#LetThemStay Fieldnotes 2: Updates and Meeting reflections

Courtesy Kara Burns 凯拉 @karaburns (used without permission)

Since the announcement that Asha would be placed in community detention, to return to Naura at some future moment, Peter Dutton stated that ‘over the last couple’ of weeks another boat had been turned back to Sri Lanka and Julian Burnside has reported another example of the violent abuse of asylum seekers by guards on Nauru . This news of business as usual should steel us about the nature of the terrain we are on; and sharpen our diagnosis that the mandatory detention of refugees as part of an aggressive process of reinforcing the border is (rather than simply a moral failing of conservative politicians) structural and systemic to the order of society itself. (My comrades who read Agamben often quote him that the camp is the ‘biopolitical nomos of the planet’)(2000, 45).

The latest news I have heard (so…