Australia to outsource or privatise its responsibilities to private multinational corporations who
operate within the established state of exception in order to maximise their profit.
This increasing privatisation of refugee management has become a hugely
controversial topic. It stems from the wider debate within international law regarding Business
and Human Rights, where, outside of the voluntary guidelines of the United Nations Global
Compact (UNGC) and the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
(UNGP), there are no legally binding treaties governing the human rights responsibilities of
these corporations. Consequently, refugees are potentially left without legal protection. Using
the concepts developed by Giorgio Agamben, it will be argued that Australia through
immigration legislation has created a state of exception within the offshore processing centre
on the island of Nauru, upon which they have outsourced or privatised their human rights
responsibilities to large multinational corporations. These corporations, including Ferrovial and
Broadspectrum have maintained the state of exception, whilst either directly contributing to or
failing to prevent severe human rights abuses on the island.
Biopolitical Framework
The biopolitical theories upon which this article has chosen to follow is that introduced by
Michel Foucault in the late 1970s, referred to as ‘biopolitics’ and ‘biopower’ 1 as well as the
concepts expanded upon by Giorgio Agamben, including the ‘state of exception’ and ‘bare
life.’ 2 Biopolitics hereby refers to the “strategic uses of knowledge which invest bodies and
populations making them amenable to various technologies of control.” 3 Furthermore, it refers
to the dynamic of modern power relations between the population and the state, an
examination of “the growing inclusion of man’s natural life in the mechanisms and calculations
of power” 4 , how “institutions, authorities and agencies act to shape the actions of populations
“ 5 and also how these actions are normalised. More specifically, it is the shifting of the referent
object of politics and security to that of life or living beings.
Biopower requires knowledge of the processes of “circulation, exchange and
transformation that makes up life” 6 and is based on intervention “that aims to optimise some
Michel, Foucault, “The History of Sexuality volume 1”, (New York: Vintage, 1978).
Giorgio, Agamben, “HomoSacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life”, (Stanford University Press,
1998).
3 Aihwa, Ong. "Making the biopolitical subject: Cambodian immigrants, refugee medicine and cultural
citizenship in California." Social Science & Medicine 40, no. 9 (1995): 1243-1257
4 Giorgio Agamben, 7
5 Ibid., 7.
1
2
6
Ben, Anderson. "Affect and biopower: towards a politics of life." Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers 37, no. 1 (2012): 28-43, 30
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