Bhasan Char is a small island in the Bay of Bengal, 30 km from the Bangladesh mainland. Dubbed the “floating island,” it emerged from the seabed about 20 years ago, a build-up of silt prone to flooding. Bhasan Char currently houses 20,000 Rohingya refugees relocated there by the Bangladeshi government in 2020, but whose voluntary and free movement to the island is under question (Hossain 2020; HRW 2021). Manus Island is located in the Bismarck Sea, over 1,000 km north of Australia. Until its closure in 2017, the Manus Island Detention Centre housed over 1,000 men who had sought asylum and were forcibly detained there by the Australian government.
Both islands, as sites of isolated detention, provide insights into the ongoing state project of shrinking the space of asylum and punishing those who seek it. This is evident at a structural level through the undermining of the practices and principles of humanitarianism and the right to seek asylum (Mountz 2013), and the diminishing of key UN bodies by states (Cox 2015). At the same time, we are seeing a series of tactics that manipulate both the sovereign and human rights obligations of the state when it comes to people seeking asylum. This includes their removal to remote detention facilities (Dickson 2015); the expansion and externalization of the border security apparatus to exclude unwanted arrivals (McNevin 2014); the shaping of public sentiment, media discourses, and political rhetoric that supports tough border policies at the expense of refugees and asylum seekers (Sharples et al. 2022); and the underfunding of humanitarian programs in refugee hosting countries (Refugee Council of Australia 2020).
These later practices are often presented as necessary mechanisms of sovereignty and border securitization, where states assert their responsibility for managing and protecting the population within their borders, in this case, from the external threat posed by irregular migrants. Nation-states were the original and intended vectors of protection for refugees and asylum seekers in the international human rights frameworks. However, there is increasing evidence of state practices that undermine the ideals of protection and seek to exclude refugees and asylum seekers from the resources of the state. In practical terms, the responsibility for refugees and asylum seekers has existed in an alliance between states and the humanitarian apparatus (inclusive of discourse, governance, and practice). At the crux of this uneasy alliance is a tension between assistance and deterrence (Gerard and Weber 2019), with humanitarian organizations mandated to assist those forced to flee due to persecution, and the state operationalizing practices that increasingly seek to deter that same movement. In practice, these distinctions between the state and the humanitarian apparatus can be characterized by seepage, resulting in practices that I conceptualize as a form of “grey sovereignty,” briefly defined as the suspension and/or manipulation of established state norms and obligations in order to contain and punish irregular migrants. This grey sovereignty forms, I argue, an obfuscated layer over the right to seek asylum.
In this article, the operationalization of grey sovereignty is captured through three paradigms that illuminate its purpose and practice. First, as sites of sovereign decline that are captured at the landscape/material level; in the social ruination of asylum seekers’ lives; and in the erosion of the principles of democracy and humanitarianism; second, as sites of violence and trauma where the neoliberal state employs temporal rhythms of immobility and precarity in order to inflict human suffering; and third, as sites of erasure and surfacing, where a statist agenda to mask responsibility and accountability for refugees and asylum seekers is inscribed on the landscape.
I situate grey sovereignty through the literature on neoliberal governance, in particular the retreat of the state from the provision of services and their outsourcing to the private sector—a type of border control that Angela Mitropoulos and Matthew Kiem have called a “‘public- private partnership’ between states, corporations and NGOs” (Mitropoulos and Kiem 2015). I also situate grey sovereignty in the border securitization literature, in particular as an ideology that determines the desirability of citizens, refugees, and asylum seekers who arrive through irregular pathways, for example, by boat, being “undesirable,” and therefore subject to controls over their mobility. These undesirable criteria can be found in media discourses that refer to asylum seekers as criminals, illegals, and deviants (Klocker and Dunn 2003) and in government rhetoric that references asylum seekers as “not welcome” or “not the kind of people we want in Australia” (see, for example, Select Committee Report 2002).
The operationalization of grey sovereignty in offshore detention sites also requires engagement with the literature on humanitarianism. In particular, the article focuses on how humanitarianism is entangled in forms of domination such as imperialism (Hardt and Negri 2000), militarization and securitization (Hyndman and Mountz 2008), and determining human value based on who deserves to be “helped” (Fassin 2012).
Drawing on these various literatures, I argue that in the context of offshore detention, grey sovereignty is enabled by a system of neoliberal governance that exploits the practices of humanitarianism. The humanitarian apparatus and/or discourses are entangled in these practices of the state. In particular, I argue that humanitarian discourses, such as saving lives, alleviating suffering and providing protection, have become entangled in a neoliberal discourse of securitization and risk associated with irregular migration and border control, and this entanglement functions as a means for states to selectively apply a grey sovereignty to the borderscapes of seeking asylum.
