Pete Chambers

Border security has become one of the key means by which the sovereignty and security of powerful nation-states is projected. This paper offers a set of observations of the Australian Commonwealth’s descriptions and instructions for its embrace of border security. Border security is legible here as a geopolitics that transforms the rights and responsibilities of maritime jurisdictions into a space of security that projects national sovereignty through the interdiction of boat arrivals. Its intensification as Operation Sovereign Borders is read as a further variation within national sovereignty, one that elevates the decisionist prerogative into total deterrence. Operation Sovereign Borders pushes the limits of sovereignty’s existence in the state toward a total domination of space, perception and human life in Australia’s maritime jurisdictions, in the name of the nation. This necessitates the development, defence and reinforcement of a regionally engaged materiality that is embodied, extended, enacted, and distributed. The intended effect of this coordinated effort is to secure the nation’s sovereignty as a unity, but the broader effect has been to devalue offshore life to secure onshore interests, in a way that now necessitates indefinite offshore detention.

In February 2013 a friend sent me a link to an obtained video hosted on The Guardian’s website, detailing a datamining tool developed by Raytheon , called Rapid Information Overlay Technology (RIOT).  RIOT allows the user to quickly assemble a clear picture of a person’s network of associates and their movements, as revealed through their habitual, normal smartphone use, the repeated patterns of which can then be visualized in a number of ways to accurately disclose their networks of association and predict their future behaviour.

The smartphone is an extremely subtle and complex device whose uses, agency and affects depend greatly on the assemblages in which it is an actant. The effectiveness of the smartphone in RIOT’s marketable surveillance assemblage, for example, depends on the interoperation of a large number of programmed systems, with interested group agents such as the Raytheon corporation and the US government at various ends. It also depends on the broader, shifting social interaction between smartphones and their human and nonhuman users in their average, everyday dealings with one another via their smartphones – for this is, after all, why the precise pattern of data is there in the first place and for the foreseeable future.

Careful consideration of the surveillant assemblage visible through RIOT prompts us to rethink agency and causality: is any ‘one’ in control here? To what ends are these tools being put, and what are their probable and possible futures?  To what do individual smartphone users and system-agents of their surveillance tend to pay attention? What kind of control might they seek, and what might they have? Considering the smartphone’s enmeshment here also encourages us to think very carefully about the possible political dangers this engenders, encourages and normalizes. These are political dangers which, the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures  amply demonstrate, are no longer science fiction, the cool-but-creepy imaginings of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, or even marginal practices that are only the obsessive worry of paranoid cranks and conspiracy theorists. Rather, they are the by-now-normal political technologies of the National Security Agency (NSA) and its project of total planetary surveillance through PRISM, Boundless Informant , and the many other projects, programs and applications of which large numbers of people are not yet aware, may never be, and may not even care to know about.

On June 7, 2006, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the United States’ ‘public enemy number two’, was killed by two 500lb bombs, dropped by US forces on the safe house in which he and others were hiding. This paper is about the making and unmaking of Al Zarqawi as a monster, and his curious afterlife as a governmental technology. As we pass the fifth anniversary of his death, this detailed study of Al Zarqawi offers an invaluable general lesson for the political analysis of terror. Zarqawi’s monstration – his making and unmaking as a monster – tells us about the powers of naming and linking that characterize executive power in the age of globalized media systems, and the productive relation between diurnal practices of security work and the nocturnal phantasms of cultural memory carried by media which, this paper argues, drive and sustain wars in the twenty-first century.

In 2012, Australia’s Christmas Island is best known as an island of immigration detention, a key component of Australia’s growing offshore border security apparatus, where interdicted boat arrivals seeking asylum are detained and processed. This article offers one account of how the Island came to be what it is, by providing two snapshots of the operable set of power relations on Christmas Island, then and now: ‘Island in the Sun’, and ‘Tropics of Governance’. Side by side, their stark contrast reveals the passage of authority through time and place, from the embodied, unified voice of the sovereignty of the British Empire to the palliative communication and bureaucratic sincerity that characterise governance. By disclosing shifting patterns of emergence and decay and showing border security’s intimate relation to governance, this article seeks to offer a deepened understanding of the current detention situation in its immanence. What can now be seen as Christmas Island’s past follies also reveals the restless work of successive political imaginations, the shifting ways and means by which an island can be translated into a solution to a political problem, and how successive solutions tend toward wreck and ruin.

The interdiction and detention of irregular arrivals has become one of the key means by which wealthy states enforce and promote secure mobility. This article presents a detailed genealogy of the problems and solutions that enabled Australia’s Christmas Island to become an inte- gral site for the reproduction of Australian society through practices of border protection. A close examination of Christmas Island reveals broader, deeper currents that follow the shifting shapes of state interna- tionally, and the dreams and ruins such transformations produce in their wake.

This paper asks a seemingly simple question: why doesn't everything fall apart? Our responses to this, I'll argue, are deeply indicative of our theoretical understandings on how social order is possible. Following insights from Luhmann's systems theory, I want to engage with the fragility and resilience of our complacent political present, in all the drift and bloat of its morbid momentum, and try to understand how we might work our way toward a better future by thinking more politically about the seeming absence of stability, predictability, agency and choice that confronts us by using some insights from systems theory. In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher discussed how the seeming absence – of choice, agency and an alternative – has produced 'reflexive impotence' in his students. By pushing a discussion of Mark Fisher through some recent examples from my work, I examine how we are trying to live imperfectly with one another in our mutually vulnerability, mutual dependence, our reciprocal yet differential precarious exposure. Why doesn't everything fall apart; how is social order possible; how could this possibly all keep going? This paper doesn't pretend to offer answers and solutions, but rather hopes to reckon with basic aspects of 'the shit we're in' as something worth thinking about and contending with

This is the pdf of a presentation given at the Migration, Irregularization and Activism conference in Malmö in June 2015. Its purpose was to introduce key aspects of Australian border security to critical audiences grappling with border security in Europe, with special attention paid to the ways in which aspects of the Australian policy model are migrating back to Europe.
I also pay attention to the logistical aspects of Border Force's handling of subjects and objects of security, problematising normative accounts that focus on inhumane treatment and social justice: what those of us concerned with its societal effects must reckon with, I argue, is that Border Force deals with thinglike objects who must be screened and can be warehoused; not humans deserving of rights.

What kind of a world is one in which border security is understood as necessary? How is this transforming the shores of politics? And why does this seem to preclude a horizon of political justice for those affected? Border Security responds to these questions through an interdisciplinary exploration of border security, politics and justice. Drawing empirically on the now notorious case of Australia, the book pursues a range of theoretical perspectives – including Foucault’s work on power, the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann and the cybernetic ethics of Heinz Von Foerster – in order to formulate an account of the thoroughly constructed and political nature of border security. Through this detailed and critical engagement, the book’s analysis elicits a political alternative to border security from within its own logic: thus signaling at least the beginnings of a way out of the cost, cruelty and devaluation of life that characterises the enforced reality of the world of border security.