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When it comes to deterring and incarcerating people seeking asylum, there is a fusion between racialisation and politicisation. The bedrock is the colonisation of the nation now called Australia, where the dispossession of Indigenous peoples was a national project that later merged into the building of a state that lauded British heritage and the exclusion of migrants through the White Australia policy. This foundation of nationhood continues in a manner that challenges the myth of harmonious multiculturalism by determining who is deemed worthy and who is excluded. The centrepiece of racialised bordering is the immigration detention regime which is increasingly characterised by transporting people to offshore sites. This chapter argues through examples, how people seeking asylum have been racialised, dehumanised and criminalised, particularly through a national security lens.

Public information campaigns (PICs) have increasingly become part of global migration deterrence projects. Australia’s No Way campaign has been widely publicised for its harsh messaging, declaring to would-be asylum seekers that ‘you will not make Australia home’. In this chapter, the author argues that in addition to targeting potential asylum seekers throughout the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the No Way campaign is directed towards multiple audiences, including diaspora communities in Australia, the Australian voting public, and a wider network of anti-immigration political figures. The No Way campaign represented one of the largest and best-funded Australian deterrence campaigns to date, with the distribution of materials ranging from billboards and social media advertisements to street theatre performances and graphic novel storyboards between 2014 and 2016. In the sections that follow, the author situates this argument within the context of the rise of PICs throughout the globe, as well as their use within Australia. Through the lens of this campaign, the author considers the question: for whom is this deterrence messaging? How does it target multiple audiences? The author concludes by considering the future of information campaigns as deterrence projects around the world.

This chapter explores the proposition that Australia’s abusive treatment of refugees and asylum seekers can be traced back to a denial of the foundational violence of colonisation.

By adopting a psychoanalytic frame, the research explores three questions: is Australia engaging in cruel, degrading and humiliating treatment of asylum seekers, a treatment that devolves into torture? If so, how is this operationalised? And finally what does the abuse satisfy within the state?

The work uses Freud’s paper, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, and Melanie Klein’s work on the paranoid/schizoid position to describe the psycho-affective terrain from which this abuse emanates.

The chapter takes this psycho-affective terrain as the foundation and then investigates the impact the privatised detention regime has had in enabling the known/unknowability of the abuse and mechanisms at work within media practice to create ‘torturable subjects’ (Mendiola, 2014, p. 13).

This chapter provides a decolonial critique of Kenya’s encampment and asylum policy. By using a decolonial framework, the chapter examines how asylum, a supposedly humanitarian gesture, has become a political tool of deterrence, dehumanisation and detention in this country. In examining the camp through a decolonial lens, the author advances an Afrocentric perspective and foregrounds that asylum policy across the African continent, which is largely focussed on keeping asylum seekers on this continent, should be understood against the context of colonial relations in Africa. The author contrasts Kenya’s refugee camp with Australia’s offshore detention camp. Central to the author’s critique is Australia’s outsourcing of its offshore detention camps to Papua New Guinea and Nauru which epitomises a neo-colonial engagement with these post-colonies. Inspired by the author’s personal experience as a former refugee, this chapter also challenges refugee literature which is dominated by voices either without lived experience of the camp or produce work that is inadequately attentive to such knowledge.