This article is structured in four parts. The article first describes the methods used to conduct the research. It then lays out the contexts of Bhasan Char and Manus Island as two distinct island geographies with shared patterns of detaining individuals seeking asylum and refuge. The article then moves to examine the literature on state and humanitarian structures of power and control through the conceptualization of grey sovereignty. It then applies this concept of grey sovereignty to Bhasan Char and Manus Island through three paradigms: as sites of sovereign decline, as sites violence and trauma, and as sites of erasure and surfacing.
Research Design: Gathering “Ground Truth Data”
This article draws on three bodies of evidence. First, archival literature such as news articles, government reports and inquiries, non-government reports, and human rights documentation (14 documents in total). This included publicly available Hansard transcriptions of government inquiries, reports and testimonies accessed via the Australian parliamentary website, as well as a range of media and NGO sources that provided contextual and documentary evidence lacking from government sources. These documents covered two distinct periods relating to the contexts of the two locations. For Manus Island, the period from when the Centre reopened in 2012 through to its closure in 2017, and for Bhasan Char, the period 2019–2020 covering the announcement of Bhasan Char as a resettlement site and the initial transfer of Rohingya refugees. These documents were identified based on relevance rather than breadth of scope or quantity, and allowed me to understand a key research aim of this article: the structural and procedural nature of how detention centers are operationalized. Keywords were used as relevant to the research aims, and included asylum seekers, Manus Island, Bhasan Char, governance, island detention, sovereignty, and humanitarianism. The searches were refined as relevant documents were uncovered.
The second body of evidence included documents that detailed personal witnessing by those detained at the sites, with an emphasis on lived experiences of the spaces. These insights were drawn from detainees’ commentary in books, news articles, reports, and social media (22 documents covering the testimony of six individuals). These insights were largely contained to Manus Island detainees as at the time of this research there was very little available material from those detained at Bhasan Char. While not the initial focus of the research, these inclusions provided empirical evidence to the procedural documents. This method of evidence was chosen because of the difficulties in accessing the sites and to ensure those who had been detained at the two sites did not have to unnecessarily repeat their stories. This should not take away from the importance of recognizing lived experience, but rather acknowledges when duplication is not needed.
Due to the limitations on accessing both sites (an extension of the practice of grey sovereignty that denies accessibility), the third body of evidence I used was Google Earth, which could provide a visual mapping of the locations. Google Earth allowed me to map the disappearance of the Manus Island Detention Centre, made invisible through government erasure of the physical infrastructure, and to monitor the development of Bhasan Char, from a collection of silt to a territory defined by its carceral infrastructure. Google Earth was used as a tool for spatial analytical thinking about the space, including the “gathering of ground truth data” (Liang et al. 2018) on land use and human settlement. It was intended as a methodological device that could complement the lived experience of the spaces. As a result, the data informing this article was drawn from multiple and diverse sources, visual as well as textual, with the view of providing complementary data to build new insights into the links between sovereignty, offshore detention, and migration.
Bhasan Char
Bhasan Char (“floating” in Bengali) emerged from the sedimentary waters of the Bay of Bengal in the year 2000. The island soon submerged, re-emerging again in 2006, and gradually increasing in size to 40 square kilometers (see figure 1). Bhasan Char is now commonly referred to as an island, but it is formed from tons of silt that is washed down the Meghna River each year. As “free-flowing sedimentary matter-energy” (Bremner 2021), the island is prone to flooding and monsoonal weather. Onto this sedimentary land mass, the Bangladesh government has started relocating 100,000 Rohingya refugees. The refugees have been moved from the camps situated around Cox's Bazar, where more than a million Rohingya have fled from Myanmar since 2017.
Bhasan Char 2016, prior to the development of Ashrayan-3 (refugee relocation site) (Source: Google Earth)
Citation: Migration and Society 7, 1; 10.3167/arms.2024.070104
On Google Earth, Bhasan Char looks to be mud flats, with a green band of more substantive land across the northern part of the island. Prior to the arrival of the Rohingya, it was uninhabited (Islam et al. 2021). In the northwest corner, row after row of red-roofed housing is visible. This is Ashrayan-3, the name given to the relocation site for the Rohingya refugees (see figure 2). Surrounding this infrastructure is the partial construction of a 19-foot (around 5.8 meters) wall that is intended to keep out the floodwaters.
Bhasan Char 2023, Ashrayan-3 is now visibly evident (Source: Google Earth)
Citation: Migration and Society 7, 1; 10.3167/arms.2024.070104
The material infrastructure on Bhasan Char resembles a prison. The red roofs constitute long bunkers of cellular housing and taller storm shelters that resemble watchtowers. Lindsay Bremner suggests this is not “infrastructure conducive to civilian life, but rather the kinds of infrastructure associated with incarceration” (2020: 8). The cost of the relocation project is estimated at US$280 million (Paul et al. 2018).
The Bangladesh government has stated that Bhasan Char offers the Rohingya greater safety, livelihood opportunities, better access to safe water and sanitation, and education for their children (Islam and Siddika 2021). Contradicting this, a report by Human Rights Watch (2021) describes food shortages, inadequate health services, no access to education, restrictions on movement, and a lack of livelihood opportunities. A study by Md. Rafiqul Islam and colleagues (2021) details frequent police patrols to ensure the Rohingya do not leave the island, and navy boats stationed offshore. Described as a humanitarian response, Bhasan Char looks increasingly like a carceral response, one that further isolates and punishes refugees.
Manus Island
Manus Island is a province of Papua New Guinea (PNG). The island is located in the Bismark Sea, 570 km from the PNG mainland. Located within the PNG Lombrum Naval base precinct, the Manus Island Detention Centre was first established as one of three island detention sites by the Australian government in 2001. Under the 2012 Memorandum of Understanding relating to regional processing and the 2013 Regional Resettlement Arrangement signed between the Australian and PNG governments, the PNG government was responsible for the administration and running of the center, including managing resettlement claims, while the Australian government was responsible for funding and servicing the center (Commonwealth of Australia 2014). This dispersal of authority across sovereign claims was significant and unprecedented in the Australian context. It allowed the Australian government to create a quasi-state (the Manus Island Detention Centre) within another sovereign state's territory (PNG), blurring the boundaries of both to ensure a grey sovereignty could be applied.
The Centre consisted of a series of makeshift shelters that were delineated into zones, segregated from each other by fencing and guard stations (see figure 3). Food, medical, hygiene, social support and other services were outsourced to private companies and NGOs, creating a complex and opaque chain of responsibility. With no avenue for resettlement in Australia, the men detained at the center were reliant on resettlement options in third countries, the United States and New Zealand being the two most touted options.
Manus Island Detention Centre 2014, the Centre had been running in its current form for two years at this time (Source: Google Earth)
Citation: Migration and Society 7, 1; 10.3167/arms.2024.070104
Access to the site was deliberately restricted by the Australian government and PNG authorities. Journalists, human rights monitors, and politicians were routinely denied entry. Information that did emerge painted a picture of gross human rights violations (Amnesty International 2013; UNHCR 2013). In 2017, after a ruling by the PNG High Court that the Centre was unconstitutional, it was closed, and the men who remained were transferred to hastily built accommodation further along the coast at Lorengau.
Google Earth shows little evidence of the Centre today (see figure 4). The site is overgrown, the infrastructure has been removed, and the land now resembles much of the rest of the coastline. However, the site remains largely inaccessible through the utilization of a familiar post- detention center pattern of returning the site to a militarized zone, in this case to the PNG Navy.
Manus Island Detention Centre 2023, there is little evidence of the Centre left (Source: Google Earth)
Citation: Migration and Society 7, 1; 10.3167/arms.2024.070104
“Grey Sovereignty”
My application of grey sovereignty to the contexts of Manus Island and Bhasan Char builds on a broad range of literature that has examined sovereignty, irregular migration and border management, and humanitarianism. Literature on sovereignty and spaces of exception has shown how territory can be carved into zones (for example, camps, islands, economic exclusion zones) by which differential sovereignty and associated treatment can be applied (Ong 2000) or where sovereign law ceases or is exempt from operating (Agamben 1998). The sovereign ambiguity of these sites is what appeals to states in developing them as sites of detention, for they provide opportunity for this differential treatment to occur. Of particular interest, is an argument put forward by Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr that the detention of certain human beings is “not an anomaly of the logic of contemporary sovereignty, but a normal outcome of this logic” (2004: 36). This helps capture the intent of grey sovereignty, not as an aberration, but rather as an intended, if dysfunctional, logic of sovereign practice.
Literature that looks at migration management has also been influential to the arguments made in this article. This literature has shown how the state, and associated immigration organizations, have utilized border securitization and policing to manage the irregular movement of peoples. This literature details securitization as a practice of expulsion through detention (Mountz 2013) and deportation (Collyer 2012), the militarization of the border through patrol and surveillance (Dickson 2021), the extraterritoriality of the border (Watkins 2017), and the policing of refugee and asylum seeker movements (Coddington 2019). The work of Polly Pallister-Wilkins (2017) has also been crucial in positioning the compliance of humanitarian work in the context of these border security practices. This migration management literature is instrumental in laying out the complex web of interconnected forces that now constitute bordering work when it comes to irregular movements.
