| Abstract: | Australia's border enforcement strategies and immigration control policies operate in distant geographies, concealed from human rights groups, media and the public. From offshore detention to militarised maritime defence operations, Australia's exclusion of asylum seekers is increasingly dependent upon geographical processes that ensure asylum seekers do not have access to the state's systems of protection. This article explores a critically overlooked geopolitical strategy of mobility regulation that relies on processes simultaneously expanding geographies of control, while contracting spaces of rights. The outcome of these rapidly evolving bordering practices is the exaggeration of the distance separating asylum seekers from the state, suspending them within a space devoid of an operational system of rights, and emphasising a new and restructured maritime legal geography. |
