Presented in person and online. Zoom details below.

Border Control as Collective Violence: Afghan Refugee Advocacy in Australia in the Era of “Stop the Boats”
Based on ongoing ethnographic research in Melbourne, this paper examines oral histories of Afghan refugee rights advocates in the era of offshore detention and ‘stop the boats’ immigration policies. Since the early 2000s, Afghan migrants have constituted a disproportionate number of boat arrivals to Australia. As a result of oscillating policies toward boat migration, some have been subject to prolonged offshore detention and temporary status while others have only recently been granted permanent refuge. Many of those who have been resettled have gone on to become powerful advocates for immigration policy reform and sources of support for newcomers released from detention to the mainland.

While emerging ethnographic literature has examined the perilous experiences refugees face journeying to Australia and their challenges with resettlement, less attention has turned to how refugees themselves conceptualize Australia’s border regime. In this paper, I argue that Afghan refugee advocate stories reframe the violence of this border regime as transnational and prolonged, departing from conventional advocacy narratives that primarily focus on violence as contained within the individual subject. Citing the enduring impact of prolonged temporary status and carceral violence upon their own personhood and upon their loved ones in Afghanistan and transit countries, refugee advocate narratives extend the spatiality and temporality of Australia’s border regime.

This paper offers a preliminary exploration of the intersubjective experience of border control policies in the era of ‘Stop the Boats.’ I conclude by asking how such a reframing of border violence opens up new understandings of refuge beyond liberal paradigms. If border regimes produce dispersed violence, how can refuge also be thought about as a set of interconnected freedoms rather than primarily as an individual right? Examining the historical and social specificity of the Afghan experience of crossing borders can unearth alternative philosophies around refuge that consider collective experiences of structural violence.

Speaker: 
Helena Zeweri is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver. She is also Faculty Affiliate at the UBC Centre for Migration Studies where she coordinates the Borders Research Group and is Faculty Associate at the UBC Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of migration studies and Cultural Anthropology. Her recent book Between Care and Criminality: Marriage, Citizenship, and Family in Australian Social Welfare (Rutgers University Press, 2023) looks at the entanglement of criminal justice, immigration, and policing institutions within migrant-targeted social welfare in Australia. Her current research examines how Afghan diasporic political life in Australia and the US is shaped by the enduring effects of displacement, carceral border regimes, and empire. Helena’s work has been published in various journals, including: Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, the Journal of Refugee Studies, the Australian Journal of Social Issues, the Australian Journal of Political Science, and a forthcoming publication in Current Anthropology. Her work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies. Prior to UBC, Helena was Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of Virginia. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Rice University and MAs in Near Eastern Studies and Anthropology from New York University and The New School for Social Research.

Zoom details: 
https://anu.zoom.us/j/87802807372?pwd=fbu3BD3PcmaIXpt3VU4srkznBENqkG.1
Meeting ID: 878 0280 7372
Password: 277792