Asylum and Extraction in The Republic of Nauru

UNSW Kaldor Centre

Scientia Professor Jane McAdam AO talks to Julia Morris about her new book, 'Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru' on 23 February 2023. This book provides an extraordinary glimpse into Nauru’s offshore processing arrangement and its impact on islanders, workforces, and migrant populations. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Nauru, Australia, and Geneva, as well as the archives of the British Phosphate Commission, Julia Morris charts the country’s colonial connection to phosphate through to a new industrial sector in asylum. She explores how this extractive industry is peopled by an ever-shifting cast of refugee lawyers, social workers, clinicians, policy makers, and academics globally and how the very structures of Nauru’s colonial phosphate industry, and the legacy of the ‘phosphateer’ era, made it easy for a new human extractive sector to take root on the island. The book also highlights the institutional fabric, discourses, and rhetoric that inform the governance of migration around the world. Morris illuminates how refugee rights activism and #RefugeesWelcome-style movements are caught up in the hardening of border enforcement operations worldwide, calling for freedom of movement that goes beyond adjudicating hierarchies of suffering. Julia Morris is Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Jane McAdam AO is Scientia Professor of Law and Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney.