At a time when the use of immigration detention is on the rise in the Global North, refugee protest is typically presented in the public sphere as 'bad behaviour' or as confirmation of 'their' otherness and inherent barbarity. This book goes some way in debunking this narrative in considering refugee protests against immigration detention from the perspective of detainees. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt as well as in-depth interviews with refugees, this book challenges contemporary human rights discourses which institutionalise power and argues instead, that despite the range of dehumanising policies and processes deployed against them, detained refugees remain agents and actively resist efforts to silence and exclude them.

This book builds a compelling picture of injustices inside immigration detention centers, within the context of the rise of the use of immigration detention in the Global North. The author presents the rarely heard voices of refugees, bringing their perspectives to light and personalising and humanising a global political issue. Based on in-depth interviews with formerly detained refugees who were involved in a wide range of protests, such as sit-ins and non-compliance, hunger strikes, lip sewing, escapes and riots, Human Rights, Refugee Protest and Immigration Detention presents a comprehensive insight into immigration detention and protest. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt, the book challenges contemporary human rights discourses which institutionalise power and will be a must-read for scholars, advocates and policymakers engaged in debates about immigration detention and forced migration.

Recognizing the radical disparity between migration/border policy and constitutional law “inside these borders,” Kathleen R. Arnold focuses on two main forms of migrant protest to explore the meaning of resistance in a sovereign context: self-harming protest by detainees and faith-based sanctuary of individuals scheduled for detention. This activism creates a “democratic state of exception,” interrupting the legal process, altering discretionary forms of sovereign power, and enacting rights not formally granted; these efforts go beyond the assertion of liberal rights or merely restoring the rule of law (even if these are also goals), challenging the warfare state while constituting a demos that is formally illegible. Migrant Protest and Democratic States of Exception will be of interest to scholars, migrant advocacy professionals (including INGO and IGO officers), graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in a variety of fields from legal studies to forced migration and refugee studies, political science, human rights, protest history, and contemporary movements.

Most Western liberal democracies are parties to the United Nations Refugees Convention and all are committed to the recognition of basic human rights, but they also spend billions fortifying their borders, detaining unauthorised immigrants, and policing migration. Meanwhile, public debate over the West’s obligations to unauthorised immigrants is passionate, vitriolic, and divisive. Refugees and the Myth of Human Rights combines philosophical, historical, and legal analysis to clarify the key concepts at stake in the debate, and to demonstrate the threat posed by contemporary border regimes to rights protection and the rule of law within liberal democracies. Using the political philosophy of John Locke and Immanuel Kant the book highlights the tension in liberalism between partiality towards one’s compatriots and the universalism of human rights and brings this tension to life through an examination of Hannah Arendt’s account of the rise and decline of the modern nation-state. It provides a novel reading of Arendt’s critique of human rights and her concept of the right to have rights. The book argues that the right to have rights must be secured globally in limited form, but that recognition of its significance should spur expansive changes to border policy within and between liberal states.

This book is an empirically grounded, critical engagement with the politics of immigration detention and deportation. Focusing on the constitutive tensions and political generativity within the activist practices of the anti-detention movement, this book examines the distinction between representational and post-representational political sensibilities. Representational politics centres on representing the interests of disenfranchised people to the state and public and operates primarily within the regime of immigration law. Post-representational politics focuses on working collaboratively with those in detention, to resist and challenge the deportation system. Since representational politics is the predominant political imaginary of migrant rights campaigning, the book focuses on illustrating and evaluating the role of post-representational politics. The book argues that the concept of post-representational politics is important for understanding and participating in radical opposition to state racism. This argument rests on the expanded possibilities it motivates of engaging with and resisting institutions that are poised to co-opt resistance; the attention it fosters to the situated power dynamics of political activities that collaborate with imprisoned people; and its sensitivity to the politically and conceptually generative capacities of everyday, embodied practices of resistance. To make this argument, this book employs innovative methodology to illuminate and engage with the practice-based thinking of activist movements about the concepts of solidarity, hospitality, witnessing and accountability. This book will be of interest to scholars and activists with interests in socio-legal studies of immigration and refugee law, as well as others in social movement studies, critical legal studies, border criminology and critical theory.

