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The Embrace of Border Security:Maritime Jurisdiction, NationalSovereignty, and the Geopolitics ofOperation Sovereign BordersPeter Chambersaa School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, WaurnPonds, AustraliaPublished online: 06 Apr 2015.

To cite this article: Peter Chambers (2015) The Embrace of Border Security: Maritime Jurisdiction,National Sovereignty, and the Geopolitics of Operation Sovereign Borders, Geopolitics, 20:2, 404-437,DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2015.1004399

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Geopolitics, 20:404437, 2015Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 onlineDOI: 10.1080/14650045.2015.1004399

The Embrace of Border Security: MaritimeJurisdiction, National Sovereignty, and theGeopolitics of Operation Sovereign Borders

PETER CHAMBERSSchool of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, Australia

Border security has become one of the key means by which thesovereignty and security of powerful nation-states is projected. Thispaper offers a set of observations of the Australian Commonwealthsdescriptions and instructions for its embrace of border security.Border security is legible here as a geopolitics that transforms therights and responsibilities of maritime jurisdictions into a spaceof security that projects national sovereignty through the interdic-tion of boat arrivals. Its intensification as Operation SovereignBorders is read as a further variation within national sovereignty,one that elevates the decisionist prerogative into total deterrence.Operation Sovereign Borders pushes the limits of sovereigntys exis-tence in the state toward a total domination of space, perceptionand human life in Australias maritime jurisdictions, in the nameof the nation. This necessitates the development, defence and rein-forcement of a regionally engaged materiality that is embodied,extended, enacted, and distributed. The intended effect of thiscoordinated effort is to secure the nations sovereignty as a unity,but the broader effect has been to devalue offshore life to secureonshore interests, in a way that now necessitates indefinite offshoredetention.

For those whove come across the seas,weve boundless plains to share

Advance Australia Fair, Australian National Anthem

Address correspondence to Peter Chambers, School of Humanities and SocialSciences, Deakin University, 75 Pigdons Road, Waurn Ponds, VIC 3216, Australia. E-mail: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.

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The Embrace of Border Security 405

Fuck off, were full!bumper sticker and Facebook group

INTRODUCTION

Over the past decade and a half, Australia has been one of a growingnumber of countries that have embraced border security. In September2013, Operation Sovereign Borders was instituted. The policy, announcedin July 2013 and disseminated as a PDF pamphlet, formed a key plankof the Australian Liberal-National Coalitions successful election campaign.Operation Sovereign Borders is described in the pamphlet as a military-ledresponse to combat people smuggling and to protect our borders. The pam-phlet describes the situation as of July 2013 as a national emergency, andpromises that a Coalition government, if elected, would tackle it with thefocus and energy that an emergency demands. The scale of the problem,the pamphlet asserts, requires the discipline and focus of a targeted militaryoperation.1

The problem to which the pamphlet refers is the attempted arrival byboat of people seeking to be processed by Australian immigration authoritiesin the hope of being found to be refugees. Onshore, these people are mostlyreferred to as either asylum seekers or illegals. Operation Sovereign Bordersis currently attempting to prevent any would-be arrivals by boat a policyof total deterrence.

This paper argues that the emergence of Operation Sovereign Bordersis legible as an intensification of a set of political tendencies nameable globally as border security. My understanding of borders here has drawninspiration from Mark Salters theorisation of border as suture, at once adivision and a knitting together of legal spheres, sovereignties and authori-ties.2 With Salters paradoxical conception of the border as a stalking horsethroughout, the starting point for my positioning of the observer is MatthewSparkes perceptive synthesis, where he asserts that borders are consequen-tial condensation points where wider changes in state-making and the natureof citizenship are worked out on the ground.3 These wider changes havebeen traced through a number of other jurisdictions, regions, and polities4:this paper focuses on the contemporary Australian case, from a critical theo-retical perspective that remains focused on border security, not just bordersor security.

I emphasise border security as a conceptual unity in part because thisforegrounds traces from transformations of one state border for border secu-rity, guided by Salters assertion that the state border is the sine qua non ofsovereignty, the political and the human.5 I also emphasise border securityas a conceptual unity because it renders visible a point of observation fromwhich we can see its political agency as such.6 In circular fashion, Operation

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406 Peter Chambers

Sovereign Borders is in many ways seeking sovereign closure on the matterof Australian borders by enacting Operation Sovereign Borders. But it does soas border security, which, in inflicting domestically constructed conceptionsof sovereignty both on the regions nation-states and non-citizens whowould arrive opens fundamental questions of sovereignty. Simultaneously,the enaction of border security enforces national sovereignty in a numberof ways that Operation Sovereign Borders cannot question, but that are fun-damentally questionable. In chasing the tail of these operations, this paperseeks to break out of the viciously circular logic that Operation SovereignBorders enacts and the cruelty it inflicts as it does so. Jacques Derrida writesthat the sovereign is alone in exercising sovereignty. Sovereignty cannot beshared, it is indivisible. The sovereign is alone (sovereign) or is not.7 Thequestion of national sovereignty, enacted as border security, poses the fol-lowing research question: how does a nation secure its unity by sharing itssovereignty with itself?

To speak of border security is also to speak of people, for it is people,actual people, who are detained and who suffer the cruelty8 of Australianauthority as border security in the name of a people, as sovereign andnation. As Niklas Luhmann phrases it, in a way that echoes the insightsof the work of Alison Mountz, Whereas human beings count as personsin the space of inclusion, in the space of exclusion they seem to countonly as bodies.9 I want to hold open the tension here in the seeming,because as Salter rightly asserts in speaking of the suturing of sovereignty,Even as citizenship stretches and strains, it remains a way of connectingrights, responsibilities, and provides a foregrounding for democracy.10 PaceMountz and Salter, I also I want to emphasise the differential experience andvisibility of bordering as a transitive world-making, world-dividing processcalled border security: the border is not everywhere for everyone.

Border securitys worlds, all over the world, are also connected toimmigration detention and processing apparatuses that deal out belonging,exclusion, protection, ejection, suspension. Though this distribution of lifechances cannot be the focus of the paper, it is the broader context framingthe critical concerns driving what follows. Border security has become a keymeans of suspending and withholding meaningful life for some, in the nameof the life of the nation and those securely onshore within it. The mean-ing and value of life itself in the eyes and forms and practices of certainagents of states is what is at stake in contemporary state work as bordersecurity. Whose living, moving and free circulation must be secured anddefended? Who must be impeded, interdicted, detained; who is exposed tocruelty and death? Australian border security currently attempts to negate thepolitics implied in such questions by suspending the political status of thoseit interdicts not least of all by detaining all boat arrivals offshore, when-ever it is possible to do so. But in this attempted negation there is also themess, tensions, passions and contradictions driving a key emergent site of

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The Embrace of Border Security 407

political contention, full of agency. A world in which national border secu-rity is unnecessary might also be a world in which global political justicebecomes possible.

In practice, Australian border security is unthinkable without consider-ing its unique regional geography, as well as its isolation and relative wealth.Total deterrence of all would-be boat arrivals only becomes possible becauseof the storm-prone, shark-infested moat that separates the island continentfrom Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. In this sense, Australia is uniqueamong the wealthy, powerful nation-states of the contemporary as a nation-state in which border securitys ideals can be realised, where the dream oftotal deterrence expressed by stop the boats can come true. This means that,while the claims here are related to general transformations of sovereignty asborder security, we should never lose sight of the specificity of the case andthe onshore peculiarities of contemporary Australian parliamentary politics.One onshore Australian peculiarity emerges because of the dominance ofMurdoch-owned mass media, which has been nakedly partisan in its supportof border security slogans such as stop the boats, which are made sensicalthrough the near complete dominance of a deterrence script11 developedover more than a decade and a half. Onshore this always-already pre- andre-mediated reality of mass media is politically indissociable from, and fullyunintelligible without recourse to related factors such as immigration deten-tion,12 the politics of human mobility,13 the agency and motivations of peoplemoving across borders,14 the possibility of escape,15 and Australias responsi-bilities under international law16 and migration law.17 Much of the scholarlyliterature on the Australian case conflates these issues; very few treat bor-der security in and on its own terms. For these reasons, this paper remainscommitted to rendering the specificities of Australias contemporary bordersecurity arrangements intelligible in terms of the general conditions withwhich they are enabled and enacted, in order to disclose the transformationsof sovereignty of which they are both a part and an agentic contributor.

They key document under close analysis throughout this paper is theGuide to Australian Maritime Security Arrangements (GAMSA), which isplaced in relation to Australias stated, mapped responsibilities. GAMSA givesorder and orientation to Australian border security by giving a full explica-tion of the roles and responsibilities government agents must undertake foreach of the eight categories of civil maritime threats it identifies. For the pur-poses of clarity, brevity, and alignment with Operation Sovereign Borders,this paper focuses on the fifth listed threat, irregular maritime arrivals.

GAMSA is read as prescriptive and descriptive for Operation SovereignBorders. It is prescriptive in that it provides a set of instructions for theCommonwealths stakeholders on how to do border security. But in doingso, it is descriptive in that it lays out elements for a generalisable apparatusof border security. It is so first of all because it is intelligible, portable andreplicable, in a way that can be further developed and re-applied by other

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408 Peter Chambers

agents working for nation-states and in the name of security. Second, it isgeneralisable insofar as it partakes of and adds to an existing set of popular,already-instituted responses to human mobility as border security. It shareswith these responses a language containing a set of assumptions, instructionsand descriptions. In these ways, it is an iterative iteration, a recursive formof communication18 that becomes agentic as it is attached to specific andintelligible parts of apparatuses. In both these ways, border security is aparadigm, and increasingly, it is the dominant paradigm for responding toforms of mobility judged problematic or threatening by public and privateagents of states and their security. With this characterisation in mind, themethodological aim with the close reading undertaken here is to producea critical and spatial account of border securitys instructions for itself anddescriptions of itself: it is a set of second-order observations on orders foroperations,19 which the mess and complexity of enacted practice and politicalrhetoric continually perturbs and reiterates.

The approach taken here follows the international political sociology ofDidier Bigo, Mark Salter, Louise Amoore and others,20 and has also learnedmuch from the methodology and presentational style of Stephen Collierstopological analysis of the spatial logic of domestic security in the UnitedStates.21 Common to these approaches is the simultaneous presentation oftwo emphases. The first emphasis is on close empirical attention to theways and means by which data appears and is translated into and realisedas actionable, portable forms of knowledge expertise, risk factors, nat-ural facts, operating environments, threat objects which can be handledto assure the safe passage of authority through a complex set of powerrelations. The second emphasis develops critical theoretical analyses of theeffects of these assembled elements as deployed: what they do politically,and, schematically, how they do it.

This methodological approach has also been further enriched byapproaches to critical geography which emphasise the extensively, inten-sively spatial dimensions of apparatuses.22 With Dalby,23 this takes shapehere as an attempt to render explicit the geographical language implicitin the formulation of contemporary policy. Of course words are deeds,but here, I seek to go beyond language and formulation and also showkey points of border securitys materiality, and how that is constitutively anenacted politics that is about the domination of space. My intention here isto offer a grounded theory sufficiently critical and spatial for understandinggeneral transformations that border security names. This is a critical geopol-itics, because it encourages us to employ a reflexive understanding that,potentially at least, offers a way of reconceiving key geopolitical notions ofjurisdiction and sovereignty. To do this I also employ insights from criticaljurisprudence,24 which I introduce in the following section. But it is also anenacted geopolitics, because it consists in an actual domination of regionalspace by agents working in the name of a nation and its sovereignty: it is

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The Embrace of Border Security 409

a concrete order of domination.25 To begin as a critical geopolitics tracingthe actual geopolitical domination border security involves, the analysis nowbegins with an articulation of the space and jurisdiction of Australian bordersecurity.

MAPPING MARITIME JURISDICTION AND NATIONALSOVEREIGNTY

National Objective, Maritime Security, Australian Law

GAMSA begins with the following sentence: Australias national objectivefor maritime security is to deter or prevent illegal activity from occurring inAustralias maritime jurisdiction and where necessary to interdict and enforceAustralian laws.26 This places GAMSAs ordering firmly on the side of law.Metonymically, this siding also evinces a compression of nation, ocean, secu-rity, activity, jurisdiction, and a territorial order of law. It is this compressedset of factors which are asserted as the national objective. Jerry Brotton hasasserted that a map always manages the reality it tries to show.27 GAMSAs2013 edition includes a variant of the following Geoscience Australia map,Australias Maritime Jurisdiction (Figure 1). GAMSA shows how this vastspace according to the deputy commander of Border Protection Command(BPC) 11% of the earths oceans28 might be managed for the nationalobjective in a way that would secure this avowed 11% as border securitysreality.

Managing to show Australias maritime jurisdictions in a way that is legalfrom an Australian perspective means Australian law must be present, at leastin some sense. For activity to occur in the maritime jurisdictions that GAMSAnominates as Australias in a way that deterrence measures would haveto be applied Australian laws would already have to be present. Bordersecurity cannot respond lawfully without a space and time of Australian lawthat is spatio-temporally already and sovereignly there.

This is because the way in which this space and time of state lawis conventionally given is through state sovereignty, where sovereignty isco-extensive with the modern state, and indivisible the entire power ofthe state has to be vested in a single locus, a centralized legal authority.29

Authority and responsibility for certain spaces as maritime jurisdictions isheld in this conventional account to emanate from the territorial order ofstate sovereignty. Australian border security moves to the offshore oceaniclimit from its onshore territorial centre. When sovereignty was embodiedin a monarch, this centre was the living body of the King or Queen; in anation-state such as Australia, sovereignty is centred equally and evenlythroughout the territory, where it remains or does it?

The following assertion from the Operation Sovereign Borders pam-phlet rhetorically aligns the commitment of the Liberal Party with the most

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FIGURE1

Australiasmaritimejurisdictio

n(source:

Geo

science

Australia).

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The Embrace of Border Security 411

conspicuous assertion of sovereignty in recent Australian political life. In away that will become crucial for this analysis, it is also, note well, an assertionof national sovereignty:

It was Prime Minister John Howard who declared that we will decidewho comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.This was a statement of national sovereignty and the need for Australiato control our borders. A Coalition government will restore real policiesthat live up to this declaration.30

In the past five years, this decisionist prerogative has been synthesised inAustralian onshore politics in the compressed repetition of the rhetoricalphrase stop the boats, which is ubiquitously known because of mass media:spokespeople from the Coalition repeat the phrase, and news media dis-seminate it. Both the repetition and the dissemination are crucial phasesinvolved in the articulation of national sovereignty. Onshore, through theeffective synthesis achieved by dint of repetition, stop the boats has becomea synecdochal phrase that compresses the entire semiotic process thatsecuring national sovereignty through border security has actually involved,throughout the history of its present.

Stop the boats tells its addressees what is necessary, what is desirable,once accession to the decisionist prerogative to decide who can arrive andhow has been reached or agreed to, whether explicitly or tacitly. And yet: Wewill decide . . . and stop the boats can be read, I am arguing, as indicatingnot merely an expression, but a transformation of sovereignty not theeffect, but an actual change that generates effects. In order to understandthis shift, we need to first re-think jurisdiction.

Jurisdiction and Sovereignty: Ordering, Law, Land, Population

Jurisdiction is the inaugural topological gesture that delimits the law: anordering of space and a localisation.31 The assertion of jurisdiction is theprimary imposition of order and place.32 We can think of this through acompressed reenactment of the order of events establishing the territorialorder of law in any colonial-settler nation-state, in three stages. Jurisdiction isexpressed; the colonisation of space is enacted; sovereignty is a later expres-sion over that space in a way to paraphrase Dorsett and McVeigh thaterases any memory of a time in which the laws jurisdiction was anythingother than complete and unified.33 In this account: jurisdiction first, thensovereignty.

