LSE Review of Books: "A critical contribution to debates on how geography can be used by state actors to protect their specific and rivalrous interests."
In the last decade, Australia has been criticised notably by the UK for its harsh and inhumane immigration detention system, which uses remote detention facilities on islands outside its shores. Since 2012, Australia has detained more than 4,183 people offshore, on Christmas Island, but also in foreign countries such as Papua New Guinea and Nauru. Other countries, such as Italy, Spain and the United States, also externalise their asylum-seeking process on islands such as Lampedusa, the Canary Islands and Guam. This transformation of the island from a space of transit to a space of containment – or, in other words, from a space of life to a space of death (Achille Mbembe, 2019, 99) – is at the centre of Alison Mountz’s new book, The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago.
