy commander of Border Protection Command
(BPC) 11% of the earths oceans28 might be managed for the national
objective in a way that would secure this avowed 11% as border securitys
reality.
Managing to show Australias maritime jurisdictions in a way that is legal
from an Australian perspective means Australian law must be present, at least
in some sense. For activity to occur in the maritime jurisdictions that GAMSA
nominates as Australias in a way that deterrence measures would have
to be applied Australian laws would already have to be present. Border
security cannot respond lawfully without a space and time of Australian law
that is spatio-temporally already and sovereignly there.
This is because the way in which this space and time of state law
is conventionally given is through state sovereignty, where sovereignty is
co-extensive with the modern state, and indivisible the entire power of
the state has to be vested in a single locus, a centralized legal authority.29
Authority and responsibility for certain spaces as maritime jurisdictions is
held in this conventional account to emanate from the territorial order of
state sovereignty. Australian border security moves to the offshore oceanic
limit from its onshore territorial centre. When sovereignty was embodied
in a monarch, this centre was the living body of the King or Queen; in a
nation-state such as Australia, sovereignty is centred equally and evenly
throughout the territory, where it remains or does it?
The following assertion from the Operation Sovereign Borders pamphlet rhetorically aligns the commitment of the Liberal Party with the most
410
FIGURE 1 Australias maritime jurisdiction (source: Geoscience Australia).
411
conspicuous assertion of sovereignty in recent Australian political life. In a

way that will become crucial for this analysis, it is also, note well, an assertion
of national sovereignty:
It was Prime Minister John Howard who declared that we will decide
who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.
This was a statement of national sovereignty and the need for Australia
to control our borders. A Coalition government will restore real policies
that live up to this declaration.30
In the past five years, this decisionist prerogative has been synthesised in
Australian onshore politics in the compressed repetition of the rhetorical
phrase stop the boats, which is ubiquitously known because of mass media:
spokespeople from the Coalition repeat the phrase, and news media disseminate it. Both the repetition and the dissemination are crucial phases
involved in the articulation of national sovereignty. Onshore, through the
effective synthesis achieved by dint of repetition, stop the boats has become
a synecdochal phrase that compresses the entire semiotic process that
securing 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 and
how has been reached or agreed to, whether explicitly or tacitly. And yet: We
will decide . . . and stop the boats can be read, I am arguing, as indicating
not merely an expression, but a transformation of sovereignty not the
effect, but an actual change that generates effects. In order to understand
this 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: an
ordering of space and a localisation.31 The assertion of jurisdiction is the
primary imposition of order and place.32 We can think of this through a
compressed reenactment of the order of events establishing the territorial
order of law in any colonial-settler nation-state, in three stages. Jurisdiction is
expressed; the colonisation of space is enacted; sovereignty is a later expression over that space in a way to paraphrase Dorsett and McVeigh that
erases any memory of a time in which the laws jurisdiction was anything
other than complete and unified.33 In this account: jurisdiction first, then
sovereignty.
What then is sovereignty? Sovereignty is a retrospective expression of
past, present and future unity that screens the actual, non-unified, heterogeneous processes of land appropriation that enabled it, including the
expressions of jurisdiction that ordered the land appropriation that became
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Peter Chambers
the territory. In order for there to be sovereign territory that can be threatened, bordered, protected, secured there had to be a colonising population
transforming the assertions of jurisdiction over land by occupying and developing that land into territory. In the case of Australias history, all of this
came across the sea by boat, at least until the advent of civil aviation as mass
transport in the 1970s. Australian sovereignty was a boat arrival. How can
we think about the relation between jurisdiction and sovereignty, territory
and law, based on the re-ordering suggested by critical jurisprudence?
Let us rethink the order as follows: sovereignty emanates from territorial law, but territorial law emanates from land appropriation, and land
appropriation was enunciated through jurisdiction, prior to any sovereignty.
Sovereignty becomes the effect of an appropriation process that transforms
a population into a people a nation through the domination of space.
Operation Sovereign Borders shows one among many contemporary cases
in which a nation is seeking to secure a space for itself through enacting
domination of space as border security, using jurisdiction in a way that
makes sovereignty effective.
Maritime Jurisdictions, Non-sovereign Conditions, Spatial Limits

What of the contemporary ocean and its jurisdictions? GAMSA explicates
Australias maritime jurisdiction by placing it within the ambit of the
1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The
importance of UNCLOS is described in GAMSA as follows:
UNCLOS provides a comprehensive international legal regime for use
of the sea and its resources. UNCLOS establishes a legal order of the
seas that seeks to balance the rights and responsibilities of coastal states
against the rights and responsibilities of other sea users in areas such
as navigation, conservation and management of living resources and the
study, protection and preservation of the marine environment. It also
clearly establishes and delineates the various maritime zones over which
states may exercise different degrees of jurisdiction.34
As a comprehensive international legal regime and as a legal order of the

seas UNCLOS is strikingly unlike the legal order of a territory and nationstate such as Australia. Like all state-based law, Australian law has to express
itself as sovereign in order to be law. But as a topological gesture that establishes and delineates those spaces that can lawfully be treated as Australias,
UNCLOSs is an ordering of space that does without sovereignty, though only
as the effect of a convention agreed to by a number of sovereign nationstates. Recalling the opening sentence of GAMSA, Australian border security
exists in order to secure the national objective, and this has and has to
have sovereignty standing behind it. But in delineating the zones over
which Australia can exercise different degrees of jurisdiction, non-sovereign
413
UNCLOS offers Australian sovereignty an authorised place to sit and speak

and act as border security, in order to secure itself and its interests a
place GAMSA accepts by acceding to the above. In a way, GAMSA allows
UNCLOS to tell Australia where and to what extent it can be sovereign, for
the purposes of border security.
GAMSA describes the following maritime jurisdictions, consistent with
UNCLOS norms: territorial sea baseline (TSB); internal waters; coastal waters;
territorial sea; contiguous zone; exclusive economic zone (EEZ); continental shelf. Also consistent with these international norms, the Commonwealth
exercises full sovereignty over its territorial sea, its seabed and subsoil, and
over the airspace above it.35 Its worth pausing to consider the phrase full
sovereignty and its spatial limit: the territorial sea extends up to twelve nautical miles from the TSB. Beyond the territorial sea for example, in the
Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which stretches to 200 nautical miles from
the TSB Australia exercises sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring
and exploiting, conserving and managing all natural resources of the waters,
seabed and subsoil, together with other activities such as the production of
energy from water, currents and wind.36 GAMSAs assertion of sovereignty
in the EEZ is interesting, because it suggests that sovereignty can be understood in this zone as merely an exclusive right to explore, exploit,
conserve and manage resources.37 This shows a conceptual alignment
between sovereignty, exclusivity and the right to extract,38 but, pace Derridas
insistence on indivisibility, can there be partial sovereignty? Australias jurisdictional responsibilities depend on it; international co-operation and Safety
of Life at Sea rely on it. But what of national sovereignty, which depends for
its effective expression in Australian maritime jurisdictions on the decisionist
prerogative, which is a categorical assertion of a right to decide for all arrivals
and the conditions of their arrival, given urgency by background conditions
described as a crisis and national emergency?
The presence of partial sovereignty shows how rhetorical expressions of national sovereignty such as Howards decisionist prerogative
necessarily exclude partial spaces and overriding responsibilities from the
avowed 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 can
thus observe one of the constitutive blind spots of the Operation: national
sovereignty is dispossessed of the fullness that it claims for itself when it
asserts itself categorically. Jurisdictional rights and responsibilities necessarily fill up Australia with conditions imposed upon it by non-sovereign norms
such as UNCLOSs, and this diminishes national sovereignty in the sense in
which the decisionist prerogative expresses it.
If the zone in which maritime interdictions of irregular maritime arrivals
occur is not sovereignly Australia, in what sense is border security being
pursued sovereignly, in a way that is consistent with the national objective?
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Peter Chambers
Strictly speaking, for a vessel to threaten Australias sovereignty, it would