What then is sovereignty? Sovereignty is a retrospective expression ofpast, present and future unity that screens the actual, non-unified, het-erogeneous processes of land appropriation that enabled it, including theexpressions of jurisdiction that ordered the land appropriation that became

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412 Peter Chambers

the territory. In order for there to be sovereign territory that can be threat-ened, bordered, protected, secured there had to be a colonising populationtransforming the assertions of jurisdiction over land by occupying and devel-oping that land into territory. In the case of Australias history, all of thiscame across the sea by boat, at least until the advent of civil aviation as masstransport in the 1970s. Australian sovereignty was a boat arrival. How canwe think about the relation between jurisdiction and sovereignty, territoryand law, based on the re-ordering suggested by critical jurisprudence?

Let us rethink the order as follows: sovereignty emanates from terri-torial law, but territorial law emanates from land appropriation, and landappropriation was enunciated through jurisdiction, prior to any sovereignty.Sovereignty becomes the effect of an appropriation process that transformsa population into a people a nation through the domination of space.Operation Sovereign Borders shows one among many contemporary casesin which a nation is seeking to secure a space for itself through enactingdomination of space as border security, using jurisdiction in a way thatmakes sovereignty effective.

Maritime Jurisdictions, Non-sovereign Conditions, Spatial Limits

What of the contemporary ocean and its jurisdictions? GAMSA explicatesAustralias maritime jurisdiction by placing it within the ambit of the1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Theimportance of UNCLOS is described in GAMSA as follows:

UNCLOS provides a comprehensive international legal regime for useof the sea and its resources. UNCLOS establishes a legal order of theseas that seeks to balance the rights and responsibilities of coastal statesagainst the rights and responsibilities of other sea users in areas suchas navigation, conservation and management of living resources and thestudy, protection and preservation of the marine environment. It alsoclearly establishes and delineates the various maritime zones over whichstates may exercise different degrees of jurisdiction.34

As a comprehensive international legal regime and as a legal order of theseas UNCLOS is strikingly unlike the legal order of a territory and nation-state such as Australia. Like all state-based law, Australian law has to expressitself as sovereign in order to be law. But as a topological gesture that estab-lishes and delineates those spaces that can lawfully be treated as Australias,UNCLOSs is an ordering of space that does without sovereignty, though onlyas the effect of a convention agreed to by a number of sovereign nation-states. Recalling the opening sentence of GAMSA, Australian border securityexists in order to secure the national objective, and this has and has tohave sovereignty standing behind it. But in delineating the zones overwhich Australia can exercise different degrees of jurisdiction, non-sovereign

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UNCLOS offers Australian sovereignty an authorised place to sit and speakand act as border security, in order to secure itself and its interests aplace GAMSA accepts by acceding to the above. In a way, GAMSA allowsUNCLOS to tell Australia where and to what extent it can be sovereign, forthe purposes of border security.

GAMSA describes the following maritime jurisdictions, consistent withUNCLOS norms: territorial sea baseline (TSB); internal waters; coastal waters;territorial sea; contiguous zone; exclusive economic zone (EEZ); continen-tal shelf. Also consistent with these international norms, the Commonwealthexercises full sovereignty over its territorial sea, its seabed and subsoil, andover the airspace above it.35 Its worth pausing to consider the phrase fullsovereignty and its spatial limit: the territorial sea extends up to twelve nau-tical miles from the TSB. Beyond the territorial sea for example, in theExclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which stretches to 200 nautical miles fromthe TSB Australia exercises sovereign rights for the purpose of exploringand exploiting, conserving and managing all natural resources of the waters,seabed and subsoil, together with other activities such as the production ofenergy from water, currents and wind.36 GAMSAs assertion of sovereigntyin the EEZ is interesting, because it suggests that sovereignty can be under-stood in this zone as merely an exclusive right to explore, exploit,conserve and manage resources.37 This shows a conceptual alignmentbetween sovereignty, exclusivity and the right to extract,38 but, pace Derridasinsistence on indivisibility, can there be partial sovereignty? Australias juris-dictional responsibilities depend on it; international co-operation and Safetyof Life at Sea rely on it. But what of national sovereignty, which depends forits effective expression in Australian maritime jurisdictions on the decisionistprerogative, which is a categorical assertion of a right to decide for all arrivalsand the conditions of their arrival, given urgency by background conditionsdescribed as a crisis and national emergency?

The presence of partial sovereignty shows how rhetorical expres-sions of national sovereignty such as Howards decisionist prerogativenecessarily exclude partial spaces and overriding responsibilities from theavowed wholeness Operation Sovereign Borders seeks to secure as Australia.Australias maritime jurisdictions are full of such rights and responsibilities,but rhetorical assertions of national sovereignty are emptied of them. We canthus observe one of the constitutive blind spots of the Operation: nationalsovereignty is dispossessed of the fullness that it claims for itself when itasserts itself categorically. Jurisdictional rights and responsibilities necessar-ily fill up Australia with conditions imposed upon it by non-sovereign normssuch as UNCLOSs, and this diminishes national sovereignty in the sense inwhich the decisionist prerogative expresses it.

If the zone in which maritime interdictions of irregular maritime arrivalsoccur is not sovereignly Australia, in what sense is border security beingpursued sovereignly, in a way that is consistent with the national objective?

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Strictly speaking, for a vessel to threaten Australias sovereignty, it wouldhave to arrive in the territorial sea. Such boats seldom arrive. Arrivals thatreach as far as Australias territorial sea constitute exceptional cases, such asthe vessel that arrived in Geraldton, Western Australia, in June 2013. The SriLankans aboard that boat arrived in Australia by accident; they had intendedto sail for New Zealand.39 Does this then mean that most arrivals, who eitherarrive in the EEZ near Christmas Island, Cocos-Keeling Islands or AshmoreReef, are partial threats to partial sovereignty?

Further, arrivals seldom arrive in Australia precisely because they areprevented from doing so: they are interdicted so that they do not arrive. Thisis consonant with the deterrence aspect of the national objective for maritimesecurity, but as it complicates any talk of arrivals, let alone of those arrivalsbeing threats to sovereignty. It also complicates and renders ambiguous thefull legality of what is being undertaken. In the case of illegal foreign fishingor whaling, Australia has sovereign rights within the EEZ: to the extent thatsuch agents are extracting resources, this is recognisably unlawful in a waythat is consistent both with the extent of Australian sovereignty and the waythat sovereignty is recognised in UNCLOSs norms. But in the absence offull sovereignty, how does BPC interdict boat arrivals in a way that is fullylawful? In order to approach this question, we have to consider two furtherjurisdictions, the Australian Search and Rescue Region (SRR) and the SecurityForces Authority Area (SFAA).

SFAA: Authority Beyond Sovereignty or Responsibility?

Beyond the EEZ, there exist two further jurisdictions, SRR and SFAA. Spatially,they are co-extensive. Functionally, they differ. GAMSA explicates this dif-ference as being one of safety and security, respectively. GAMSA refers tothe SRR as that part of the world in which a nation has responsibility forthe safety of life at sea . . . and for assistance to people in distress,40 butis also careful to emphasise that the GAMSA deals solely with security inAustralias maritime jurisdiction and does not address maritime safety issues,including the Safety of life at Sea (SOLAS) Convention.41 Discursively, thedistinction of the SFAA maintains a space for GAMSA to write of maritimearrivals as matters for border security.

The SFAA is the Area that refers to the SFA, an agency that GAMSAdescribes as a national agency in charge of providing the response tomaritime security incidents. In Australia this role is undertaken by BorderProtection Command (BPC).42 The SFAA is the Area in which the SFA hasauthority over maritime security incidents; in Australia, this is BPC. BPC is theSFA, and it operates in the SFAA against threats, including boat arrivals. Butthis is circular. In order to break out of this circle, what has to be recognisedis that SFA was an area of authority generated as the negotiated effect aimedat developing regional cooperation for combating piracy and violence at

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The Embrace of Border Security 415

sea, facilitated by the International Maritime Organization. But in what senseare piracy and violence at sea comparable to irregular maritime arrivals assecurity threats?

