Sharon Pickering

Border terror: policing, forced migration and terrorism

The symbiotic relationship between refugees and the police is increasing around key zones of global exclusion: the US/Mexico border, the European Union and the Southeast Asian/Australasian rim.1 Examining these relationships uncovers the contradictory yet stunted deployment of sovereignty‐led responses of the Global North to refugees, particularly those responses that cluster around the frontier, marking and patrolling the border. Moreover, the police/refugee relationship and the discourses underpinning it have prepared the way for problematic constructions of, and responses to, terrorism as it is patrolled at the border. Refugees are not just a problem, but a policing problem. Terrorism is not a problem, but a counter‐terrorism policing problem. Increasingly the securitisation of borders explicitly and implicitly conflates these two ‘policing’ problems. This article will examine the discursive resources underpinning border‐policing efforts against refugees and terrorism, and the repercussions for the law enforcement apparatus. In the case of Australia, it will argue that the border‐policing effort has become a site for the recrafting of federal law enforcement with significant consequences for regional governance as policing becomes unshackled from territory and merged with military functions. In making this argument in relation to Australia within the Southeast Asian region, the article will also draw on evidence from Europe and North America.

The Production of Sovereignty and the Rise of Transversal Policing: People-smuggling and Federal Policing

Abstract Border-policing has been the subject of increasing criminological concern in the US and Europe: however, it has garnered relatively little attention in Australia. This article addresses the federal border-policing effort that has contributed to policing out the refugee. It has done so through a focus on people-smuggling that has increasingly relied on public debate depicting people-smuggling as a matter of national security. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has made significant contributions to debates that have considered people-smuggling a matter for law enforcement. This article argues that through an analysis of AFP reports we can trace how they have contributed to the construction of the people-smuggling problem. In drawing on international-relations theory, notably concepts of statecraft and transversality, the article concludes that the AFP has made a central contribution to a wider attack on refugee protection with far-reaching consequences for the nature of federal law enforcement.

Floating carceral spaces: Border enforcement and gender on the high seas:

To examine the micro politics of new carceral spaces this article considers the very human(e) interactions that occur in an increasingly depersonalized, technologically remote-driven space: the border. This interrogation is also specifically interested in the enactment of gender at the border in relation to the increasing numbers of women making irregular maritime journeys and the competing paradigms of enforcement (masculine) and rescue (feminine) in the use of interception and custody in the border’s daily operation. In an effort to ground recent theoretical excursions empirically into the geographical margins of the state, this article examines the narratives of Australian customs agents who undertake maritime border enforcement and are charged with the custody of asylum seekers.

Irregular border-crossing deaths and gender: Where, how and why women die crossing borders

In a global era of increased securitization of migration between the developed and developing world this article undertakes a gendered analysis of the ways women die irregularly crossing borders. Through an examination of datasets in Europe, the USA and Australia it finds women are more likely to die crossing borders at the harsh physical frontiers of nation-states rather than at increasingly policed ‘internal border’ sites. The reasons why women are dying are not clearly discernible from the data, yet based on the extant literature it is reasonable to conclude that gendered social practices within families, and within countries of origin and transit, as well as the practices of smuggling markets, are key contributing factors.

The Haneef case and counter-terrorism policing in Australia

The Haneef case focused Australian and international attention on the operation of counter-terrorism policing. This article identifies key aspects of the broader federal police approach to counter-terrorism policing used in the Haneef investigation and specifically focuses on the role of ‘perceptual interventions’ made by the Australian Federal Police via national media releases during the investigation. The article outlines the counter-productivity and other shortcomings of the prevailing federal counter-terrorism policing approach.

Women, Borders, and Violence

Borders are of central concern to criminologists because of the concentration of political and material resources mobilised in their “defence”, for the physical exclusion of people and for their signifying role in the enactment of legal and social processes aimed at identifying people as illegal. The effective “illegalisation” of migration that Dauvergne (2008) elegantly outlines in her work on making people illegal has been centred on border control imperatives that operate in symbiotic relationship with moral panics around unregulated migration flows. Yet it is not migration in its entirety that has fuelled such concerns but rather the unregulated migratory flows that run from the Global South to the Global North (Young, 2007). The escalation of regulatory efforts against extra legal migration has taken on domestic and international significance at the same time that “illegal” has become a noun used to describe people rather than their actions (Bacon, 2007). This has occurred largely because of a range of factors mostly attributed to globalisation, but which have significant historical antecedents around identity and sovereignty as well as political expediencies around performances of effective government. In many ways this book takes much of this scholarship for granted. It does so in order to ask the question: what are women’s experiences of policing when they cross borders extra legally? The answer has overwhelmingly focused on the complex interplay between state and non-state agents, operating in formal and informal contexts. It has done so by mapping the nonlinear journeys of women to and through global frontier lands between the Global North and Global South. While it charts their many vulnerabilities, particularly in relation to sexual and gender-based violence and political community, it also identifies points of resistance, albeit often of a limited kind. In this chapter I try to draw together the strands of arguments offered in the preceding chapters and consider some of the implications for criminology.