While the concept of grey sovereignty builds on these literatures, it also offers a distinct perspective. It links territorial exceptions and the operationalization of sovereignty with a deliberate intent to obfuscate state responsibility toward people seeking asylum. It centers the terrain (ubiquitous sovereign territories, such as detention centers inscribed on islands) as a specific construct that allows the state to exceptionalize refugees and asylum seekers (removed from norms and laws) and apply practices of grey sovereignty (meant to deter, harm, and punish with no reasonable accountability). My use of the term “grey sovereignty” is intended not only to convey the opaque nature of these practices but also to highlight the degradation or washing out of the ideals of humanitarianism and sovereignty that it also encapsulates. To grey out is to make something unavailable or unseen, a transient dimming or obscuring. Grey sovereignty is therefore used to represent both the shadows in which the liminal state authority operates and the dissolving of the principles of the democratic state. In order to make this assertion, I first explain my definition of grey sovereignty (consisting of three constitutive elements) and the conditions under which it can be applied to the management of irregular migration.
First, grey sovereignty constitutes when laws, regulations, and obligations (both domestic and international) are suspended, ignored, and/or manipulated so that a state can contain and control irregular migrants. This results in practices of differential treatment, and because they largely sit outside the legal system, there are limited avenues for redress. This can take the form of what Aihwa Ong calls “graduated sovereignty,” where the state's differential treatment of segments of the population intensifies pre-existing social distinctions along race, class, gender, and ethnicity lines (2000). Ann Stoler has linked this to imperial formations that allow for “sliding and contested scales of differential rights” (Stoler 2008: 193), suggesting this process is fluid and can be directed toward a changeable targeted group. Ong further explains this treatment through state-transnational networks where some state responsibilities are taken up by foreign corporations (Ong 2000: 57), a point that pertains to some of the arguments made later in this article around the neoliberal outsourcing of bordering work to private companies and non-governmental organizations. In this way, norms are suspended so that power can be applied differentially, and control enacted over the few who must abide by a different set of rules and rights (Bigo 2007).
Second, grey sovereignty is applied to circumstances where it is intended to provide duplicitous treatment and remove responsibility and accountability from the state. This is a deliberate and practical tactic of sovereign power and neoliberal governance and should be viewed not as a reduction in power, but rather a redirection of it. The aim is not to weaken state power over these jurisdictions, but rather to complicate and obfuscate state action and responsibility. The state temporarily cedes control over the operations to quasi-state authorities (Ong 2000), specifically in terms of labor, the market, surveillance, security, and policing. At the same time, they maintain micromanagement and control when it comes to the social and legal regulations of belonging, citizenship, and mobility. This system is designed, as Didier Bigo argues, to create uncertainty and allow governments to create new (il)legal parameters for those seeking asylum (2007: 5).
And third, grey sovereignty is a deliberate tactic to mask state action toward people seeking asylum that is dehumanizing and punitive. People are punished for pursuing the right to seek asylum. States are willing to forgo some of the ideals of sovereignty (e.g., the right to seek asylum, authority over certain types of territory, democratic principles) in order to maintain their control over irregular migration and ultimately who they are willing to allow into the sovereign state. This is evident in the way the state can apply grey sovereignty for their own self-interests, often simultaneously presenting the state as the protector of sovereign power (through an expansion of tough border securitization mechanisms that protect those within the state) and as not responsible for dubious operations, that include their participation and consent, but which occur outside of their sovereign territory.
In addition to these definitional factors, I argue that a key feature of grey sovereignty as it is applied to irregular migration and offshore detention, is the state's deliberate entanglement of the humanitarian apparatus in this practice. This is most evident in the way humanitarianism has been co-opted into neoliberal discourses of securitization and risk. States use humanitarian reason and rhetoric to justify what are otherwise calculated and inhuman responses to refugees and asylum seekers. For example, the Bangladesh government has referred to the relocation of Rohingya refugees to Bhasan Char as necessary to avoid the humanitarian disaster of overcrowding at Cox's Bazar (Khokon 2020), suggesting there is an ongoing humanitarian risk should this relocation not occur. A study by Md Rafiqul Islam and colleagues (2021) extends this argument through a human security framework, arguing that the island relocation offers the opportunity for a safe and secure life for the Rohingya. Alison Gerard and Leanne Weber refer to Didier Fassin's critique of “assemblages of power that use humanitarian reason and the notion of a higher moral purpose to legitimize certain actions by government and non-government agencies” (2019: 269). Fassin's caution is important, for more than a moral framing, this rhetoric appropriates humanitarian reason, such as care and protection, to justify the sovereign right to do harm, the antithesis of humanitarianism.