have to arrive in the territorial sea. Such boats seldom arrive. Arrivals that
reach as far as Australias territorial sea constitute exceptional cases, such as
the vessel that arrived in Geraldton, Western Australia, in June 2013. The Sri
Lankans aboard that boat arrived in Australia by accident; they had intended
to sail for New Zealand.39 Does this then mean that most arrivals, who either
arrive in the EEZ near Christmas Island, Cocos-Keeling Islands or Ashmore
Reef, are partial threats to partial sovereignty?
Further, arrivals seldom arrive in Australia precisely because they are
prevented from doing so: they are interdicted so that they do not arrive. This
is consonant with the deterrence aspect of the national objective for maritime
security, but as it complicates any talk of arrivals, let alone of those arrivals
being threats to sovereignty. It also complicates and renders ambiguous the
full legality of what is being undertaken. In the case of illegal foreign fishing
or whaling, Australia has sovereign rights within the EEZ: to the extent that
such agents are extracting resources, this is recognisably unlawful in a way
that is consistent both with the extent of Australian sovereignty and the way
that sovereignty is recognised in UNCLOSs norms. But in the absence of
full sovereignty, how does BPC interdict boat arrivals in a way that is fully
lawful? In order to approach this question, we have to consider two further
jurisdictions, the Australian Search and Rescue Region (SRR) and the Security
Forces 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 difference as being one of safety and security, respectively. GAMSA refers to
the SRR as that part of the world in which a nation has responsibility for
the safety of life at sea . . . and for assistance to people in distress,40 but
is also careful to emphasise that the GAMSA deals solely with security in
Australias maritime jurisdiction and does not address maritime safety issues,
including the Safety of life at Sea (SOLAS) Convention.41 Discursively, the
distinction of the SFAA maintains a space for GAMSA to write of maritime
arrivals as matters for border security.
The SFAA is the Area that refers to the SFA, an agency that GAMSA
describes as a national agency in charge of providing the response to
maritime security incidents. In Australia this role is undertaken by Border
Protection Command (BPC).42 The SFAA is the Area in which the SFA has
authority over maritime security incidents; in Australia, this is BPC. BPC is the
SFA, and it operates in the SFAA against threats, including boat arrivals. But
this is circular. In order to break out of this circle, what has to be recognised
is that SFA was an area of authority generated as the negotiated effect aimed
at developing regional cooperation for combating piracy and violence at
415
sea, facilitated by the International Maritime Organization. But in what sense

are piracy and violence at sea comparable to irregular maritime arrivals as
security threats?
Piracy involves people and assets in situations with a direct potential
for deadly harm, because it involves the expropriation of vessels and their
cargo. GAMSA asserts that violence is generally intrinsic in acts of piracy
and robbery at sea.43 It is for this reason that GAMSA construes it as a security threat. Fishing and whaling, meanwhile, are regarded as a direct threat
to property-like resources. We can see here a split analogous to the two
categories of crime upheld by many domestic police forces: crimes against
the person and crimes against property. Many contemporary instances of
illegal foreign fishing also involve organised crime networks, large trawlers,
and long nets. Japans state-backed commercial whalers are virtual seaborne
factories44 capable of industrial-scale resource expropriation. Would-be boat
arrivals lack such resources and equipment as would be necessary to attack
BPC or shipping interests in Australias maritime jurisdictions. They also lack
the organisational wherewithal and intent to extract any sovereignly claimed
resources in Australias EEZ: precisely because the fishing boats are not fishing in this case, leaving aside the fact that they are fishing boats involved
in resource extraction without industrial methods. What then are these boats
that must be stopped?
Would-be arrivals typically attempt to arrive in Australia aboard repurposed fishing boats chartered by smugglers. In many cases these boats
are poorly maintained and of dubious seaworthiness. In most cases, these
boats are dangerously overloaded, with passengers, including children and
babies, who are unable to swim. This is one of the main contributors to
shipwrecks over the past decade between Indonesia and Australia, in which
perhaps more than a thousand people have perished.45 Passengers aboard
these boats are often not given life jackets. In recent years, many vessels
have sailed for Australia during swell season, when conditions can deteriorate very quickly. A situation such as this is surely unsafe, and would seem
on first glance to be an ongoing, even chronic Safety of Life at Sea situation,
which would engage Australias responsibilities within the SRR and transfer
jurisdiction to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA). And yet, right
up until the point at which either a person aboard a boat raises a distress
signal or people end up in the water, would-be arrivals are approached as
security threats.
In maintaining the SRR as the SFAA for the SFA, BPC is including boat
arrivals within threat categories in a way that involves either self-serving logic
or ambiguity, especially as GAMSA concedes that irregular maritime arrivals
have been driven by political unrest or poverty in other countries, the limited
places available internationally in migrant-receiving countries, and the safety
and economic opportunity Australia offers.46 If boat arrivals do not violently
threaten people or maritime resources, if they are driven by violence or
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Peter Chambers
poverty themselves, and if they are seeking safety, how can this ambiguity
about their threatening nature be clarified? The following section responds
to this in detail.
OPERATIONALISING SOVEREIGN BORDERS: LEGITIMATE

ACTIVITY, INTEREST
GAMSA defines security threat in the maritime domain as any action, device
or event that has potential to cause consequences adverse to Australias interests.47 In explicating the nature of boat arrivals as a threat, GAMSA states,
Australias national interests are threatened by any irregular arrival of people.48 Notable in this section is how the language of law and sovereignty
has been replaced by that of interest and threat though the nation is still
present as the qualifier of interest. But (again) the language is circular: boat
arrivals are held to carry the potential to cause consequences adverse to
Australias interests, interests threatened by boat arrivals. To escape this
circle, we can interpolate from the national objective and say that GAMSA
expresses an interest in avoiding irregularity irregularity would be the
consequences adverse. This is consonant with the following, from the same
section, elaborating the earlier assertion: The primary risk is the potential for
entry into Australia without having been screened by border authorities.49
In what sense might entry without screening by border authorities constitute
the primary risk of a compromise to Australias interests in a way that would
constitute a security threat? This becomes much clearer once we examine
the way in which GAMSA recognises activity as constitutive, then codes it as
good and bad.
The opening paragraph of GAMSA makes reference to Australia as the
worlds fifth largest shipping nation.50 Indeed, the volume of total seaborne
trade is estimated to have quadrupled over the past few decades51 ; a commitment to expanding trade remains an avowed policy commitment of nearly
all nation-states, including Australia.52 It is this ambient background of accumulation and distribution, governed by an economistic logic expressed as
an imperative, that constitutes what GAMSA recognises as activity. Activity
as 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 primary conception of interest: Australian and foreign ships carry Australian
passengers, crew and cargo within and beyond Australian waters. Australia
therefore has strong economic and national interests in maintaining security
within and beyond Australian waters.53 Australian passengers, cargo, crew
and waters here are all represented as property-like things with whose being
Australian 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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FIGURE 2 Shipping movement to and from Australia (source: Geoscience Australia).
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Peter Chambers
analogous to property. But the claim here is more an allowance of mobility