Piracy involves people and assets in situations with a direct potentialfor deadly harm, because it involves the expropriation of vessels and theircargo. GAMSA asserts that violence is generally intrinsic in acts of piracyand robbery at sea.43 It is for this reason that GAMSA construes it as a secu-rity threat. Fishing and whaling, meanwhile, are regarded as a direct threatto property-like resources. We can see here a split analogous to the twocategories of crime upheld by many domestic police forces: crimes againstthe person and crimes against property. Many contemporary instances ofillegal foreign fishing also involve organised crime networks, large trawlers,and long nets. Japans state-backed commercial whalers are virtual seabornefactories44 capable of industrial-scale resource expropriation. Would-be boatarrivals lack such resources and equipment as would be necessary to attackBPC or shipping interests in Australias maritime jurisdictions. They also lackthe organisational wherewithal and intent to extract any sovereignly claimedresources in Australias EEZ: precisely because the fishing boats are not fish-ing in this case, leaving aside the fact that they are fishing boats involvedin resource extraction without industrial methods. What then are these boatsthat must be stopped?

Would-be arrivals typically attempt to arrive in Australia aboard re-purposed fishing boats chartered by smugglers. In many cases these boatsare poorly maintained and of dubious seaworthiness. In most cases, theseboats are dangerously overloaded, with passengers, including children andbabies, who are unable to swim. This is one of the main contributors toshipwrecks over the past decade between Indonesia and Australia, in whichperhaps more than a thousand people have perished.45 Passengers aboardthese boats are often not given life jackets. In recent years, many vesselshave sailed for Australia during swell season, when conditions can deterio-rate very quickly. A situation such as this is surely unsafe, and would seemon first glance to be an ongoing, even chronic Safety of Life at Sea situation,which would engage Australias responsibilities within the SRR and transferjurisdiction to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA). And yet, rightup until the point at which either a person aboard a boat raises a distresssignal or people end up in the water, would-be arrivals are approached assecurity threats.

In maintaining the SRR as the SFAA for the SFA, BPC is including boatarrivals within threat categories in a way that involves either self-serving logicor ambiguity, especially as GAMSA concedes that irregular maritime arrivalshave been driven by political unrest or poverty in other countries, the limitedplaces available internationally in migrant-receiving countries, and the safetyand economic opportunity Australia offers.46 If boat arrivals do not violentlythreaten people or maritime resources, if they are driven by violence or

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poverty themselves, and if they are seeking safety, how can this ambiguityabout their threatening nature be clarified? The following section respondsto this in detail.

OPERATIONALISING SOVEREIGN BORDERS: LEGITIMATEACTIVITY, INTEREST

GAMSA defines security threat in the maritime domain as any action, deviceor event that has potential to cause consequences adverse to Australias inter-ests.47 In explicating the nature of boat arrivals as a threat, GAMSA states,Australias national interests are threatened by any irregular arrival of peo-ple.48 Notable in this section is how the language of law and sovereigntyhas been replaced by that of interest and threat though the nation is stillpresent as the qualifier of interest. But (again) the language is circular: boatarrivals are held to carry the potential to cause consequences adverse toAustralias interests, interests threatened by boat arrivals. To escape thiscircle, we can interpolate from the national objective and say that GAMSAexpresses an interest in avoiding irregularity irregularity would be theconsequences adverse. This is consonant with the following, from the samesection, elaborating the earlier assertion: The primary risk is the potential forentry into Australia without having been screened by border authorities.49

In what sense might entry without screening by border authorities constitutethe primary risk of a compromise to Australias interests in a way that wouldconstitute a security threat? This becomes much clearer once we examinethe way in which GAMSA recognises activity as constitutive, then codes it asgood and bad.

The opening paragraph of GAMSA makes reference to Australia as theworlds fifth largest shipping nation.50 Indeed, the volume of total seabornetrade is estimated to have quadrupled over the past few decades51; a commit-ment to expanding trade remains an avowed policy commitment of nearlyall nation-states, including Australia.52 It is this ambient background of accu-mulation and distribution, governed by an economistic logic expressed asan imperative, that constitutes what GAMSA recognises as activity. Activityas interest is represented cartographically in GAMSA with the following map(Figure 2), taken from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

It is from this represented reality of activity that GAMSA draws its pri-mary conception of interest: Australian and foreign ships carry Australianpassengers, crew and cargo within and beyond Australian waters. Australiatherefore has strong economic and national interests in maintaining securitywithin and beyond Australian waters.53 Australian passengers, cargo, crewand waters here are all represented as property-like things with whose beingAustralian makes and keeps them within this sphere of national interest.As with fishing rights to scarce resources in the EEZ, these are claims

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FIGURE2

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analogous to property. But the claim here is more an allowance of mobilityof interest as activity. That is to say: because of the nature of shipping asan activity, it must move. GAMSAs logic is in preventing the impedance ofa constitutively mobile activity: Interruption of or interference with inter-national shipping operating in Australias maritime jurisdiction would havean immediate and detrimental effect on Australias economy and its exportcompetitiveness, and other consequences for lawful activity within Australiasmaritime jurisdiction.54 Activity that is in Australias interest must continueover space and time, indefinitely: interruption of or interference with activ-ity at any point would be detrimental, and must be prevented fromoccurring.

GAMSA develops the notion of activity by elaborating a distinction setup by asserting an idea about legitimate activity, which is read as a signifi-cant contributor to the Australian economy.55 But what makes it legitimate?I would like to offer the following counterfactual as a theory. GAMSA recog-nises an order of things from the perspective of a self-serving retrospection.To wit: such activity, because it benefits Australias economy, is then coded aslegitimate, legislated for and defended as such, here using the full resourcesof border security. We can see evidence of this from recent developmentsin Australian shipping.56 Recognition of the benefit comes first; legitimacy isthen coded accordingly.

If recognition of the benefit comes first, then we can define an interestas a recognised benefit. Authority would then be the power to recognise abenefit in a way capable of securing it, using such resources as are avail-able. Such interests are complex investments that involve all of us throughglobal supply chains.57 Like the border security apparatus arranged in defen-sive relation to these supply chains, these complex interests are embodied,extended, enacted, and distributed.58 This means that interests, like bor-der securitys, are necessarily and richly spatial. Further, temporally andprocessually these interests are not a one off matter. That activity mustcontinue means securing is an active, transitive process that transforms thespace and time of the future according to the needs of those interests thatpredominate in the present. This gives us one minimalistic but cogent wayof understanding the purpose of Australian border security according toits declared interest: border security was established to order mobility foraccumulation to secure circulation for interested stakeholders in Australiasmaritime jurisdictions. Circulation must be defended.

So what is a threat any action that threatens interests by being irreg-ular? For GAMSA in regard to irregular maritime arrivals, it would seemthat threat = arrival + irregularity, and that irregularity also carries the fol-lowing though GAMSA never explains how or why: Irregular maritimearrivals also pose a significant threat in relation to illegal activity in protectedareas . . . marine pollution . . . and compromise to biosecurity . . ..59 But theirregularity is simply a condition of legislation, whereby, according to the

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Migration Act (1958) a non-citizen must have a visa to arrive in Australia.The Commonwealth could remove this condition, and that would allow theboats to stop by enabling the planes to start. But irregularity is not simply aconsequence of not being screened by border authorities, it is also a screenfor a desire for deterrence, the achievement of which is sign and signal ofeffective governmental control.60

What is a border? As GAMSAs understanding of threat constructs it,border = interest + threat (where existence of threat calls for a responseas security [interdiction]). If this is the case, unless interest + threat =sovereignty, sovereignty = border. Should Operation Sovereign Borders thenbe re-named Operation Securing Circulation? This phrase deletes the nation,which is always behind stop the boats, to the extent that it is a proclama-tion of national sovereignty, as the pamphlet asserts. National sovereigntygets taken along with border security, because jettisoning it would depriveOperation Sovereign Borders of its persuasive rhetorical force: would-bearrivals would then no longer be a national emergency, just matters for rou-tine impedance. If Operation Sovereign Borders is to be persuasive, thenperhaps national sovereignty must be the unannounced passenger aboardall of BPCs response assets. If this is the case, border security is not peoplesmuggling, but it does smuggle a people into Australias maritime jurisdic-tions whenever BPC performs interdiction. And this, as I now turn to explore,must be enacted.