While the relocation of the Rohingya has been predominantly framed through a discourse of alleviating a humanitarian crisis, the security concerns act as intersecting accompaniments, leading to a conflation of humanitarian responses with a securitization agenda, and resulting in outcomes that harm refugees and asylum seekers. This is replicated by NGOs, such as Save the Children Australia and the Salvation Army who were actively involved in providing humanitarian assistance inside the offshore detention centers on Manus and Nauru but were also inevitably drawn into refugee status determination assessments (Commonwealth of Australia 2014) and assessment and enforcement activities such as behavioral management and transferee services.1 Practitioners, experts, civil society organizations, and private contractors were also drawn into these activities, further embedding the idea of using humanitarian concerns to justify bordering practices (Pallister-Wilkins 2017).
The absence of the state from these humanitarian spaces leaves a void where public functions are filled by humanitarian actors and private organizations, further embedding the notion of grey sovereignty, which sees a deliberate withdrawal of the neoliberal state and the insertion of a range of private actors who “mess up” the systems of responsibility and accountability. While this poses challenges to the operationalization of such sites, these practices of entanglement should be of particular concern for the humanitarian apparatus. By becoming implicated in the practices of borderwork that are occurring in island detention sites, the humanitarian sector becomes a vector for the translation of government power and a contributor to government agendas on securitization (Gerard and Weber 2019: 267). This poses a challenge to humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality but also to their larger remit to protect human life and dignity. Below I examine how grey sovereignty is operationalized through three paradigms that encapsulate its practice.
Sites of Sovereign Decline
Forcing asylum seekers and refugees into detention on remote islands could be seen as an extension of postcolonial sovereign rule—a mechanism for excluding the “undesirables” (Agier 2011) from the protection of the nation-state. Island detention is a long-standing technique of governance (Mountz 2020), often used as a form of externalization of sovereign power (Khalili 2012) and as carceral sites of detainment and punishment that evade legal regulation (Foucault 2007). Of particular interest to my arguments is Ann Stoler's evocation of islands as a spatial metaphor for colonial and imperial ruination, where she articulates zones of containment that mix security and defense with confinement and abuse (2008). These framings are particularly evident in the state's operationalization of Manus Island and Bhasan Char as sites of detention where I argue we can see a process of sovereign decline in action. This is evident through three distinct but interrelated dimensions: at the landscape/material level; in the social ruination of asylum seeker lives; and in the erosion of the principles of democracy and humanitarianism.
Australia's offshore detention regime has taken place on islands with which Australia has colonial ties—in this case Manus Island. Negotiations between the Australian and PNG governments involved considerable financial aid for PNG, framed as economic development for the region, to house offshore detention and process claims of people seeking asylum who arrived by boat (Watkins 2017). This could be seen as part of an entrenched government strategy to use Australian aid “to immobilise displaced people as far from Australia as possible” and to “contain asylum seekers in precarity” (Watkins 2017: 971).
These agreements, and their operationalization, have allowed the Australian government to be both intricately involved in the governance of offshore detention spaces that both exist outside of their sovereign power and are strategically removed from any responsibility over those spaces and the people residing within them. For example, Manus is the sovereign territory of the PNG state, however, as the Commonwealth of Australia report on the death of Reza Berati at the Manus Island Detention Centre stated, the Australian state, through its management of contracted services at the Centre, had considerable control over operations (2014: 151).
One could argue that Australia reinscribed “colonial and postcolonial relationships of dispossession and exploitation” (Salyer et al. 2020: 436) in order to use Manus Island as a site of detention and secure the PNG government's buy-in to the policy. However, this should not take away from the fact that PNG drew immense benefits from the scheme nor that they were able to bring their own power to the relationship, the PNG High Court decision that brought about the closure of the center being one such example. The PNG government took on the roles of security, control, and surveillance of the detention center. The PNG police were also responsible for law and order there, and the security contractors had to meet local staff employment quotas (Commonwealth of Australia 2014). In this way, the PNG government became entangled in the bordering mechanisms of the Australian state. This entanglement extended further to capture external service providers; private companies such as SERCO, G4S, and Transfield were responsible for providing security to the Centre and the International Health and Medical Services with providing medical care. Local PNG companies also took on the roles of providing security, gardening, food, and cleaning services to the Centre.
Importantly, this entanglement in the practices of grey sovereignty also included the humanitarian apparatus. NGOs such as the Salvation Army, who won a tender to provide social support services such as educational, recreational, and well-being activities to asylum seekers inside the Centre, were drawn into the mechanisms of “humanitarian borderwork” (Pallister-Wilkins 2017), such as being tasked with surveillance and control within the Centre. In October 2021, the UNHCR signed an agreement with the Bangladesh government to provide protection, education, skills-training, livelihood, and health services to the Rohingya refugees on Bhasan Char (Al Jazeera 2021). The agreement was made despite UNHCR concerns, expressed only months earlier, about the suitability of the site (UN 2020) as well as concerted pressure from international human rights organizations to stop the transfer of refugees (HRW 2020, 2021).