of interest as activity. That is to say: because of the nature of shipping as
an activity, it must move. GAMSAs logic is in preventing the impedance of
a constitutively mobile activity: Interruption of or interference with international shipping operating in Australias maritime jurisdiction would have
an immediate and detrimental effect on Australias economy and its export
competitiveness, and other consequences for lawful activity within Australias
maritime jurisdiction.54 Activity that is in Australias interest must continue
over space and time, indefinitely: interruption of or interference with activity at any point would be detrimental, and must be prevented from
occurring.
GAMSA develops the notion of activity by elaborating a distinction set
up by asserting an idea about legitimate activity, which is read as a significant contributor to the Australian economy.55 But what makes it legitimate?
I would like to offer the following counterfactual as a theory. GAMSA recognises an order of things from the perspective of a self-serving retrospection.
To wit: such activity, because it benefits Australias economy, is then coded as
legitimate, legislated for and defended as such, here using the full resources
of border security. We can see evidence of this from recent developments
in Australian shipping.56 Recognition of the benefit comes first; legitimacy is
then coded accordingly.
If recognition of the benefit comes first, then we can define an interest
as a recognised benefit. Authority would then be the power to recognise a
benefit in a way capable of securing it, using such resources as are available. Such interests are complex investments that involve all of us through
global supply chains.57 Like the border security apparatus arranged in defensive relation to these supply chains, these complex interests are embodied,
extended, enacted, and distributed.58 This means that interests, like border securitys, are necessarily and richly spatial. Further, temporally and
processually these interests are not a one off matter. That activity must
continue means securing is an active, transitive process that transforms the
space and time of the future according to the needs of those interests that
predominate in the present. This gives us one minimalistic but cogent way
of understanding the purpose of Australian border security according to
its declared interest: border security was established to order mobility for
accumulation to secure circulation for interested stakeholders in Australias
maritime jurisdictions. Circulation must be defended.
So what is a threat any action that threatens interests by being irregular? For GAMSA in regard to irregular maritime arrivals, it would seem
that threat = arrival + irregularity, and that irregularity also carries the following though GAMSA never explains how or why: Irregular maritime
arrivals also pose a significant threat in relation to illegal activity in protected
areas . . . marine pollution . . . and compromise to biosecurity . . ..59 But the
irregularity is simply a condition of legislation, whereby, according to the
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Migration Act (1958) a non-citizen must have a visa to arrive in Australia.

The Commonwealth could remove this condition, and that would allow the
boats to stop by enabling the planes to start. But irregularity is not simply a
consequence of not being screened by border authorities, it is also a screen
for a desire for deterrence, the achievement of which is sign and signal of
effective governmental control.60
What is a border? As GAMSAs understanding of threat constructs it,
border = interest + threat (where existence of threat calls for a response
as security [interdiction]). If this is the case, unless interest + threat =
sovereignty, sovereignty = border. Should Operation Sovereign Borders then
be re-named Operation Securing Circulation? This phrase deletes the nation,
which is always behind stop the boats, to the extent that it is a proclamation of national sovereignty, as the pamphlet asserts. National sovereignty
gets taken along with border security, because jettisoning it would deprive
Operation Sovereign Borders of its persuasive rhetorical force: would-be
arrivals would then no longer be a national emergency, just matters for routine impedance. If Operation Sovereign Borders is to be persuasive, then
perhaps national sovereignty must be the unannounced passenger aboard
all of BPCs response assets. If this is the case, border security is not people
smuggling, but it does smuggle a people into Australias maritime jurisdictions whenever BPC performs interdiction. And this, as I now turn to explore,
must be enacted.
ENACTORS, INTENSIFIERS, AND ENABLERS OF

BORDER 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 eyes
and ears. GAMSA understands these sense functions by the term awareness
indeed, one of the key avowed tasks of border security is the generation of
awareness. To do this GAMSA nominates generating awareness of activity
as 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 sets
of awareness generators, sense abilities. The most general of these sets is
common knowledge and open source information. One interface for the
translation of this knowledge and information into actionable intelligence
is Customs Watch, ACBPSs national information collection program that
draws on the knowledge of industry and the community to protect Australias
borders by reporting suspicious border activities.61 The importance of
community engagement is stressed here: Customs Watch also values its
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partnerships with community groups and individuals who observe suspicious

activities in their local environments. These groups include accommodation
providers, coast guard volunteers, radio operators, 4WD clubs, marina operators and residents of coastal communities.62 In the case of the arrival in
Geraldton, Western Australia, of the group of Sri Lankan men sailing for New
Zealand, BPC was explicit in its call for coastal community engagement from
suspicious individuals-cum members: Terry Price, deputy commander of BPC
operations at the time, said that BPC had to patrol 11 percent of the earths
oceans, that detecting every vessel was a vast challenge, and that the public should ring in if they see anything. . . . We want people to call if they
believe theyve seen something.63 Mr. Price stated that the lesson learnt
from the Geraldton incident was that Border Protection Command needed
residents to act as spotters.64 This indicates that doing border security successfully in Australias maritime environment requires recruiting citizens as
awareness generators who can feed information to its own professional
staff.
The second set of awareness generators for border security is comprised
of Australias various intelligence gathering, analysis and espionage agencies.65 Where irregular maritime arrivals are concerned, the first active set
of formal sense abilities are located in southeast Asia, especially West Java,
Indonesia, in the form of a number of regionally engaged agents employed
to watch, wait, and respond. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) seek to
know, surveil, and respond to arrivals through the transnational crime prism
of people smuggling.66 Just as Australian border security eventually becomes
a matter of mandatory detention for arrivals as a matter of law, prior to arrival
and departure both its precondition and prevention are reliant on a parallel
set of enforceable recognitions as criminal and transnational.
Responding effectively to people smuggling as a matter of transnational
crime which is more-or-less organised through fluid networks of association67 means being pre-emptive, disruptive and co-operative. Its worth
noting 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 Indonesians
in Indonesia. Effective co-operation requires ongoing good faith efforts by
Indonesian counterparts, which struggles to exist without trust and respect.
Responding effectively to people smuggling as a matter of transnational
crime requires engaging with these aspects of transnational crime. It may
even involve entanglement in transnational crime, at the very least in the
course of intelligence gathering and undercover operations. The apparent
clarity of border security as asserted in Operation Sovereign Borders is shadowed beyond what GAMSA recognises as sovereignly Australia by murky
associations that reach out into the region and back into Australia, embroiling Australian interests in an informal political economy with a global reach.
Securing national sovereignty through border security is impossible without
reaching into the global shadows.
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Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (ACBPS) also runs a

