The Death of Asylum
Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago
Alison Mountz
American Association of Geographers (AAG) Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography
BOOK LAUNCH: A DISCUSSION WITH ALISON MOUNTZ HOSTED BY Balsillie School of International Affairs
Investigating the global system of detention centers that imprison asylum seekers and conceal persistent human rights violations
Alison Mountz traces the global chain of remote detention centers used by states of the Global North to confine migrants fleeing violence and poverty, using cruel measures that, if unchecked, will lead to the death of asylum as an ethical ideal. She demonstrates how remote sites curtail the basic human right to seek asylum, forcing refugees to take more dangerous risks.
"A critical contribution to debates on how geography can be used by state actors to protect their specific and rivalrous interests." —London School of Economics Review of Books
Remote detention centers confine tens of thousands of refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants around the world, operating in a legal gray area that hides terrible human rights abuses from the international community. Built to temporarily house eight hundred migrants in transit, the immigrant “reception center” on the Italian island of Lampedusa has held thousands of North African refugees under inhumane conditions for weeks on end. Australia’s use of Christmas Island as a detention center for asylum seekers has enabled successive governments to imprison migrants from Asia and Africa, including the Sudanese human rights activist Abdul Aziz Muhamat, held there for five years.
Awards
American Association of Geographers (AAG) Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography
$28.00 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-9711-3
$112.00 cloth ISBN 978-0-8166-9710-6
304 pages, 26 b&w photos, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, August 2020
Alison Mountz is professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration in the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Laurier University. She is author of Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border (Minnesota, 2010), winner of the 2011 Meridian Book Award.
In this clear and compelling account, Alison Mountz draws on a range of conceptual tools and original research in island detention sites around the world to map the death of asylum. While much of the news is bad, the final chapters suggest ways forward, reminding us of the possibility and impact of resistance. This is urgent and necessary reading for everyone concerned with contemporary politics and practices of migration control.
Mary Bosworth, University of Oxford
A brilliant account of the recent evolution of the asylum system at a global level, The Death of Asylum is informed by a single cohesive current of groundbreaking theoretical analysis. One of the most important and urgent books about forced migration ever written.
Michael Collyer, University of Sussex
A critical contribution to debates on how geography can be used by state actors to protect their specific and rivalrous interests.
London School of Economics Review of Books
The Death of Asylum is a critical contribution to various debates on how geography can be used by state actors to protect their specific and rivalrous interests.
LSE
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The Conversation: Environmental disasters are fuelling migration
The Death of Asylum is "a critical contribution to debates on how geography can be used by state actors to protect their specific and rivalrous interests."
New Books in European Studies: Conversation with Alison Mountz
The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) arrives at an extraordinarily consequential moment for the future of asylum protections.
The Conversation: Environmental disasters are fuelling migration
In her book The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago, Alison Mountz, a geographer at Wilfrid Laurier University, describes the steady development of asylum processing in places far away from physical borders, such as Australia’s offshore processing camps in Papua New Guinea and Nauru.