Detention at these sites leaves refugees in a state of suspension, placing them even further from the mechanisms of the state and international human rights frameworks that might help resolve their displacement and apply rights and entitlements. Sites like Manus and Bhasan Char represent a casting out of the asylum seeker and the means to entrench them in a cycle of imprisonment and punishment. Indefinite detention and the suspension of laws and rights that often accompany such a situation have allowed states to diminish or wash out the ideals of sovereignty and democracy, a key tenant of the idea of grey sovereignty. Manus Island and Bhasan Char become containers of precarity and uncertainty. They hold refugees in a temporal state of exception and uncertainty, what Georgina Ramsay has called “a technique of sovereignty” (2017: 515) and an assertion of sovereign power.
I argue these practices of grey sovereignty show hostility toward the principles of democracy and are evidence of sovereign ruin (Stoler 2008)—here, seen as an erosion of rights and norms that jeopardizes democratic ideals. It is also a condition under which vulnerable populations are subject to violence and trauma, further evidence of sovereign decline and ultimately the cause of great loss.
Sites of Violence and Trauma: Stuck in a State of Temporality and Precarity
If island detention spaces can be seen as an indicator of sovereign decline, particularly in terms of the deliberate suspension of rights and norms, then we can also understand them as spaces that can harbor state violence. This is encapsulated in the physical manifestation of the space, as carceral sites of detention and punishment, but also its manifestation on the bodies of those who are detained at these sites, particularly through temporal rhythms of precarity or immobility designed to inflict human suffering.
On Manus Island, former detainee Behrouz Boochani talks of being in a constant state of inertia, monotony and waiting: “Days in the prison begin with the commotion of long queues—long, pulverising queues” (2018: 189). Limiting access to food, medicine, and toileting become tactics of management and control. As former detainee Mustafa Golem tweeted at the time of the protests over the closure of the Centre, “They're making us weak, let's see who wins, our dignity or their cruelty” (@MustafaGolem, 1 November 2017). Boochani also talks of the imposed torturous cycle of “starvation-thirst-terror” (Boochani 2017). These are acts of violence that are dehumanizing, leading to what Boochani has called the asylum seeker being “forced to straddle the border between being human and animal” (2018: 232). Rather than being seen as a by-product of state bureaucracy, Ruben Andersson suggests “waiting” is a management technique that is fundamental to state operations (2014: 796). These constitute acts of violence on the bodies of people seeking asylum through depravation of basic human needs and rights.
Detention centers become sites of containment and oppression where violence can flourish. Segregated and isolated from “normal” life (Agier 2011), and therefore “invisibilized” to the general population, states can apply exclusion techniques to the populations who are forced to inhabit these sites.
Humanitarian organizations, through their entanglement in the state's bordering practices, also reproduce these categories of exclusion and isolation (Pallister-Wilkins 2017): replicating hierarchal powers, prolonging the existence of detention sites, and providing legitimacy to state actions. Seeking asylum can be seen as a series of temporal events that deplete refugee lives and inflict trauma. This manipulation of temporality is embedded in the bordering practices of the detention regime and is a key feature of neoliberal governance. Debjani Bhattacharyya points out this deliberate use of temporality when she identifies how the refugee becomes an experiment of postcolonial power; the Rohingya are relocated to sediments where legal claims to rights are made impossible (2021: 149).
Waiting, insecurity, and refusal become the dominant characteristics of this experience (Andersson 2014)—replicated both in state practices of bordering, and humanitarian systems of aid that make those detained reliant on external providers. These temporal rhythms of precarity are also reinforced through language. The Bangladesh government has referred to Bhasan Char as a “temporary” relocation site, seemingly in defiance of its own significant financial investment in creating more “permanent” physical infrastructure on the island. The asylum seekers on Manus Island were only to be held there while their claims were being processed. Temporary detainment was at best implied, and nothing was constructed on Manus Island that could not be taken away.
This language of temporal stasis, as it is applied in the face of action that implies something not temporary, pushes the boundaries of conventional understandings of temporality. There is psychological trauma in promising something will be temporary (many who were on Manus are still facing unprocessed claims after eight years) as a calculated maneuver to ensure refugees are excluded from rights and services that should be attached to their claims for protection. This manipulation of time and space is an act of the neoliberal state, a deliberate tactic to exploit the mobility and flexibility of migration systems that were designed to protect, not punish (Andersson 2014).