ENACTORS, INTENSIFIERS, AND ENABLERS OFBORDER SECURITY

Enactor I: Awareness Generators

Like the legitimate activities it defends, border security is embodied,extended, enacted, and distributed. Where mitigating the threat is concerned,border security begins with the Commonwealths regionally dispersed eyesand ears. GAMSA understands these sense functions by the term awareness indeed, one of the key avowed tasks of border security is the generation ofawareness. To do this GAMSA nominates generating awareness of activityas a function of Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (ACBPS),which then contributes assets and personnel to BPC.

In its work as assigned to ACBPS, BPC relies on inter-operative setsof awareness generators, sense abilities. The most general of these sets iscommon knowledge and open source information. One interface for thetranslation of this knowledge and information into actionable intelligenceis Customs Watch, ACBPSs national information collection program thatdraws on the knowledge of industry and the community to protect Australiasborders by reporting suspicious border activities.61 The importance ofcommunity engagement is stressed here: Customs Watch also values its

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partnerships with community groups and individuals who observe suspiciousactivities in their local environments. These groups include accommodationproviders, coast guard volunteers, radio operators, 4WD clubs, marina oper-ators and residents of coastal communities.62 In the case of the arrival inGeraldton, Western Australia, of the group of Sri Lankan men sailing for NewZealand, BPC was explicit in its call for coastal community engagement fromsuspicious individuals-cum members: Terry Price, deputy commander of BPCoperations at the time, said that BPC had to patrol 11 percent of the earthsoceans, that detecting every vessel was a vast challenge, and that the pub-lic should ring in if they see anything. . . . We want people to call if theybelieve theyve seen something.63 Mr. Price stated that the lesson learntfrom the Geraldton incident was that Border Protection Command neededresidents to act as spotters.64 This indicates that doing border security suc-cessfully in Australias maritime environment requires recruiting citizens asawareness generators who can feed information to its own professionalstaff.

The second set of awareness generators for border security is comprisedof Australias various intelligence gathering, analysis and espionage agen-cies.65 Where irregular maritime arrivals are concerned, the first active setof formal sense abilities are located in southeast Asia, especially West Java,Indonesia, in the form of a number of regionally engaged agents employedto watch, wait, and respond. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) seek toknow, surveil, and respond to arrivals through the transnational crime prismof people smuggling.66 Just as Australian border security eventually becomesa matter of mandatory detention for arrivals as a matter of law, prior to arrivaland departure both its precondition and prevention are reliant on a parallelset of enforceable recognitions as criminal and transnational.

Responding effectively to people smuggling as a matter of transnationalcrime which is more-or-less organised through fluid networks of associ-ation67 means being pre-emptive, disruptive and co-operative. Its worthnoting that the pre- and dis- elements of these pillars rely on the co-, that is,they rely on inter-agency co-operation and co-ordination with Indonesiansin Indonesia. Effective co-operation requires ongoing good faith efforts byIndonesian counterparts, which struggles to exist without trust and respect.Responding effectively to people smuggling as a matter of transnationalcrime requires engaging with these aspects of transnational crime. It mayeven involve entanglement in transnational crime, at the very least in thecourse of intelligence gathering and undercover operations. The apparentclarity of border security as asserted in Operation Sovereign Borders is shad-owed beyond what GAMSA recognises as sovereignly Australia by murkyassociations that reach out into the region and back into Australia, embroil-ing Australian interests in an informal political economy with a global reach.Securing national sovereignty through border security is impossible withoutreaching into the global shadows.

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Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (ACBPS) also runs anumber of awareness and capacity-building efforts, as well as building andmaintaining relationships with its Indonesian counterparts. The Departmentof Immigration and Border Protection likewise has a number of agentsengaged throughout south-east Asia working on the detention side of theborder security complex: this may include informal arrangements for ware-housing would-be refugees in Indonesia and Malaysia.68 As with AFPs effortsand the concerted watching of Australias formal and informal informants, thestatecraft that contributes to maintaining the territorial integrity of Australiarequires a certain vigilant and pro-active engagement in and with Indonesiaand Australias other neighbours; Australian border security is always-alreadya regional engagement.69 These are complex, fragile relationships; generat-ing effective awareness for Australian border security would be less effectivewithout them.

Australian and Indonesian agents of Australian border security provideintelligence to ACBPS on vessels whose departure is known or estimatedto be imminent, and this information shapes the posture of BPCs deployedassets. There are many fishing vessels operating throughout the Indonesianarchipelago; BPCs knowledge of certain fishing vessels70 as containing, car-rying or conveying threats is predicated on intelligence gathered in thecourse of intelligence gathering, information sharing and enforcement worktaking place in Indonesia, which in the case of People Smuggling StrikeTeam, takes place in collaboration with Indonesias analogous people smug-gling task force, co-formed as part of the Bali Process.71 Gathered intelligenceis the key means by which ACPBS knows would-be arrivals when they areimminent departures in a way it can communicate to BPC: as with generat-ing awareness, knowing a departure to be more than a fishing boat relieson agents working in Indonesia who must rely, to varying extents, on theirIndonesian counterparts.

Commonly, all of the Commonwealths sense abilities play a partial,formal role in generating awareness before the departure of a vessel.ACBPS gathers and disseminates actionable intelligence to BPC, a form ofinstrumental knowledge intended to enable relatively safe and timely inter-diction of vessels by BPC. However, there is a second, informal networkthat, depending on the voyage, may be of equal or greater significance. Bothpeople-smuggling networks as well as smuggled people and their friendsand families are in active contact, mostly via mobile phone. In practice,this means that certain of those aboard boats are in contact with peoplein immigration detention in Australia (on Christmas Island, in Darwin, onManus Island, on Nauru), relatives on the mainland, and smugglers backin Indonesia and elsewhere (who, in turn, retain the phone numbers ofsmuggled peoples relatives to follow up for payment).

This shadow communication network becomes significant for BPC ingenerating awareness because any one of these people has the knowledge

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and ability to place an anonymous call to 000 (Australias emergency num-ber) in the event of an emergency. This aspect of border security meritsanalytic attention in its own right, but for present purposes its worth notingthat there exists a kind of disjunctive symbiosis between BPC and asylumseekers, an uneasy co-dependence between the interests of interdictors,interdicted and their networks of associates at certain moments, in cer-tain cases, they rely on one another to keep one another out of harmsway. In a strange way all sides of the interdiction have common interests;they look out for one another. Smugglers and the smuggled are shadowstakeholders in border security, and this has definite effects, because whenthe shadow communication network fails, along with the Commonwealthsformal counterparts, people end up in the water.

Another set of awareness generators is comprised of imagery receivedfrom a number of satellites, both commercial and military. While GAMSAconcedes these sources to be in use, no detailed information about themis contained within the reports to which I had access, either because itis classified or commercial in confidence. A further set of sense abili-ties is airborne, and consists of electronic, electromagnetic, electro-opticaland optical means of surveillance. It includes the planes and helicopters ofCustoms Border Protection division; aircraft of the Royal Australian Air Force(RAAF) assigned to surveillance tasks by BPC; Australian Army RegionalForce Surveillance Unit patrols; and air patrols using aircraft contracted tothe Australian Maritime Safety Agency (AMSA).

The next set of sense abilities is seaborne, what BPC calls surfaceassets. These are taken from the full range of enforcement agencies thatBPC is empowered to command and control in order to respond to secu-rity threats. Surface assets are deployed in a posture, both in line with thegeneral strategy of deployment for patrol purposes,72 and circumstantially,as in the case where a specific surface asset has been deployed to respondto a threat object, so identified, either by any number or combination ofthose awareness-generating sense abilities detailed above, or by the senseabilities of the deployed surface assets. These sense abilities include radar,two-way radio (VHF and UHF), mobile telecommunications, binoculars (bothelectro-optical and optical), and the naked eye.