number of awareness and capacity-building efforts, as well as building and
maintaining relationships with its Indonesian counterparts. The Department
of Immigration and Border Protection likewise has a number of agents
engaged throughout south-east Asia working on the detention side of the
border security complex: this may include informal arrangements for warehousing would-be refugees in Indonesia and Malaysia.68 As with AFPs efforts
and the concerted watching of Australias formal and informal informants, the
statecraft that contributes to maintaining the territorial integrity of Australia
requires a certain vigilant and pro-active engagement in and with Indonesia
and Australias other neighbours; Australian border security is always-already
a regional engagement.69 These are complex, fragile relationships; generating effective awareness for Australian border security would be less effective
without them.
Australian and Indonesian agents of Australian border security provide
intelligence to ACBPS on vessels whose departure is known or estimated
to be imminent, and this information shapes the posture of BPCs deployed
assets. There are many fishing vessels operating throughout the Indonesian
archipelago; BPCs knowledge of certain fishing vessels70 as containing, carrying or conveying threats is predicated on intelligence gathered in the
course of intelligence gathering, information sharing and enforcement work
taking place in Indonesia, which in the case of People Smuggling Strike
Team, takes place in collaboration with Indonesias analogous people smuggling task force, co-formed as part of the Bali Process.71 Gathered intelligence
is the key means by which ACPBS knows would-be arrivals when they are
imminent departures in a way it can communicate to BPC: as with generating awareness, knowing a departure to be more than a fishing boat relies
on agents working in Indonesia who must rely, to varying extents, on their
Indonesian 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 of
instrumental knowledge intended to enable relatively safe and timely interdiction of vessels by BPC. However, there is a second, informal network
that, depending on the voyage, may be of equal or greater significance. Both
people-smuggling networks as well as smuggled people and their friends
and families are in active contact, mostly via mobile phone. In practice,
this means that certain of those aboard boats are in contact with people
in immigration detention in Australia (on Christmas Island, in Darwin, on
Manus Island, on Nauru), relatives on the mainland, and smugglers back
in Indonesia and elsewhere (who, in turn, retain the phone numbers of
smuggled peoples relatives to follow up for payment).
This shadow communication network becomes significant for BPC in
generating awareness because any one of these people has the knowledge
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and ability to place an anonymous call to 000 (Australias emergency number) in the event of an emergency. This aspect of border security merits
analytic attention in its own right, but for present purposes its worth noting
that there exists a kind of disjunctive symbiosis between BPC and asylum
seekers, an uneasy co-dependence between the interests of interdictors,
interdicted and their networks of associates at certain moments, in certain cases, they rely on one another to keep one another out of harms
way. In a strange way all sides of the interdiction have common interests;
they look out for one another. Smugglers and the smuggled are shadow
stakeholders in border security, and this has definite effects, because when
the shadow communication network fails, along with the Commonwealths
formal counterparts, people end up in the water.
Another set of awareness generators is comprised of imagery received
from a number of satellites, both commercial and military. While GAMSA
concedes these sources to be in use, no detailed information about them
is contained within the reports to which I had access, either because it
is classified or commercial in confidence. A further set of sense abilities is airborne, and consists of electronic, electromagnetic, electro-optical
and optical means of surveillance. It includes the planes and helicopters of
Customs Border Protection division; aircraft of the Royal Australian Air Force
(RAAF) assigned to surveillance tasks by BPC; Australian Army Regional
Force Surveillance Unit patrols; and air patrols using aircraft contracted to
the Australian Maritime Safety Agency (AMSA).
The next set of sense abilities is seaborne, what BPC calls surface
assets. These are taken from the full range of enforcement agencies that
BPC is empowered to command and control in order to respond to security threats. Surface assets are deployed in a posture, both in line with the
general strategy of deployment for patrol purposes,72 and circumstantially,
as in the case where a specific surface asset has been deployed to respond
to a threat object, so identified, either by any number or combination of
those awareness-generating sense abilities detailed above, or by the sense
abilities of the deployed surface assets. These sense abilities include radar,
two-way radio (VHF and UHF), mobile telecommunications, binoculars (both
electro-optical and optical), and the naked eye.
The next set of sense abilities includes those of officials stationed on
Christmas Island and local residents, and usually relies on a combination
of telescopes and binoculars, two-way radio, and mobile telecommunications (both intra-island and island-to-BPC command) in order to function.
As in the case of the shadow network of mobile communications from the
smuggler-side of border security, these means, far less spectacular in scalar
terms (as well as operating cost and complexity), have been of greater significance than their scale would suggest: in the case of the shipwreck of
SIEV 22173 it was these sense abilities that saw an approaching vessel, when
all the hi-tech failed. Armed ships and expensive74 drone-based surveillance
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programmes capture governmental resources and media attention, but in the

prevention of drowning, they may do little work relative to their size and
cost. Nonetheless, high tech appears to have a gravitational pull that correlates with security apparatuses: in the Coronial Inquest for SIEV 221, jet
skis and rocket-propelled life jackets were suggested as further appropriate
response assets for CI; both suggestions were received as prudent possible
measures by the Coroner.75
Overall, the awareness generators of border security can be understood
as comprising a regionally dispersed co-operation of agents: embodied by
suspicious individuals, extended by high-tech prostheses and undercover
operations, enacted by interested corporations, corrupt police and professional staff, and distributed throughout South-East Asia as a complex regional
engagement, as well as being arranged in a strategic posture in Australias
maritime jurisdiction. Seen from this machinic perspective, the sovereign
unity projected as ideal by Operation Sovereign Borders would appear to
bear no relation to the dispersed, heterogeneous materiality required to
enact it.
But unity is also gathered in action: that is, by actually going out and
enforcing the border through interdiction, BPC contributes to the restoration of the integrity of that border, and if it does so reliably, it makes itself
indispensible for doing so. As explored above, this cannot happen without
co-operation, but it must eventually be en-forced. This brings us to the second subsection, where I describe those deployed aspects of border security
most 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 the
case of maritime interdiction primarily consists in enforcement, but I am
also critically interested in what happens in the space of thought between
preparedness and response. To begin with on this point, its worth noting
the meaning that response indicates by paying close attention to the shift
between the pre- and the re-.
I take it that border security is active with action,76 and I have been
reading these actions as complex transitive processes unfolding as a geopolitics in these sections with a distinct materiality. As I see it, however,
GAMSA tends to describe border security for all threats as re-acting to
the prior, provoking actions of others: reactions upon actions. This would
make enforcing border security like the game design of Space Invaders, in
which alien invaders just keep appearing at the top of the screen, regardless
of 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 strongly
at odds with the actuality of the complex, fraught regional engagements
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Peter Chambers
canvassed in the previous section which must be proactive, preemptive

and 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 prior
and ready made. This of course is part of what makes decisive responding possible and necessary, but more broadly, it effaces the traces77 of
the all-too-active and ongoing works of construction that border security
requires in order to be effective. In action as response, BPCs assets might not
have headspace to engage in critical reflection. Nonetheless, border security
requires complex forms of what might be considered premeditation: intentions developed and actions carried out by thousands of staff, entangled in
the region, even requesting that citizens get out their binoculars and report
suspicious behaviour.
In effacing all traces of prior construction by moving from the pre- to
the re- in order to generate effective response as enforcement, individuals,
prostheses, corporations, police and communication networks are all effectively invisibilised: gathered intelligence appears ready-to-hand, but only at
the cost of negating border securitys constructed world. In order for it to be
ready, everything not only has to be prefabricated, the processes of fabrication have to be disregarded a priori. In the response phase of operations
delineated by GAMSA, all response can do is be prepared for the moment
at which the threat moves into BPCs theatre of operations. Here we find
another constitutive blind spot generated by the practice of border security.
In order to respond as security, BPC must not regard the world beyond its
security operations. The following is a .jpeg (Figure 3) copied from a page
of the Australian Navys website describing the effects of its illegal foreign
fishing work as assigned to BPC.78
In transforming threats into objects who can be responded to, border
securitys response assets79 engage in objectification: SIEV (Suspected Illegal
FIGURE 3 Illegals hauled in (source: Navy: the Sailors Paper).
425
Entry Vehicle) offers one way in which this is done using an acronym, the
above images shows another way this is represented, as a sign of a job well
done. The obscuring of constructed conditions that enables action is not
only a blinding to world; it also transforms the world it makes visible as it
responds so that it is visible another way. This is one of the key ways in
which, as Salter notes, the border as suture is about the way borders are
made 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, interdicting
and excising.
The patrol vessels actively deployed in Australias northern waters each
carry two Rigid Hulled Inflatable Boats (RHIBs) of between six and eight
metres, which can carry crew and passengers of between two (operational
minimum) and twenty-five (emergency maximum of the largest of the three
kinds). In most cases it is these RHIBs and their trained personnel that are
deployed to perform the first stages of interdiction on the high seas. Patrol
vehicles also carry a number of life jackets for the passengers and crew
of interdicted boats, as well as life rafts that can be launched as staging
points between foundering boats, RHIBs and patrol vessels, in the event of
an emergency. The presence of life jackets is, of course, a prudent safety
measure. But it is one that brings us to essence of the lived contradictions of
all those who pass through the response phase of the apparatus, the space
where interdiction is actually enforced and risky threats are transformed into
that which is processed; it thus bears closer comment.
Boat arrivals are construed as risky security threats who must be cared
for, in the course of interdiction. Arguably the greatest threat they present
(to BPC and the Commonwealth) emerges precisely because of their all-toohuman vulnerability and the risk it necessarily presents to the responders,
who, should their actions in the course of interdiction result in any loss of
life, injury, or even large numbers of people in the water, be opened to
questioning about their possible negligence, failure to adequately carry out
mission objectives, even criminal prosecution. BPCs responders are actually responsible for what they have authority over. This lived contradiction
is potentially a costly double bind for BPCs responders; at the very least,
from an ice-eyed mission objectives point of view, there are difficulties and
delicacies involved in these operations that are not typically experienced by
combat troops on search and destroy missions. The security threat must not
under any circumstances be eliminated. This generates further risks, costs,
and contradictions, mostly for BPCs responders in the course of discharging
their responsibilities. We can see one representation of this situation in the
following (Figure 4), which is a document produced by ACBPS in order to be
disseminated to would-be arrivals.81 It is recognisably a piece of government
propaganda, but it also stages the situation I am describing here including
the way the split is sutured with graphical clarity.
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Peter Chambers
FIGURE 4 Afghan storyboard (source: Australian Customs and Border Protection).
In practice, such a split holds safety apart from security. It also opens
onto a paradox at the heart of enforcement. It is an existential paradox, both
in that the split does and does not exist, and in that it profoundly shapes
the 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 to
respond as border security, it must: BPC is not AMSA. But operationally
it cannot exist in the sense that, as highly trained professional staff, BPCs
responders must know very well when a SOLAS incident has arisen they
know when security threats are not. Further, their being competent would
also 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, BPCs
responders may know what a pamphlet such as Operation Sovereign
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Borders cannot say: boat arrivals are security threats that are not threatening or not threatening in any of the ways that other threats are. The
vulnerability of national sovereignty is addressed by operationally recognising the vulnerability of boat arrivals in a way that does not discursively
recognise their vulnerability. This restores an observable unity to Australian
border security, but its clarity can only be maintained by suppressing the
emergence of another that would violate it if it were allowed to be. Border
security involves its enforcers in the domination of space and time. For this to
be 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 colonisation
of maritime space by national sovereignty has come to require the following
further measures.
Intensification: Tow Backs, Turn Arounds

Operation Sovereign Borders is an intensification of earlier efforts at establishing, developing and stabilising border security in Australia. Prior to the
September 2013 election, the then opposition canvassed the idea of turning
boats back; when this was mooted in 2011, discussion emphasised the operational 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 under
a veil of stubborn secrecy, which is justified as on-water operational matters which cannot be discussed both on grounds of national security and
giving 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 response
assets can know this, and never with certainty.
These intensifications are legible as unilateral offences against
Indonesian state sovereignty, with all that entails for effective co-operation
in generating awareness. Turn arounds and towbacks are also offensive to
Indonesian national sovereignty, to the extent that such a thing exists as the
precise counterparts of what has been analysed here: minimally, the right to
decide who arrives and the conditions in which they do. Arguably, they also
turn people men, women, children into boats and illegals, mere things
that can not only be hauled in but also moved around and treated as the
Commonwealth sees fit.
Tow backs and turn around are intensifications that move Australian
border security beyond the domination of space and perception toward the
direct domination of peoples lives in a way that takes no responsibility for
that which it asserts authority over: it is ejection, discharge. It is people
dumping. This is a domination of space, perception, and human life that
is in violation of the national objective set by GAMSA, because an expression of national sovereignty has reached beyond state sovereignty and the
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Peter Chambers
limits of Australias maritime jurisdiction in a way that makes it illegible

as legal or lawful. Tow backs and turn arounds are matters of fact and
will, not of law. In this way, national sovereignty is the determination of a
people to dominate in a way that refuses to recognise a limit such as would
circumscribe that of law. This also means showing contempt for, and even
direct violation of, the sovereignty of others. To the extent it is successful
according to its own unilateral intentions it is total domination. This raises
the principle of deterrence to the level of an absolute. Border security in
Australian maritime space can be regarded as a self-defending world in its
totality and the unilaterally imposed limits of what can be recognised within
that 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 of
military work, policing and other enforcement work and unites them within
the border security paradigm as BPC. From this perspective BPC is a multiagency command structure that conducts border security in concert with
a combination of enforcement agencies. It is a structure that enjoins the
intertwining of the thin blue line of policing with the uniform green of
the military in order to achieve the blended, effect of one command,83 a
projected unity. In terms of intended structure and projected effect, it is
crucial to note the relation here between one and all: one command, all
threats. One command has been put into place because of the complexity
of the all. Operation Sovereign Borders reinforces this projected impression
not just through talk of crisis and national emergency, but also by calling for
a further militarisation of the border.
Operation Sovereign Borders is a command structure that appears
Hobbesian insofar as it places an apparent one in command of the all
of sovereign Australias border security resources. But this projected impression is not consonant with the structures that enable it. Operation Sovereign
Borders asserts that stopping the boats cannot be achieved through interdepartmental committees, working groups and international dimensions
alone. There must be one person responsible with all the necessary resources
of government at his or her command.84 Just who is this person, and pace
Hobbes, what would be their powers of personation85 ?
As implemented, the policy does not upset the nested hierarchy of
committees that characterise Australian border securitys administrative structure: it merely adds a further task force, the Joint Agency Taskforce, above
which remains the Secretaries Committee on National Security, headed by
the Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the National Security
Committee, headed by the Prime Minister. As implemented, the policy has
in fact generated further bureaucratic complexity while abrogating to the
executive further and more secretive authority.
429
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 networks
structured by the committee form,86 and these are characterised by their
own intra and inter-committee hierarchies and internal politics, which are
complex.87 This means that Australian maritime security governance has
structures that preclude border securitys being accurately characterised as
a unity. Border Protection Command is not the responsibility or expressed
authority of any one. It is always also Customs and the Navy and the
Executive and the National Interest and over thirty other nominated stakeholders and the many other inter-active enforcement factors elaborated
earlier. This iterated set of hierarchies, networks and functional interdependencies and the incoherence, friction, turf wars, and animosities they
perforce introduce needs to be described in more detail to give a sufficiently precise sense of the disjuncture between the multiplicity of relations
at play in making border security a defensibly concerted effort and the
impression 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 the
structure the one command, all threats unity generated by BPCs intertwining of green and blue begins to fade and blur. On the blue side, under the
previous government, the Commander of BPC reported to the Deputy Chief
Executive Officer of Maritime, Corporate and Intelligence, who reported to
the CEO of Customs and Border Protection Service, who, in turn, reported
to the Minister of Home Affairs. On the green side, the Commander of
BPC reported to the Chief of Joint Operations, who reported to the Chief
of the Defence Force, who reported to the Minister of Defence. Operation
Sovereign Borders, adds the other aforementioned Taskforce above BPC, the
Operation Sovereign Borders Joint Agency Taskforce. Is there an identifiable
one here?
Operation Sovereign Borders places a military commander as the head
of the Taskforce: this is supposed to be the one commander (currently
Deputy Chief of Army Angus Campbell). But this commander reports to the
Minister for Immigration and Border Protection (currently Peter Dutton), and
the Minister has forbidden General Campbell from speaking publically about
his responsibilities. If General Campbell is the one, then his is a subordinated
and silenced one. This may be expedient for the executive, but it speaks
against a Hobbesian account of personation as an instantiation of a one
capable of sovereign speech.
The structural novelty of the task force is a formal one: a military service
has been made responsible to a minister other than the Minister of Defence.
This potentially places military assets at the disposal of an immigration
minister, in this sense it could be said to militarise immigration and the
executive responsible for it. The pamphlet explicitly states that the scale of
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Peter Chambers
this problem requires the discipline and focus of a targeted military operation, placed under a single operational and ministerial command.88 Where
ministerial 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 effectuating
this means being able to decide. Who can decide decisively? Certainly not
the Ministers subordinated commander. The Minister himself, meanwhile,
reports to Cabinet-level committees and the Department of Prime Minister
and Cabinet. Border security is not the one Operation Sovereign Borders
says it must be to be effective. Rather, it is lodged in the Department of
Prime Minister and Cabinet as follows.
At key moments, the order and orientation of border security rests on
political decisions. The first component of the executive that must be mentioned here is the Attorney-General.89 The Attorney-Generals department is
generally responsible for the formulation of policy and legal advice to the
government, including on matters relating to national security (and, therefore, border security). If, as I have suggested, border security rests at key
moments on decisions, then fundamentally it is the role of the AttorneyGeneral, their department, and the Crisis Centre to provide the executive
with legally defensible standing for border security, a sufficiently stable platform from which the decision leaps, resolving the crisis situation either
way. This raises questions in relation to the department or the Operation
Sovereign Borders pamphlet, where it speaks of crisis and national emergency, but given that this advice is confidential, the only trace we would
have of it would be in the public speech acts and decisions of the Prime
Minister, or in formulations like GAMSA. Which brings me to that which I
take 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 central enabling condition of border security, and the Prime Minister is the axis
around which the department turns. Within the department, the Committee
that oversees the co-ordination of border security is the National Security
Committee of Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister. Below this is the
Secretaries Committee on National Security, known as SCNS, the peak interdepartmental committee. It is chaired by the Secretary of the Department
of Prime Minister and Cabinet; its deputy is the National Security Advisor.
Below this is the National Intelligence Coordination Committee, chaired by
the NSA (National Security Advisor). The Prime Minister receives advice and
intelligence directly from the National Security Advisor and the Office of
National Assessment (ONA). Policy and strategic responses are formulated
within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet; the key group here
is 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?
431
Throughout this paper I have been describing the necessarily embodied, extended, enacted, and distributed elements nameable by the
Commonwealth as border security in relation to BPC, which as we can
see in these sections is also a complicated matrix of elements and acronyms,
requiring extensive collaboration to co-ordinate. As we have seen, Operation
Sovereign Borders emerged from the decisionist prerogative and the electoral success of the stop the boats slogan, which, in the response phase,
has intensified to the point of total domination and the violation of the
sovereignty of others. According to this ideal, nothing and no one can enter
except on a sovereign say so. This leads to the following question: who can
speak 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 people
in a way that is believed, otherwise it would cease to be, like the silence
that would be the law of an extinguished people. In order for it to be
said believably, it must resonate. As agents of Operation Sovereign Borders,
the executive may speak in the name of the nation, but to date successive
executives have only done so by expressing unconditional support for the
intensifications of border security it involves. In the space made and kept for
national sovereignty in this way, no one speaks, except on terms and conditions favourable to border security. Border security is sovereign speech
on the condition of border securitys defence and expansion.
CONCLUSION
Border security has been characterised here as a transformation of
sovereignty. Examined as space, materiality, and administrative form,
Operation Sovereign Borders has been explored as a set of border security
practices that tries to suture the world back together as sovereign. In doing
so, it knits its addressees as subjects into the bordered world.90 To return
to our research question: through border security the nation secures its unity
by sharing that which is indivisible.91 A logic that insists on the elimination of paradoxes would insist: this is incoherent. How can that which
is indivisible be apportioned into shares? By allowing paradoxes to abide
at the heart of our analysis of border securitys logic, we can show what
national sovereignty does without exception. As border security, national
sovereignty is that form of power capable of processing its paradoxes by
interdicting them and detaining them offshore. Through the division of the
world into shores, and the enforcement of these shores as border security, a
defended space has been constituted for the foreseeable future in which the
sovereign is alone and is not.
The global embrace of border security is indicative of a transformed
appreciation of the value of human life. Border security actively contributes
432
Peter Chambers
to mutations within and among the terms of belonging, exclusion and domination, from ones predicated categorically on citizenship by either blood or
soil to ones enabled by a differential recognition of the value of human life
based 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 fall
back on blood-and-soil narratives of belonging in order to establish distinctions for inclusion and exclusion: we grew here, you flew here was a
slogan used by locals after one prominent race riot in Sydney, Australia
the Cronulla Riots. For those with sufficient capital economic, social, symbolic assertions of such locality-rooted conditions are unnecessary where
global mobility is concerned. What has been set up for this class of person
is a mobility regime that ensures their low friction accumulative movement.
There are classes of people for whom circulation has been secured, and this
is producing categories of person who must be removed from circulation.
Securing circulation on behalf of this class, what John Urry calls the rich
class,95 is generating a world of proliferating borders96 ; in circular fashion,
this strengthens calls for the further development and intensification of border security policies. Securing circulation requires the accumulative mobility
of some, and this necessitates the impedance, forcible ejection, or indefinite
detention of others.97
Offshore detention is an interface of open systems and living people.
Following Deborah Cowens lead, this paper has attempted to observe key
points in this interface from the perspective of the border security systems
involved in producing offshore and offshore detention, and in this context,
threats to circulation are treated not only as criminal acts but as profound
threats to the life of trade.98 Offshore detention centres are places of mediation that translate border security into human suffering so that the life of trade
may continue to grow, accelerate, and intensify, with as little impedance as
is possible. This makes of offshore detention centres key global sites where
complexity becomes brutality99 in the name of a lifeless circulation of goods
that must be secured. The circulation of goods has been made synonymous
with the securing of the good. Offshore there is exposure, cruelty the suspension 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, beyond
the immediate privilege of a position of relative comfort, the spectacle of the
shipwreck, and the ability to look away.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the careful reading of Jenny Chambers, Ohad
Kosminsky and Caitlin Overington, without whom this would have been a
433
lesser manuscript. I would like to acknowledge the mentoring and support