In many ways, government practices reproduce disorientation and uncertainty to mask acts of grey sovereignty that defy state responsibility and accountability. This tenuous logic is intended to show those incarcerated at these sites that they do not matter, that their experiences and their lives can be deconstructed and reconstructed at the government's will. As former detainee on Manus Island, Javiet Ealom has written there is intended dysfunction at the dark heart of Manus Prison: “At first, I put it down to poor planning, poor funding or perhaps a general disinterest on the part of the Australians. Later on—after much needless hardship—I came to realise a more sinister psychology was at play” (2021: 113). Under such conditions, island detention can be seen as a container of state violence where the responsibility and accountability of the state for that violence is effectively masked. This is the intended effect of applying grey sovereignty to such practices.
Sites of Erasure and Surfacing: Two Parallel Components of Irregular Migration
In addition to the practices of sovereign decline and the acts of violence and trauma that define island detention spaces and temporalities, there is a process of terraforming that occurs over the sites. Here, I argue two parallel components of migration as it relates to the formation of spaces of island detention: erasure and surfacing. Ann Stoler (2008) makes reference to Frantz Fanon's framing of erasure in terms of the “tinge of decay,” where there is “figurative decay” (the breakdown of people and pathologies) and “physical decay” (the destruction of landscapes and infrastructure). Under these conditions, decay can be seen to have both physical and discursive consequences; with no physical reminder that the thing ever existed, the narrative can take a form where actions and responsibilities are “forgotten” or erased.
On Manus Island, we can see these practices of erasure over the terrain. When Behrouz Boochani returned to the site of the Centre in 2018, almost a year after it had been closed down, he described the scene like this:
The prison had been completely destroyed and was now a jungle with a whole range of plants and vegetation. I saw the only tree that had existed in Fox prison. I also saw a tree that was in Delta prison, which we called “the suicide tree.” I saw the location of Chauka, the Green Zone, and Bravo, all solitary confinement cells. It was there that they imprisoned human being and inflicted psychological torture on them. All these places were now gone; there was not one sign of them left (Boochani 2018)
All that remains of the Centre are shaded lines in the grass that mark the outlines of now removed buildings—they resemble scars on the land, the marks and wounds of human violence (Stoler 2008) that occurred there. The site of inhumane suffering had been erased or so it seems. Boochani notes a couple of natural landmarks, a toothbrush, and a pair of sandals buried in the dirt. Boochani asks, “How can the designers and organisers of Manus prison think that by razing the prison they can eliminate the remnants of the crimes they committed?” Lesley Instone partially illuminates the motivations behind razing such sites when she argues that “forgetting places is just as political as naming them” (2010: 368), suggesting erasure has political intent.
On Bhasan Char and Manus Island these practices of erasure are evident on a number of levels. They can be found in the removal of the Rohingya from the roots of their persecution and their physical removal to a remote island in the Bay of Bengal. This practice of rendering bodies, violence, and history invisible (Bargu 2014) is given legitimacy by the UNHCR who helped facilitate this relocation. It can also be found in the physical dismantling of the center on Manus Island, an attempt to make “invisible” all that went on there, but also in the portrayal of the asylum seekers as a threat to Australia's borders and by extension the nation, erasing their history of persecution and their right to seek asylum accordingly. Without context and the acknowledgment of past persecution, the men on Manus Island are rendered mute, allowing an alternate negative framing of their predicament, one that positions them as “illegal” or a “threat.” A former Manus Island detainee reminds us of this context of past persecution when he tweeted during the center closure, “2 days of horror and fear / I fled Iraq because of danger and I have found danger again / 2 days of horror dangerous days I have ever seen” (@f_91_f, 24 November 2017).
On Bhasan Char, we see a parallel process occurring, a surfacing of the terrain upon which an inscription of sovereign ambiguity/authority can occur. Bremner has argued this is a form of territorial materiality with a statist agenda (2020: 2). This may be a state's attempt to assign soil/territory to the stateless (as in the case of the Rohingya on Bhasan Char) or to make sovereign claims over engineered territory (as in the case of China's claims to sites in the South China Sea). Bremner has highlighted the “unruliness of territorial materialities in relation to statist agendas” while Ong has argued for the concept of surfacing as a way to understand how nations can “engineer claims over extraterritorial zones” (2020: 201). It is both this constructed materialization of these island sites and its associated precarity that is of particular interest to my arguments here, as it allows for the surfacing of territorial forms upon which the statist agenda can be inscribed. Bhasan Char constitutes a blank surface, a virgin terrain that has emerged from the seabed. On this fragile territory is placed both the physical, such as people and structures, as well as the figurative, such as manufactured claims to sovereign authority—constituting Bhattacharyya's (2021) experimental take on managing irregular migration. It is precisely for this reason, its imprecise, unpredictable, incomplete, messiness, that the state is then able to construct the terrain in the guise of its particular statist agenda, in this case as a settlement solution to the Rohingya refugee crisis.