The next set of sense abilities includes those of officials stationed onChristmas Island and local residents, and usually relies on a combinationof telescopes and binoculars, two-way radio, and mobile telecommunica-tions (both intra-island and island-to-BPC command) in order to function.As in the case of the shadow network of mobile communications from thesmuggler-side of border security, these means, far less spectacular in scalarterms (as well as operating cost and complexity), have been of greater sig-nificance than their scale would suggest: in the case of the shipwreck ofSIEV 22173 it was these sense abilities that saw an approaching vessel, whenall the hi-tech failed. Armed ships and expensive74 drone-based surveillance

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programmes capture governmental resources and media attention, but in theprevention of drowning, they may do little work relative to their size andcost. Nonetheless, high tech appears to have a gravitational pull that cor-relates with security apparatuses: in the Coronial Inquest for SIEV 221, jetskis and rocket-propelled life jackets were suggested as further appropriateresponse assets for CI; both suggestions were received as prudent possiblemeasures by the Coroner.75

Overall, the awareness generators of border security can be understoodas comprising a regionally dispersed co-operation of agents: embodied bysuspicious individuals, extended by high-tech prostheses and undercoveroperations, enacted by interested corporations, corrupt police and profes-sional staff, and distributed throughout South-East Asia as a complex regionalengagement, as well as being arranged in a strategic posture in Australiasmaritime jurisdiction. Seen from this machinic perspective, the sovereignunity projected as ideal by Operation Sovereign Borders would appear tobear no relation to the dispersed, heterogeneous materiality required toenact it.

But unity is also gathered in action: that is, by actually going out andenforcing the border through interdiction, BPC contributes to the restora-tion of the integrity of that border, and if it does so reliably, it makes itselfindispensible for doing so. As explored above, this cannot happen withoutco-operation, but it must eventually be en-forced. This brings us to the sec-ond subsection, where I describe those deployed aspects of border securitymost directly concerned with enforcement.

Enactor II: Responsive, Responsible Responders

GAMSA divides BPCs operations into four phases: prevention, preparedness,response and recovery. In this subsection I focus on response, which in thecase of maritime interdiction primarily consists in enforcement, but I amalso critically interested in what happens in the space of thought betweenpreparedness and response. To begin with on this point, its worth notingthe meaning that response indicates by paying close attention to the shiftbetween the pre- and the re-.

I take it that border security is active with action,76 and I have beenreading these actions as complex transitive processes unfolding as a geopol-itics in these sections with a distinct materiality. As I see it, however,GAMSA tends to describe border security for all threats as re-acting tothe prior, provoking actions of others: reactions upon actions. This wouldmake enforcing border security like the game design of Space Invaders, inwhich alien invaders just keep appearing at the top of the screen, regardlessof the efforts and points already scored by the engaged player. But of course,border security is not a computer game, and this reactive image is stronglyat odds with the actuality of the complex, fraught regional engagements

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canvassed in the previous section which must be proactive, preemptiveand cooperative in order to be effectively disruptive.

In framing border security as a reaction for the purposes of response,GAMSA tends to recode the security threat that boat arrivals present as priorand ready made. This of course is part of what makes decisive respond-ing possible and necessary, but more broadly, it effaces the traces77 ofthe all-too-active and ongoing works of construction that border securityrequires in order to be effective. In action as response, BPCs assets might nothave headspace to engage in critical reflection. Nonetheless, border securityrequires complex forms of what might be considered premeditation: inten-tions developed and actions carried out by thousands of staff, entangled inthe region, even requesting that citizens get out their binoculars and reportsuspicious behaviour.

In effacing all traces of prior construction by moving from the pre- tothe re- in order to generate effective response as enforcement, individuals,prostheses, corporations, police and communication networks are all effec-tively invisibilised: gathered intelligence appears ready-to-hand, but only atthe cost of negating border securitys constructed world. In order for it to beready, everything not only has to be prefabricated, the processes of fabri-cation have to be disregarded a priori. In the response phase of operationsdelineated by GAMSA, all response can do is be prepared for the momentat which the threat moves into BPCs theatre of operations. Here we findanother constitutive blind spot generated by the practice of border security.In order to respond as security, BPC must not regard the world beyond itssecurity operations. The following is a .jpeg (Figure 3) copied from a pageof the Australian Navys website describing the effects of its illegal foreignfishing work as assigned to BPC.78

In transforming threats into objects who can be responded to, bordersecuritys response assets79 engage in objectification: SIEV (Suspected Illegal

FIGURE 3 Illegals hauled in (source: Navy: the Sailors Paper).

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Entry Vehicle) offers one way in which this is done using an acronym, theabove images shows another way this is represented, as a sign of a job welldone. The obscuring of constructed conditions that enables action is notonly a blinding to world; it also transforms the world it makes visible as itresponds so that it is visible another way. This is one of the key ways inwhich, as Salter notes, the border as suture is about the way borders aremade to appear and disappear.80 This it is not just a form of representation;it is also another perceptual way in which threats are maintained as such.The suture involves knitting and cutting, stitching and ripping, interdictingand excising.

The patrol vessels actively deployed in Australias northern waters eachcarry two Rigid Hulled Inflatable Boats (RHIBs) of between six and eightmetres, which can carry crew and passengers of between two (operationalminimum) and twenty-five (emergency maximum of the largest of the threekinds). In most cases it is these RHIBs and their trained personnel that aredeployed to perform the first stages of interdiction on the high seas. Patrolvehicles also carry a number of life jackets for the passengers and crewof interdicted boats, as well as life rafts that can be launched as stagingpoints between foundering boats, RHIBs and patrol vessels, in the event ofan emergency. The presence of life jackets is, of course, a prudent safetymeasure. But it is one that brings us to essence of the lived contradictions ofall those who pass through the response phase of the apparatus, the spacewhere interdiction is actually enforced and risky threats are transformed intothat which is processed; it thus bears closer comment.

Boat arrivals are construed as risky security threats who must be caredfor, in the course of interdiction. Arguably the greatest threat they present(to BPC and the Commonwealth) emerges precisely because of their all-too-human vulnerability and the risk it necessarily presents to the responders,who, should their actions in the course of interdiction result in any loss oflife, injury, or even large numbers of people in the water, be opened toquestioning about their possible negligence, failure to adequately carry outmission objectives, even criminal prosecution. BPCs responders are actu-ally responsible for what they have authority over. This lived contradictionis potentially a costly double bind for BPCs responders; at the very least,from an ice-eyed mission objectives point of view, there are difficulties anddelicacies involved in these operations that are not typically experienced bycombat troops on search and destroy missions. The security threat must notunder any circumstances be eliminated. This generates further risks, costs,and contradictions, mostly for BPCs responders in the course of dischargingtheir responsibilities. We can see one representation of this situation in thefollowing (Figure 4), which is a document produced by ACBPS in order to bedisseminated to would-be arrivals.81 It is recognisably a piece of governmentpropaganda, but it also stages the situation I am describing here includingthe way the split is sutured with graphical clarity.

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FIGURE 4 Afghan storyboard (source: Australian Customs and Border Protection).

In practice, such a split holds safety apart from security. It also opensonto a paradox at the heart of enforcement. It is an existential paradox, bothin that the split does and does not exist, and in that it profoundly shapesthe recognition of the existence of living people on either side of the split.Procedurally it does exist in the sense that, as we have seen, for BPC torespond as border security, it must: BPC is not AMSA. But operationallyit cannot exist in the sense that, as highly trained professional staff, BPCsresponders must know very well when a SOLAS incident has arisen theyknow when security threats are not. Further, their being competent wouldalso require responders to know that boat arrivals are not threats like others:not Somali pirates, not Indonesian fishermen, nor Japanese whalers.

In unfolding border securitys paradoxes through interdiction, BPCsresponders may know what a pamphlet such as Operation Sovereign

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Borders cannot say: boat arrivals are security threats that are not threat-ening or not threatening in any of the ways that other threats are. Thevulnerability of national sovereignty is addressed by operationally recognis-ing the vulnerability of boat arrivals in a way that does not discursivelyrecognise their vulnerability. This restores an observable unity to Australianborder security, but its clarity can only be maintained by suppressing theemergence of another that would violate it if it were allowed to be. Bordersecurity involves its enforcers in the domination of space and time. For this tobe successful, only some realities must be seen, and not others. In this way,Operation Sovereign Borders is a geopolitics of the maritime environment,but one that can also colonise the mind. As it intensifies, this colonisationof maritime space by national sovereignty has come to require the followingfurther measures.