I have been given by Alison Young, Peter Rush and the Research Unit in
Public Cultures, without whom I would be an even more imperfect academic
and scholar than I am. Around campus, I would like to acknowledge the
sustaining intellectual support of the Territory, Authority, Population (TAP)
reading group, where many of the ideas presented here were reality tested
and developed, over many years of robust interlocution. More generally,
I would like to acknowledge that this paper was written on land that was
appropriated as part of a land appropriation process that continues to be
political, 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, available
at <http://www.nationals.org.au/Portals/0/2013/policy/The%20Coalition%E2%80%99s%20Operation%20
Sovereign%20Borders%20Policy.pdf>, 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 on
the Border, Political Geography 25 (2006) p. 152.
4. Cf. Jason Ackleson, Constructing Security on the USMexico Border, Political Geography
24/2 (2005) pp. 165184, Rhys Jones, Agents of Exception: Border Security and the Marginalization
of Muslims in India, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27/5 (2009) pp. 879897; EevaKaisa Prokkola, Technologies of Border Management: Performances and Calculation of Finnish-Schengen
Border 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 the
Sovereign Ban, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28/6 (2010) pp. 10711083; Henk Van
Houtum, Human Blacklisting: The Global Apartheid of the EUs External Border Regime, Environment
and 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 explication 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: Duke
University Press 2003) pp. 3462.
7. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press
2011) p. 8.
8. The United Nations recent report on Australias offshore processing has described conditions in
offshore detention centres as cruel, inhuman, degrading and in violation of international law. See Nick
Cumming-Bruce, U.N. Office Criticizes Australia Detention Policies, New York Times, 22 Feb. 2014, available at <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/22/world/asia/un-office-criticizes-australia-detention-policies.
html?_r=0>, accessed 28 Feb. 2014. See also Amnesty Internationals full report on conditions, This
is Breaking People: Human Rights Violations at Australias Asylum Seeker Processing Centre on Manus
Island, Papua New Guinea, available at <http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ASA12/002/2013/en/
b2f135dc-3353-420d-b587-05d2b3db6e2f/asa120022013en.pdf>, accessed 28 Feb. 2014.
9. Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Vol. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2012) p. 26.
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 pages
unassigned, (2014).
434
Peter Chambers
12. Cf. Alison Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2010) as well as the work of Mary Bosworth and Katya
Aas generally, see <bordercriminologies.law.ox.ac.uk/>.
13. Cf. Tim Creswell, Toward a Politics of Mobility, Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 28/1 (2010) pp. 1731.
14. Cf. Anne McNevin, Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the Political,
(New York: Columbia University Press 2011).
15. Jenna M. Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge, Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons,
Borders and Global Crisis (Athens: University of Georgia Press 2012).
16. Cf. Jane McAdam (ed.), Forced Migration, Human Rights and Security (Oxford: Hart Publishing
2008).
17. Cf. Mary Crock and Daniel Ghezelbash, Do Loose Lips Bring Ships? The Role of Policy, Politics
and Human Rights in Managing Unauthorised Boat Arrivals, Griffith Law Review 19/2 (2010) p. 238287.
18. Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition
(New York: Springer 2003) pp. 305325.
19. Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Vols. 1 and 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2012).
20. Cf. Louise Amoore, Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror, Political
Geography 25/3 (2006) pp. 336351; Didier Bigo, Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the
Governmentality of Unease, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27 (special issue) (2002) pp. 6392;
Marieke deGoede, Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination, Security
Dialogue 39/23 (2008) pp. 155176; Anna Leander, The Power To Construct International Security:
On the Significance of Private Military Companies, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33/3
(2005) pp. 803826; Mark Salter, Passports, Mobility, and Security: How Smart Can the Border Be?
International Studies Perspectives 5 (2004) pp. 7191.
21. Stephen Collier, Topologies of Power: Foucaults Analysis of Political Government beyond
Governmentality, Theory, Culture and Society 26/6 (2009) pp. 78108.
22. Cf. Oren Yiftachel, Critical Theory and Gray Space: Mobilization of the Colonized, City 13/2-3
(JuneSep. 2009) pp. 246263; and also Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land (London: Verso 2007) for two very
rich approaches which share these commitments.
23. Simon Dalby, World Politics, Security and Culture: Critical Connections, Geopolitics 14/2
(2009) p. 407.
24. Cf. the work of Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh generally, and especially Shaunnagh
Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh, Jurisdiction (London: Routledge-Cavendish 2012).
25. This is of course Schmittian language that I apply here via Dorsett and McVeighs interpretations
of Schmitt, especially The Nomos of the Earth in the Jus Publicum Europeaum (New York: Telos Press
2006).
26. Guide to Australian Maritime Security Arrangements (GAMSA), (Canberra: Commonwealth
of Australia 2013) p. 3, available at <www.bpc.gov.au/webdata/resources/files/gamsa_2013_web.pdf>,
accessed 8 March 2014. Please note well that the earlier iteration of GAMSA is still available online,
and contains interest passages about the moral obligations of non-commercial stakeholders which
were deleted from the 2013 edition. See <http://www.bpc.gov.au/webdata/resources/files/GAMSAGuide.
pdf>, accessed 8 March 2014.
27. In Tim Holland, A History of the World in Twelve Maps by Jerry Brotton Review,
Guardian.co.uk, 24 Aug. 2012, available at <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/24/historyworld-twelve-maps-review>, accessed 12 May 2013.
28. The 11% being referred to here is GAMSAs calculation of the SRR/SFAA; correspondence with a
representative from Geoscience Australia emphasised that the source material used to determine particular
measurements can have a marked impact on exactly how close to reality the result is. There are no set
international standards for determining measurements such as the length of coastlines, so comparisons are
inherently contestable and as so many contemporary political disputes show bitterly contested. The
11% claim is somewhat disingenuous, however, as the SRR/SFAA includes maritime space right toward
Antarctica, and the allocation of scarce BPC resources for the purposes of maritime surveillance would
preclude regular patrolling of this area, on the basis that this is not where most threats especially boat
arrivals emerge from.
29. Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh, Just So: The Law which Governs Australia is Australian
Law, Law and Critique 13 (2002) p. 293.
30. Liberal Party of Australia (note 1) p. 4.
435
31. Dorsett and McVeigh, Just So (note 29) p. 291.

32. Ibid., p. 292.
33. Ibid., p. 296.
34. GAMSA (note 26) p. 29.
35. Ibid., pp. 2930.
36. Ibid., p. 30.
37. GAMSA also asserts criminal jurisdiction in the EEZ through the Crimes at Sea Act (2000);
see GAMSA (note 26) pp. 3738. In the case of maritime arrivals, this would give the Commonwealth
jurisdiction over state-based law, for example, if an interdicted person aboard one of BPCs vessels was
assaulted by or assaulted BPC staff (&c).
38. This alignment is developed in detail in relation to the transfer of Christmas Islands sovereignty
from Britain to Australia in Peter Chambers, Society Has Been Defended: Following the Shifting Shape of
State through Australias Christmas Island, International Political Sociology 5/1 (2011) p. 1834.
39. This example is detailed in Peter Chambers, Shipwreck with Spectator: Snapshots of Border
Security in Australia, Global Change, Peace & Security 26/1 (2014) pp. 97112.
40. GAMSA (note 26) p. 163.
41. Ibid., p. 4, emphases in original.
42. Ibid., p. 10.
43. Ibid., p. 87.
44. Cf. Charlotte Epstein, The Making of Global Environmental Norms: Endangered Species
Protection, Global Environmental Politics 6/2 (2006) pp. 3254.
45. See Sara Davies and Alex Reilly, Factcheck: Have More than 1000 Asylum Seekers Died at Sea
under Labor, The Conversation, 22 July 2013, available at <http://theconversation.com/factcheck-havemore-than-1000-asylum-seekers-died-at-sea-under-labor-16221>, accessed 28 Feb. 2014.
46. GAMSA (note 26) p. 9.
47. Ibid., p. 163.
48. Ibid., p. 75.
49. Ibid., p. 75.
50. Ibid., p. 2.
51. International Chamber of Shipping, World Seaborne Trade, 2013, available at <http://www.
ics-shipping.org/shipping-facts/shipping-and-world-trade/world-seaborne-trade>, accessed 28 Feb. 2014.
52. Cf. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Trade at a Glance, 2012, available at <http://
www.dfat.gov.au/publications/trade/trade-at-a-glance-2012.html>, accessed 28 Feb. 2014.
53. GAMSA (note 26) p. 3.
54. Ibid., p. 3.
55. Ibid., p. 3.
56. One conspicuous example is the development of Queenslands enormous reserves of highgrade coal. Getting the coal to market requires shipping it through the Great Barrier Reef. This carries a
risk of marine pollution, and in a fragile ecosystem already threatened by climate change, other shipping,
tourism, and so on. The consequences of a spill would be dire, while routine shipping carries the
possibility of maritime pollution through bilge water, damaging coral, and so on on 3 April 2010, a
Chinese ship, the Shen Neng 1, did run aground on the reef. Marine pollution is recognised as a security
threat in GAMSA. Yet shipping coal through the reef has been allowed because it is expressed to be in
Australias macroeconomic interest. Not only that, but there are currently plans for at least six major port
developments, many of which require dredging in or near the reef. On this matter see Marian Wilkinson
and Clay Hitchens, Great Barrier Grief, 4 Corners, 3 Nov. 2011, available at <http://www.abc.net.au/
4corners/stories/2011/11/03/3355047.htm>, accessed 28 Feb. 2014.
57. This notion is developed persuasively to this reader as a conception of political responsibility
(as opposed to narrow liability) by Iris Marion Young, Responsibility and Global Labor Justice, The
Journal of Political Philosophy 12/4 (2004) pp. 365388.
58. Though I am not engaging in or pursuing his claims here, this phrase is drawn from Lambros
Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
2012).
59. GAMSA (note 26) p. 75.
60. The assertions here are predicated on assumptions which are developed and critically analysed
in David Palmer, The Values Shaping Australian Asylum Policy: The Views of Policy Insiders, Australian
Journal of Public Administration 67/3 (2008) pp. 307320.
436
Peter Chambers
61. Customs Watch, available at <http://www.customs.gov.au/customswatch/default.asp>,

