Social & Legal Studies

This article explores and unpacks the entanglements between law and geography that enable and advance the exclusion of non-citizens from entry into sovereign territory. We suggest that states manipulate jurisdiction within and beyond sovereign territory to extend enforcement. This jurisdiction applies primarily to the bodies of migrants themselves as opposed to fixed spaces. Like Elden’s (2009, 2013) imperio, or imperial power, this extension is spatially boundless, limitless in internal checks and administrative. Imperio places migrant bodies into new legal regimes with subjectivities that overlap and override existing protections, such as international refugee law. We develop our argument by considering enforcement practices in three areas: the waiting zone at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, search and rescue areas on the Central Mediterranean Sea and Australian excision zones.

The international refugee protection regime failed in protecting millions of refugees during the current Syrian conflict. However, for more than half a million Palestinian refugees who have resided in Syria since 1948, this failure has been persistent since such time as they were never protected by the international protection regime. These Palestinian refugees are now reliving the trauma of their statelessness through the current Syrian conflict. Their lack of protection reveals a complex layering of the failure of the legal framework of refugee protection. This case demonstrates the limits of an international protection regime that was initially formulated to address a Eurocentric set of concerns. This article links the current protection gaps for Palestinian refugees from Syria with the structural flaws of the international refugee protection regime. The article argues that the particular legal frameworks that were established to govern the statelessness of Palestinian refugees since 1948 have contributed in prolonging this unresolved crisis and pushed stateless Palestinians into a new cycle of displacement and victimization.

As an ancien régime, East Asia has been considered a region that bucks the trend of the so-called ‘humanization of international law’, where the primacy of the interests of individual has become the norm. As such, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the only institutionalized transnational body in the region, not only embodies a political statement against the Western backed liberal order, but also harkens back to the decolonization era, summoning Bandung’s post-colonial ideals where the state is the only and, thus, ultimate expression in international affairs through the espousal of equality and non-interference paramountcy. This article argues that this post-colonial arrangement has failed to serve its supposed ultimate beneficiary, that is, subaltern groups such as the persecuted Rohingya. The Rohingya have been denied their human rights even by their post-colonial fellows. To bring sobriety into the fold, the article uses the ingenuity of the Malaysian Human Rights Commission Suruhanjaya Hak Asasi Manusia Malaysia (SUHAKAM), as a node to cross-cultural legitimation, as a call for an ‘indigenized pragmatism’ embracing universal human rights that transcend the boundaries of nationalism-based political discourse rather than refugee rights due to their evocation of foreignness.

How are refugees perceived and governed in contemporary politics? What sort of sovereign responses has been advanced to govern and discipline the movement of people in a globalizing world? The article discusses how the ‘figure of the refugee’ (Scheel and Squire, 2014) or the ‘refugee label’ (Zetter, 1991, 2007) has changed once the Cold War ended and growing numbers of asylum seekers from the global South began searching for protection in the North. It attributes the restrictive character of contemporary asylum politics both to a perception of refugees as abject masses from the South and to sovereign states’ responses to a globalizing reality. In this context, I argue that access to asylum has been restricted both through the mobilization of new sovereign borders that seek to contain the mobility of asylum seekers perceived as villains, and through the creation of new categories or legal limits, in the form of temporary protection statuses to those perceived as passive victims. By focusing on the latter strategy, I briefly explore how Haitian asylum seekers have been labelled as ‘humanitarian immigrants’ in Brazil, highlighting the productivity of this legal limit.

This essay revisits the ‘Komagata Maru’ incident of 1914 to investigate the legalities that have complicated migration from some parts of the world to others since the era of apparently porous colonial borders to the highly bordered contemporary world that is differentially porous. It shows that the promise of free movement in the global village is undercut by the reality of legislation and juridical issues that continue to regulate the movements of people from one part of the world to the other. It focuses on legal borders that restrict the movement of people in the contemporary world by returning to an earlier moment when several of these issues were foregrounded. The essay draws on Hardt and Negri’s (2000) Empire and Foucault’s notion of governmentality to identify the juridical procedures, tactics, apparatuses of security and machineries of surveillance that the British government employed against imperial subjects during the Komagata Maru episode of 1914. It argues that the national and supranational organisms united under the single logic of the sovereignty of the British Empire, through which state-centric imperialism obstructed the mobility of the passengers on the Komagata Maru, make it resemble the new Empire.

Using the results of ethnographic research and focus group interviews with Filipino temporary foreign workers in Alberta, Canada, the goal of this article is to bring temporary foreign workers into academic and policy discussions by critically assessing how they fare at different stages of the migration process. Such analysis shows the strengths of ideational, affective and structural factors in determining temporary foreign workers’ motivations and goals. Ultimately, this article shows that temporary foreign workers reconstruct belonging and remake citizenship by making membership claims in Canada on the basis of their economic and social contributions to the country. Such claims, however, are grounded in dual modes of belonging in both Canada and in the Philippines. Their participation in migrants’ rights organizations that endeavour to provide temporary foreign workers with pathways to permanent residency shows their belief in their ‘right to have rights’ (Isin, 2008).