Intensification: Tow Backs, Turn Arounds

Operation Sovereign Borders is an intensification of earlier efforts at estab-lishing, developing and stabilising border security in Australia. Prior to theSeptember 2013 election, the then opposition canvassed the idea of turningboats back; when this was mooted in 2011, discussion emphasised the oper-ational and diffuse risks and costs involved with such an idea.82 In practice,turn arounds are now occurring, and as of writing they are doing so undera veil of stubborn secrecy, which is justified as on-water operational mat-ters which cannot be discussed both on grounds of national security andgiving tactical advantage to the people smugglers and their business model.Turn arounds and towbacks are being conducted when it is safe to do so,but how would it be possible to know when that would be? Only responseassets can know this, and never with certainty.

These intensifications are legible as unilateral offences againstIndonesian state sovereignty, with all that entails for effective co-operationin generating awareness. Turn arounds and towbacks are also offensive toIndonesian national sovereignty, to the extent that such a thing exists as theprecise counterparts of what has been analysed here: minimally, the right todecide who arrives and the conditions in which they do. Arguably, they alsoturn people men, women, children into boats and illegals, mere thingsthat can not only be hauled in but also moved around and treated as theCommonwealth sees fit.

Tow backs and turn around are intensifications that move Australianborder security beyond the domination of space and perception toward thedirect domination of peoples lives in a way that takes no responsibility forthat which it asserts authority over: it is ejection, discharge. It is peopledumping. This is a domination of space, perception, and human life thatis in violation of the national objective set by GAMSA, because an expres-sion of national sovereignty has reached beyond state sovereignty and the

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limits of Australias maritime jurisdiction in a way that makes it illegibleas legal or lawful. Tow backs and turn arounds are matters of fact andwill, not of law. In this way, national sovereignty is the determination of apeople to dominate in a way that refuses to recognise a limit such as wouldcircumscribe that of law. This also means showing contempt for, and evendirect violation of, the sovereignty of others. To the extent it is successful according to its own unilateral intentions it is total domination. This raisesthe principle of deterrence to the level of an absolute. Border security inAustralian maritime space can be regarded as a self-defending world in itstotality and the unilaterally imposed limits of what can be recognised withinthat world.

Administrative Enablers of Border Security: All, and, One

Administratively, Australian border security is an amalgamation: of agencies,offices and officers, and their roles. It takes the formerly distinct tasks ofmilitary work, policing and other enforcement work and unites them withinthe border security paradigm as BPC. From this perspective BPC is a multi-agency command structure that conducts border security in concert witha combination of enforcement agencies. It is a structure that enjoins theintertwining of the thin blue line of policing with the uniform green ofthe military in order to achieve the blended, effect of one command,83 aprojected unity. In terms of intended structure and projected effect, it iscrucial to note the relation here between one and all: one command, allthreats. One command has been put into place because of the complexityof the all. Operation Sovereign Borders reinforces this projected impressionnot just through talk of crisis and national emergency, but also by calling fora further militarisation of the border.

Operation Sovereign Borders is a command structure that appearsHobbesian insofar as it places an apparent one in command of the allof sovereign Australias border security resources. But this projected impres-sion is not consonant with the structures that enable it. Operation SovereignBorders asserts that stopping the boats cannot be achieved through inter-departmental committees, working groups and international dimensionsalone. There must be one person responsible with all the necessary resourcesof government at his or her command.84 Just who is this person, and paceHobbes, what would be their powers of personation85?

As implemented, the policy does not upset the nested hierarchy ofcommittees that characterise Australian border securitys administrative struc-ture: it merely adds a further task force, the Joint Agency Taskforce, abovewhich remains the Secretaries Committee on National Security, headed bythe Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the National SecurityCommittee, headed by the Prime Minister. As implemented, the policy hasin fact generated further bureaucratic complexity while abrogating to theexecutive further and more secretive authority.

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Border security also involves Australian maritime security governance.Indeed, it is a key task of GAMSA to explicate its structures and functions.Maritime security governance is a hierarchy of interdependent networksstructured by the committee form,86 and these are characterised by theirown intra and inter-committee hierarchies and internal politics, which arecomplex.87 This means that Australian maritime security governance hasstructures that preclude border securitys being accurately characterised asa unity. Border Protection Command is not the responsibility or expressedauthority of any one. It is always also Customs and the Navy and theExecutive and the National Interest and over thirty other nominated stake-holders and the many other inter-active enforcement factors elaboratedearlier. This iterated set of hierarchies, networks and functional interde-pendencies and the incoherence, friction, turf wars, and animosities theyperforce introduce needs to be described in more detail to give a suffi-ciently precise sense of the disjuncture between the multiplicity of relationsat play in making border security a defensibly concerted effort and theimpression of orchestrated unity crucial for sovereignty.

BPC is directly commanded by a Rear Admiral seconded from Defence.But above this transparent, human, embodied point in border security thestructure the one command, all threats unity generated by BPCs intertwin-ing of green and blue begins to fade and blur. On the blue side, under theprevious government, the Commander of BPC reported to the Deputy ChiefExecutive Officer of Maritime, Corporate and Intelligence, who reported tothe CEO of Customs and Border Protection Service, who, in turn, reportedto the Minister of Home Affairs. On the green side, the Commander ofBPC reported to the Chief of Joint Operations, who reported to the Chiefof the Defence Force, who reported to the Minister of Defence. OperationSovereign Borders, adds the other aforementioned Taskforce above BPC, theOperation Sovereign Borders Joint Agency Taskforce. Is there an identifiableone here?

Operation Sovereign Borders places a military commander as the headof the Taskforce: this is supposed to be the one commander (currentlyDeputy Chief of Army Angus Campbell). But this commander reports to theMinister for Immigration and Border Protection (currently Peter Dutton), andthe Minister has forbidden General Campbell from speaking publically abouthis responsibilities. If General Campbell is the one, then his is a subordinatedand silenced one. This may be expedient for the executive, but it speaksagainst a Hobbesian account of personation as an instantiation of a onecapable of sovereign speech.

The structural novelty of the task force is a formal one: a military servicehas been made responsible to a minister other than the Minister of Defence.This potentially places military assets at the disposal of an immigrationminister, in this sense it could be said to militarise immigration and theexecutive responsible for it. The pamphlet explicitly states that the scale of

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this problem requires the discipline and focus of a targeted military opera-tion, placed under a single operational and ministerial command.88 Whereministerial command is concerned the government has, on this occasion,been as good as their word. Or have they?

Border security involves the decisionist prerogative, and effectuatingthis means being able to decide. Who can decide decisively? Certainly notthe Ministers subordinated commander. The Minister himself, meanwhile,reports to Cabinet-level committees and the Department of Prime Ministerand Cabinet. Border security is not the one Operation Sovereign Borderssays it must be to be effective. Rather, it is lodged in the Department ofPrime Minister and Cabinet as follows.

At key moments, the order and orientation of border security rests onpolitical decisions. The first component of the executive that must be men-tioned here is the Attorney-General.89 The Attorney-Generals department isgenerally responsible for the formulation of policy and legal advice to thegovernment, including on matters relating to national security (and, there-fore, border security). If, as I have suggested, border security rests at keymoments on decisions, then fundamentally it is the role of the Attorney-General, their department, and the Crisis Centre to provide the executivewith legally defensible standing for border security, a sufficiently stable plat-form from which the decision leaps, resolving the crisis situation eitherway. This raises questions in relation to the department or the OperationSovereign Borders pamphlet, where it speaks of crisis and national emer-gency, but given that this advice is confidential, the only trace we wouldhave of it would be in the public speech acts and decisions of the PrimeMinister, or in formulations like GAMSA. Which brings me to that which Itake to be the decider, the Prime Minister and his or her department.

