The Production of Sovereignty and the Rise of Transversal Policing: People-smuggling and Federal Policing
| Author | Sharon Pickering |
| Published date | 01 December 2004 |
| DOI | 10.1375/acri.37.3.362 |
| Date | 01 December 2004 |
362 THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
VOLUME 37 NUMBER 3 2004 PP.362–379
The Production of Sovereignty
and the Rise of Transversal Policing:
People-smuggling and Federal Policing
Sharon Pickering
Monash University,Australia
Border-policing has been the subject of increasing criminological
concern in the US and Europe: however, it has garnered relatively
little attention in Australia.This article addresses the federal border-
policing effort that has contributed to policing out the refugee. It has
done so through a focus on people-smuggling that has increasingly relied
on public debate depicting people-smuggling as a matter of national
security.The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has made significant contri-
butions to debates that have considered people-smuggling a matter for
law enforcement.This ar ticle argues that through an analysis of AFP
reports we can trace how they have contributed to the construction of
the people-smuggling problem. In drawing on international-relations
theory, notably concepts of statecraft and transversality, the article
concludes that the AFP has made a central contribution to a wider
attack on refugee protection with far-reaching consequences for the
nature of federal law enforcement.
Migrations do not assume the form of invasions; they did not in the nineteenth
century when border controls were minimal or nonexistent, and they do not today
… If we can accept that migration is not simply an aggregation of individual
decisions, but a process patterned and shaped by existing politico-economic systems,
then the question of control and regulation becomes more manageable (Sassen,
1999, p. 56).
In the past decade, people-smuggling has come to dominate discussions regarding
the assumed need to police Australia’s northern border. Initially this task fell to the
military, primarily the Royal Australian Navy. Increasingly it has become a task for
the AFP. It is a task not carried out on the border of the rolling seas but within
Australia and within other nations, notably Indonesia and refugee-producing
nations. Even more than the US/Mexico border, the Australian border is truly a
borderland where drawing cartographic lines on the sea seems futile as waves crash
over and fishing boats traverse the Torres Strait on a daily basis and the policing
Address for correspondence: Sharon Pickering, Criminal Justice and Criminology, Monash
University, Australia. Email: sharon.pickering@arts.monash.edu.au
Crim 37.3-text-final 10/1/04 4:25 PM Page 362
apparatus comes to operate as much from within other nations as within the nation
that empowers it. However, we are yet to criminologically ask how such a border-
land, such a version of the sovereign state, is produced and policed by federal polic-
ing? This paper will address this question by examining how the AFP has shaped
public discourse around people-smuggling.
Sovereignty, Borders, Statecraft
The key literatures I bring to bear on this examination of federal border-policing
come from the interdisciplinary study of borders, sovereignty and statecraft.
Sassen suggests there is a growing convergence in the rooting of immigration
policies within a shared understanding of national borders and the role of the
state that includes:
(1) the sovereignty of the state and border control as the heart of the regulatory
effort (whether on land or at airports or consulates in sending countries); and (2) an
understanding of immigration as the consequence of emigrants’ individual actions
(the receiving country is taken as a passive agent, one not implicated in the process).
Refugee policy, in contrast recognizes additional factors as leading to outflows. The
framework for immigration singles out the border and the individual as the sites for
regulatory enforcement (Sassen, 1996, p. 69).
In the case of Australia, refugee policy is no longer a buffer for the refugee against
the regulatory effort meted out against unauthorised immigration. The border-
policing effort is played out upon human bodies in spite of potential claims for
refugee status. How this is legitimated by the individual and collective agents of the
state grants insight into how practices of statecraft occur through the border-polic-
ing function.
The performance of modern statecraft is often understood as constituted by a
series of state practices (primarily through the use of state power, institutions and
representatives) to enact and enforce state boundaries that are central to the
performance of state sovereignty (Devetak, 1995, 2001; Doty, 1996). While sover-
eignty has traditionally been understood as marking a natural inside from a natural
outside with spatially and temporally fixed definitions, more recently sovereignty
has come to be understood as underpinned by historically and politically
normalised interpretations of the state that are neither natural or neutral (Brown,
2002; Reus-Smit, 2001). Rather than sovereignty having a fixed essence, it is
increasingly considered a performance of the state (or practice of statecraft)
(Soguk, 1999; Doty, 1996; Weber, 1995). As such, violent boundary-inscription
practices undertaken by the state against the refugee can be understood as a form of
statecraft. The pursuit of such practices seeks to create a political space in a
“boundary producing political performance” that in turn brings into being the
sovereign state (Devetak, 1995). The concept of statecraft moves a criminological
understanding of border-policing from a position of understanding the border as
fixed to understanding the border as spatially produced and circulated, a process in
which policing plays a critical role. The state is not only understood as being
constituted by violence (Tilly, 1985) but is maintained through violent boundary-
inscription practices. National borders are no longer lines on a map but spaces of
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PEOPLE-SMUGGLING AND FEDERAL POLICING
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
Crim 37.3-text-final 10/1/04 4:25 PM Page 363
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