But rather than a grab for sovereign territory, as many of these “constructed” territorial forms are, the territorial claims over Bhasan Char and Manus Island serve the temporary purpose of the state ascribing a narrative that removes or shifts state responsibility for refugees and asylum seekers. Under these circumstances, there is no intended longevity to sovereign claims over the space. If Bhasan Char submerges back into the Bay of Bengal or the Manus Island Detention Centre is erased from the surface of Manus Island, it is irrelevant. What matters is that these spaces are receptive to the impermanent practices of grey sovereignty. Practices that provide sufficient murky coverage for the claim to the right to establish and operate sites of detention on ubiquitous islands and for states to both inscribe and erase their activities on these sites as necessary and without repercussion.
Erasure and surfacing are the dual processes of irregular migration management. One starts with a clean slate (surfacing) and inscribes the statist agenda to manage irregular migration through practices of grey sovereignty, the other wipes the slate clean (erasure) to mask that these practices of grey sovereignty ever existed. Both erasure and inscription follow circular processes of decimation and renewal over the terrain; they necessarily embrace mobility, precarity, and impermanence. These are the conditions under which practices of grey sovereignty thrive, they also represent the degradation or washing out of humanitarianism and sovereignty that I argue are integral to the concept.
Conclusion
In many ways, the arguments in this article are about entanglements—government, humanitarian, civil society, but also of the natural world—how these island sites, as ambiguous lands and territories, are drawn into the practice of subjecting harm on the bodies of people seeking asylum. This article's arguments are also about assemblages of people, aid, and surveillance circulating through island detention sites and creating their own spaces and values (Ong 2005). These assemblages are mobile and diverse in character and are often implicated in the differential treatment of people seeking refuge or asylum.
Bhasan Char and Manus Island offer two differing but interrelated case studies on the application of grey sovereignty to the island detention of refugees and asylum seekers. I have argued that grey sovereignty can produce sites of sovereign decline, violence and trauma, and erasure and surfacing, and that these operations are characterized by practices that apply differential treatment toward refugees and asylum seekers, particularly in terms of dehumanizing and punitive actions. These practices often have the intended purpose of removing the state from any responsibility or accountability for such actions. This commonly occurs through the outsourcing of certain forms of sovereignty, particularly the disaggregation of territorial space in order to protect the state and its citizens from people seeking asylum.
In addition, I have argued that practices of grey sovereignty are intimately connected to neoliberal governance and constitute the state's deliberate entanglement of the humanitarian apparatus in the management and operationalization of island detention spaces. Humanitarian discourses, such as saving lives, alleviating suffering, and providing protection, have become entangled in a neoliberal discourse of securitization and risk that is applied to irregular migration and border control. By becoming entangled in these practices of borderwork, the humanitarian sector becomes a vector for the translation of a government agenda that intends to shrink the space of asylum. Here we see the humanitarian apparatus complicit in acts that reproduce temporality, precarity and power inequities in order to manage or govern the mobilities of refugees and asylum seekers.
While practices of grey sovereignty are not necessarily new—we have seen similar manipulation of state systems when it comes to creating tax enclaves, militarized zones, or in the transnational mobilities of certain goods and services—in the context of the island detention of refugees and asylum seekers, I have shown that acts of grey sovereignty can work to undermine the ideals of both sovereignty and humanitarianism. A question then becomes, how far are we willing to erode these ideals in order to ensure the maximum punitive effect on people seeking refuge and/or asylum. As the ideals of sovereignty and humanitarianism become muddied by the actions occurring in island detention, that seepage also has inward-looking ramifications. While the state has traditionally positioned island detention of people seeking asylum as an aberration that occurs “over there,” there are implications likely to be felt at “home” too. Acts of grey sovereignty pose a threat to domestic and global orders that goes well beyond the island territories discussed in this article.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to acknowledge the feedback provided by participants at the Minjerribah writing retreat as well as the editors of this special issue, Sara Riva, Tess Altman, and Gerhard Hoffstaedter, who all helped make this article significantly stronger.
Notes
See, for example, the agreement between The Salvation Army and the Commonwealth of Australia, which outlines the schedule of services The Salvation Army would provide on Nauru. “Contract for Salvation Army on Nauru and Manus Island.” Right to Know, 29 November 2016. https://www.righttoknow.org.au/request/2695/response/7412/attach/html/5/%20Documents%20released.pdf.html.
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