The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet is the site of the cen-tral enabling condition of border security, and the Prime Minister is the axisaround which the department turns. Within the department, the Committeethat oversees the co-ordination of border security is the National SecurityCommittee of Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister. Below this is theSecretaries Committee on National Security, known as SCNS, the peak inter-departmental committee. It is chaired by the Secretary of the Departmentof Prime Minister and Cabinet; its deputy is the National Security Advisor.Below this is the National Intelligence Coordination Committee, chaired bythe NSA (National Security Advisor). The Prime Minister receives advice andintelligence directly from the National Security Advisor and the Office ofNational Assessment (ONA). Policy and strategic responses are formulatedwithin the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet; the key group hereis the Homeland and Border Security Policy Coordination Group (HPCG).Using these systems, processes, and assemblies, is it the Department itself,and the Prime Minister him or herself, directing border security?

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Throughout this paper I have been describing the necessarily embod-ied, extended, enacted, and distributed elements nameable by theCommonwealth as border security in relation to BPC, which as we cansee in these sections is also a complicated matrix of elements and acronyms,requiring extensive collaboration to co-ordinate. As we have seen, OperationSovereign Borders emerged from the decisionist prerogative and the elec-toral success of the stop the boats slogan, which, in the response phase,has intensified to the point of total domination and the violation of thesovereignty of others. According to this ideal, nothing and no one can enterexcept on a sovereign say so. This leads to the following question: who canspeak in the name of the nation, in a way that resonates as sovereign?

Sovereignty is said in many ways; it must be said by many peoplein a way that is believed, otherwise it would cease to be, like the silencethat would be the law of an extinguished people. In order for it to besaid believably, it must resonate. As agents of Operation Sovereign Borders,the executive may speak in the name of the nation, but to date successiveexecutives have only done so by expressing unconditional support for theintensifications of border security it involves. In the space made and kept fornational sovereignty in this way, no one speaks, except on terms and con-ditions favourable to border security. Border security is sovereign speechon the condition of border securitys defence and expansion.

CONCLUSION

Border security has been characterised here as a transformation ofsovereignty. Examined as space, materiality, and administrative form,Operation Sovereign Borders has been explored as a set of border securitypractices that tries to suture the world back together as sovereign. In doingso, it knits its addressees as subjects into the bordered world.90 To returnto our research question: through border security the nation secures its unityby sharing that which is indivisible.91 A logic that insists on the elimina-tion of paradoxes would insist: this is incoherent. How can that whichis indivisible be apportioned into shares? By allowing paradoxes to abideat the heart of our analysis of border securitys logic, we can show whatnational sovereignty does without exception. As border security, nationalsovereignty is that form of power capable of processing its paradoxes byinterdicting them and detaining them offshore. Through the division of theworld into shores, and the enforcement of these shores as border security, adefended space has been constituted for the foreseeable future in which thesovereign is alone and is not.

The global embrace of border security is indicative of a transformedappreciation of the value of human life. Border security actively contributes

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to mutations within and among the terms of belonging, exclusion and domi-nation, from ones predicated categorically on citizenship by either blood orsoil to ones enabled by a differential recognition of the value of human lifebased on explicitly economic and tacitly moral criteria.92 In these senses,93

border security can be described as an enacted biopolitics.94

Citizenship in the wake of these transformations is not merely economic.Precarious and marginal publics within many domestic populations now fallback on blood-and-soil narratives of belonging in order to establish dis-tinctions for inclusion and exclusion: we grew here, you flew here was aslogan used by locals after one prominent race riot in Sydney, Australia the Cronulla Riots. For those with sufficient capital economic, social, sym-bolic assertions of such locality-rooted conditions are unnecessary whereglobal mobility is concerned. What has been set up for this class of personis a mobility regime that ensures their low friction accumulative movement.There are classes of people for whom circulation has been secured, and thisis producing categories of person who must be removed from circulation.

Securing circulation on behalf of this class, what John Urry calls the richclass,95 is generating a world of proliferating borders96; in circular fashion,this strengthens calls for the further development and intensification of bor-der security policies. Securing circulation requires the accumulative mobilityof some, and this necessitates the impedance, forcible ejection, or indefinitedetention of others.97

Offshore detention is an interface of open systems and living people.Following Deborah Cowens lead, this paper has attempted to observe keypoints in this interface from the perspective of the border security systemsinvolved in producing offshore and offshore detention, and in this context,threats to circulation are treated not only as criminal acts but as profoundthreats to the life of trade.98 Offshore detention centres are places of media-tion that translate border security into human suffering so that the life of trademay continue to grow, accelerate, and intensify, with as little impedance asis possible. This makes of offshore detention centres key global sites wherecomplexity becomes brutality99 in the name of a lifeless circulation of goodsthat must be secured. The circulation of goods has been made synonymouswith the securing of the good. Offshore there is exposure, cruelty the sus-pension of a normal ordering of life as past, present and future. Onshore,there is still a horizon of justice visible from the shores of politics, beyondthe immediate privilege of a position of relative comfort, the spectacle of theshipwreck, and the ability to look away.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the careful reading of Jenny Chambers, OhadKosminsky and Caitlin Overington, without whom this would have been a

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lesser manuscript. I would like to acknowledge the mentoring and supportI have been given by Alison Young, Peter Rush and the Research Unit inPublic Cultures, without whom I would be an even more imperfect academicand scholar than I am. Around campus, I would like to acknowledge thesustaining intellectual support of the Territory, Authority, Population (TAP)reading group, where many of the ideas presented here were reality testedand developed, over many years of robust interlocution. More generally,I would like to acknowledge that this paper was written on land that wasappropriated as part of a land appropriation process that continues to bepolitical, contested, and unsettled. This paper is located in the midst of this,with hope.

NOTES

1. Liberal Party of Australia, The Coalitions Operation Sovereign Borders Policy, 2013, availableat , accessed 8 March 2014.

2. Mark B. Salter, Theory of the /: The Suture and Critical Border Studies, Geopolitics 17/4(2012) p. 750.

3. Matthew Sparke, A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security and the Biopolitics of Citizenship onthe Border, Political Geography 25 (2006) p. 152.

4. Cf. Jason Ackleson, Constructing Security on the USMexico Border, Political Geography24/2 (2005) pp. 165184, Rhys Jones, Agents of Exception: Border Security and the Marginalizationof Muslims in India, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27/5 (2009) pp. 879897; Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola, Technologies of Border Management: Performances and Calculation of Finnish-SchengenBorder Security, Geopolitics 18/1 (2013) pp. 7784; S. M. Reid-Henry, An Incorporating Geopolitics:Frontex and the Geopolitical Rationalities of the European Border, Geopolitics 18/1 (2013) pp. 198224;Nick Vaughan-Williams, The UK Border Security Continuum: Virtual Biopolitics and the Simulation of theSovereign Ban, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28/6 (2010) pp. 10711083; Henk VanHoutum, Human Blacklisting: The Global Apartheid of the EUs External Border Regime, Environmentand Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2010) pp. 957976.

5. Salter, Theory of the / (note 2) p. 750.6. For a full explication of the epistemology I am working with here, see Heinz von Voerster,

Understanding Understanding (New York: Springer 2003) as well as Bruce Clarkes excellent explica-tion of von Foersters epistemology and its implications for sociology in Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N.Hansen (eds.), Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, (Durham: DukeUniversity Press 2003) pp. 3462.

7. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press2011) p. 8.

8. The United Nations recent report on Australias offshore processing has described conditions inoffshore detention centres as cruel, inhuman, degrading and in violation of international law. See NickCumming-Bruce, U.N. Office Criticizes Australia Detention Policies, New York Times, 22 Feb. 2014, avail-able at , accessed 28 Feb. 2014. See also Amnesty Internationals full report on conditions, Thisis Breaking People: Human Rights Violations at Australias Asylum Seeker Processing Centre on ManusIsland, Papua New Guinea, available at , accessed 28 Feb. 2014.

9. Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Vol. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2012) p. 26.10. Salter, Theory of the / (note 2) p. 751.11. Sharon Pickering and Leanne Weber, New Deterrence Scripts in Australias Rejuvenated

Offshore Detention Regime for Asylum Seekers, Law and Social Inquiry, issue number and pagesunassigned, (2014).

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12. Cf. Alison Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucra