Dr. Helena Zeweri recently published an editorial in Today’s Totalitarianism called: “Getting Them ‘Out of the Way’: Consent and Forcible Transfer in the US-Australia Refugee Swap Deal of 2016.
Today’s Totalitarianism is an interdisciplinary platform for academically informed commentary on authoritarian developments throughout the world.
“In the wake of calls for mass deportations and deterrence-based policies, it is imperative to pay attention to how migrants will be constructed as non-consenting, “in the way,” and movable, in order to justify inhumane policies toward them”
In the editorial Dr. Zeweri states that “the forcible transfer of refugees is part of the global trend toward externalized border enforcement….In the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election as President and Australia’s increasingly restrictive and deterrence-based stance on irregular migration, it is worth revisiting the 2016 refugee swap deal less as an exceptional moment in international migration governance, and more as part of an ongoing pattern of treating migrants as non-consenting subjects.