Privileging Work Not Sex: Flexibility and Employment in the Sexual Services Industry:

We present findings from a study of sex workers recruited in indoor licensed premises in Victoria. While the study addressed regulation, enforcement and working conditions, we focus on the value of flexible well-paid work for two particular groups of female workers (parents and students). We link this issue of flexibility to broader gendered employment conditions in Australia, arguing the lack of comparable employment is crucial to understanding worker decisions about sex work. Debates and regulation focus on gendered inequalities related to heterosexuality much more than they recognize gendered inequalities related to labour market conditions. The focus on criminalization, harm, exploitation and stigma obscures the centrality of work flexibility and conditions to womens decision-making. A more direct focus on the broader employment context may produce better recognition of why women do sex work.

Honouring white masculinity: culture, terror, provocation and the law

Late in 2004 in Victoria, James Ramage was convicted of manslaughter.1 The jury found that Ramage had been provoked to kill his wife by her comments about their marriage and his role as a husband and by her alleged expression of disgust about their sexual life together. This decision provoked sustained critique and commentary and was followed quickly by the release of the Victorian Law Reform Commission’s (VLRC) recommendations for reform of the defence of provocation.2 Close attention to the trial transcripts in the case exposes much about how the criminal justice system understands, interprets and reinforces conventional gender roles. When the Ramage case is compared with another recent intimate homicide case, Yasso,3 which involved an Iraqi national seeking Australian citizenship, these gender roles can be understood as embedded in the discourses of the ‘war on terror’ where Western legal and political liberal democratic systems such as Australia’s are implicitly set against those of nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan and cultures where women are viewed by the West as ‘oppressed’.4 Like James Ramage, Mazin Yasso killed his wife. In this article, we explore these cases, discussing the language and gender concepts that the provocation defence mobilises. We argue that a comparison of the two cases reveals the on-going protection of white middle-class masculinity and the condemnation of other masculinities associated with ‘less civilised’ cultures, which are seen as inherently violent and oppressive.

Punishment, globalization and migration control: “Get them the hell out of here"

This article considers the future of punishment in a world shaped by competing and reinforcing forces of globalization and nationalism. In it, we call for a wider conversation about the growing interdependence between criminal justice and migration control and of its implications for many of the key concepts and approaches within the field of punishment and society. The article examines the renewed salience of defending borders and drawing boundaries between members and non-members, as well as the shifting focus of penal power from issues of imprisonment and morality, towards questions of immobilization and expulsion from the polity. By doing so, it also addresses the gaps in the existing theories and narratives about penality, which fail to take properly into account the implications of global connectivity, while overlooking enduring matters of racial and class inequity. Finally, the article points out how the progressive destabilization of citizenship and the precarity of membership and belonging are inimically linked to increasingly potent exhortations of penal power that affect us all.

The Journey to the Border: Continuums of Crossing

The focus of this chapter is the impact of violence on women’s capacity to cross national borders. The aim is to better understand crime, violence and mobility in relation to women fleeing what many regard as a collapsed state and site of one of the world’s most intractable conflicts: Somalia. We approach this subject by considering women’s experiences of conflict and the conditions surrounding their exit, their transit through refugee camps and/or neighbouring countries, and their reception in countries of asylum or the Global North. We argue that an increase in the number of women fleeing conflict zones such as Somalia is occurring at the same time that extra legal border crossing is becoming increasingly difficult and dangerous. We also argue that the conditions of exit, transit and reception are shaped by both organised and opportunistic crime. Green and Ward (2009) have recently termed crime which serves both organised and opportunistic goals as “dual purpose” criminality. Ordinary, political or indeed dual purpose criminality effectively acts as a border policing apparatus that controls women’s mobility, thus gatekeeping women’s access to other countries, and in many cases access to legal remedies and protection. Such criminality can be enacted by organised political groups, militia, individuals or groups from opposing clans, government agents, smugglers and traffickers, or can take the form of the structural violence entailed in reception processes in places like Malta. Such criminality largely controls the nature of the border crossing experience for women fleeing Somalia. Furthermore, this criminality may be regarded as a form of political, cultural, organised and individualised policing of women’s mobility that routinely employs practices of rape and sexual violence.