accessed 28 Feb. 2014.
62. Customs Watch partnerships, available at <http://www.customs.gov.au/customswatch/
partnerships.asp>, accessed 28 Feb. 2014.
63. Trevor Paddenberg, Help Us Stop the Boats Says Border Protection Command, The Sunday
Times, 4 May 2013, available at <http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/help-us-stop-theboats-says-border-protection-command/story-fnhocxo3-1226635305186>, accessed 28 Feb. 2014.
64. Ibid.
65. The Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS); Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation
(DIGO); Defence Signals Directorate (DSD); Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO); the Office of
National Assessments (ONA) and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).
66. Organising bringing groups of five or more non-citizens into Australia reckless as to whether
the people had, or have a lawful right to come to Australia is an offence in Commonwealth criminal law
(section 232A of the Migration Act 1958).
67. Cf. the excellent work of Michael Kenney on the matter of drug trafficking, which includes
very helpful organisational diagrams and analysis thereof applicable to smuggler networks; Michael
Kenney, The Architecture of Drug Trafficking: Network Forms of Organisation in the Colombian Cocaine
Trade, Global Crime 8/3 (2007) pp. 233259. On the long history of smuggling in south-east Asia, see
Eric Tagliacozzo, Smuggling in Southeast Asia: History and its Contemporary Vectors in an Unbounded
Region, Critical Asian Studies 34/2 (2002) pp. 193220.
68. I have been informed by a department insider that there are many informal or off the books
detention centres paid for by Australia in Indonesia and Malaysia, though I have not been able to confirm
this.
69. This notion of regional engagement is taken from Matthew Coleman, A Geopolitics
of Engagement: Neoliberalism, the War on Terrorism, and the Reconfiguration of US Immigration
Enforcement, Geopolitics 12/4 (2007).
70. Most of the vessels involved in the smuggling economy are fishing vessels, both in Indonesia
and, especially after the end of the civil war there, in Sri Lanka.
71. The Bali Process is a governance structure inaugurated in 2002 to promote information
sharing between governments and their agencies and interoperability between enforcement authorities
throughout the region.
72. This asset is called an Operational Response Vehicle; Christmas Island has one such vehicle
deployed at all times.
73. SIEV stands for Suspect (or Suspected) Illegal Entry Vehicle, and is the acronym used by BPC
for a boat. Each SIEV is allocated a number. SIEV 221 was the vessel that crashed at North West Point on
Christmas Island on 15 December 2010. It is also known as the Christmas Island Boat Tragedy. See SIEV
221 Internal Review Australian Customs Service, available at <http://www.customs.gov.au/webdata/
resources/files/110124CustomsInternalReview.pdf>, accessed 28 Feb. 2014.
74. Cf. Liam Mannix, The Drones Are Coming: Border Protection Fleet for Adelaide, Crikey.com.au,
20 March 2013, available at <http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/03/20/the-drones-are-coming-borderprotection-fleet-for-adelaide/>, accessed 28 Feb. 2014; and Mark Corcoran, Australia Moves to Buy
$3bn Spy Drone Fleet, Abc.net.au, 4 Sep. 2012, available at <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-0904/australia-moves-to-buy-spy-drones/4236544>, accessed 28 Feb. 2014.
75. Coroners Court of Western Australia, Christmas Island Findings, 23 Feb. 2012, available at <http://www.coronerscourt.wa.gov.au/_files/Christmas_Island_Findings.pdf>, p. 159, accessed
28 Feb. 2014.
76. I am riffing here on Alain Pottages interpretation of Foucaults analytic of power relations. See
Alain Pottage, Power as an Art of Contingency: Luhmann, Deleuze, Foucault, Economy and Society 27/1
(1998).
77. This is a phrasing of Derridas. See Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 1
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2010) pp. 130131.
78. Navy: The Sailors Paper 50/18 (4 Oct. 2007), available at <http://www.defence.gov.au/news/
navynews/editions/5018/index.htm>, accessed 28 Feb. 2014.
79. Response assets such as the one pictured above consist of at least twenty vessels (this
will increase by at least eight vessels due to the delivery of Austals new Cape Class vessels), split
roughly evenly between Customs and Border Security and the Australian Defence Force (ADF), both
commonly under BPC. This approximate count includes: eight Customs and Border Security patrol
437
vessels; one Customs contracted southern ocean patrol vessel (the Oceanic Viking); one Customs contracted northern patrol vessel (ACV Triton); seven Royal Australian Navy (RAN) Armidale Class Patrol
Boats; one RAN Major Fleet Unit; one RAN Heavy Landing Craft; one RAN general-purpose patrol
vessel (Mine Hunter Coastal); other Defence response assets as required and assigned. Cape Class
Patrol Boats, available at <http://www.austal.com/en/products-and-services/defence-products/patrolboats/cape-class-patrol-boats.aspx>, accessed 20 May 2013.
81. Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, Afghanistan Storyboard (Pashtu), available
at <http://www.customs.gov.au/site/Translations/Pashtu.asp>, accessed 1 March 2014.
82. Amber Jamieson, The Consequences of Turning Boats Back: SIEV Towback Cases,
Crikey.com.au, 7 Nov. 2011, available at <http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/11/07/the-consequences-ofturning-boats-back-siev-towback-cases/> accessed 28 Feb. 2014.
83. This is clearly described in the organisational structure page on BPCs website, available at
<http://www.bpc.gov.au/site/page5599.asp>, accessed 28 Feb. 2014.
84. Liberal Party of Australia (note 1) p. 2.
85. Thomas Hobbes, Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated, Leviathan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 1996) pp. 111117.
86. Cf. Peter Chambers, The Passage of Authority: Imagining the Political Transformation of
Australias Christmas Island, from Sovereignty to Governance, Shima 6/2 (2012).
87. See the Stakeholder coordination table for irregular maritime arrivals in GAMSA (note 26) p. 76.
88. Liberal Party of Australia (note 1) p. 2, italics mine.
89. The Attorney-General is Australias chief law officer of the Crown and the minister responsible
for legal affairs, national and public security. He or she is also a member of Cabinet (which exerts a
strong legislative influence in Australias Westminster system).
91. Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2012) p. 326.
92. This is also the conclusion drawn by political geographers working ethnographically on the
new urban apartheid. Cf. Yiftachel (note 22) and especially Allen Feldman, Philoctetes Revisited: White
Public Space and the Political Geography of Public Safety, Social Text 68 19/3 (2001) p. 87.
93. I emphasise the restriction here as I am very wary of the appeal and explanatory power of what
remains among Foucaults most persistently seductive and enigmatic concepts. For a critical starting point
that pinpoints many of these lures, see Thomas Lemke, Bio-politics: An Advanced Introduction (New York:
NYU Press 2011).
94. Cf. Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade
(Minneapolis: (University of Minnesota Press 2014) pp. 197231; Nick Vaughn-Williams, Border Politics:
The Limits of Sovereign Power (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press 2009) pp. 3895; and Sparke
(note 3).
95. John Urry, Offshoring (London: Polity 2014) p. 1.
96. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Albany:
Duke 2013).
97. Cf. Sparke (note 3), as well as Mezzadra and Neilson (note 96).
98. Cowen (note 94) p. 3.
99. Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press 2014).

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