In this enormously ambitious but concise book, Nayan Shah observes how hunger striking stretches and recasts to turn a personal agony into a collective social agony in conflicts and contexts all around the world, laying out a remarkable number of case studies over the last century and more. From suffragettes in Britain and the US in the early twentieth century to Irish political prisoners, Bengali prisoners, and detainees at post-9/11 Guantánamo Bay; from Japanese Americans in US internment camps to conscientious objectors in the 1960s; from South Africans fighting apartheid to asylum seekers in Australia and Papua New Guinea, Shah shows the importance of context for each case and the interventions the protesters faced. The power that hunger striking unleashes is volatile, unmooring all previous resolves, certainties, and structures and forcing supporters and opponents alike to respond in new ways. .

The best country-by-country assessment of human rights. The human rights records of more than ninety countries and territories are put into perspective in Human Rights Watch's signature yearly report. Reflecting extensive investigative work undertaken by Human Rights Watch staff, in close partnership with domestic human rights activists, the annual World Report is an invaluable resource for journalists, diplomats, and citizens, and is a must-read for anyone interested in the fight to protect human rights in every corner of the globe.

Robert Ferrell Book Prize Honorable Mention 2021, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History Honorable Mention 2022, Association for Asian American Studies After the US war in Vietnam, close to 800,000 Vietnamese left the country by boat, survived, and sought refuge throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific. This is the story of what happened in the camps. In Camps raises key questions that remain all too relevant today: Who is a refugee? Who determines this status? And how does it change over time? From Guam to Malaysia and the Philippines to Hong Kong, In Camps is the first major work on Vietnamese refugee policy to pay close attention to host territories and to explore Vietnamese activism in the camps and the diaspora. This book explains how Vietnamese were transformed from de facto refugees to individual asylum seekers to repatriates. Ambitiously covering people on the ground—local governments, teachers, and corrections officers—as well as powerful players such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the US government, Jana Lipman shows that the local politics of first asylum sites often drove international refugee policy. Unsettling most accounts of Southeast Asian migration to the US, In Camps instead emphasizes the contingencies inherent in refugee policy and experiences.

Coopted by military operations, humanitarianism has never been neutral. Rather than welcoming refugees, host countries assess the relative risks of taking them in versus turning them away, using a risk-benefit analysis that often reduces refugees to collateral damage in proxy wars fought in the war on terrorism. Carceral Humanitarianism testifies that humanitarian aid and human rights discourse are always political and partisan. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

This explosive new volume brings together a lively cast of academics, activists, journalists, artists, and people directly impacted by asylum regimes to explain how current practices of asylum align with the neoliberal moment and to present their transformative visions for alternative systems and processes. Through essays, artworks, photographs, infographics, and illustrations, Asylum for Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry regards the global asylum regime as an industry characterized by profit-making activity: brokers who facilitate border crossings for a fee; contractors and firms that erect walls, fences, and watchtowers while lobbying governments for bigger “security” budgets; corporations running private detention centers and “managing” deportations; private lawyers charging exorbitant fees; “expert” witnesses; and NGO staff establishing careers while placing asylum seekers into new regimes of monitored vulnerability. Asylum for Sale challenges readers to move beyond questions of legal, moral, and humanitarian obligations that dominate popular debates regarding asylum seekers. Digging deeper, the authors focus on processes and actors often overlooked in mainstream analyses and on the trends increasingly rendering asylum available only to people with financial and cultural capital. Probing every aspect of the asylum process from crossings to aftermaths, the book provides an in-depth exploration of complex, international networks, policies, and norms that impact people seeking asylum around the world. In highlighting protest as well as profit, Asylum for Sale presents both critical analyses and proposed solutions for resisting and reshaping current and emerging immigration norms.