form of valued life against some form of threat: a productive relation of making life live.” 7 This notion of‘ making life live’ is especially relevant here when discussing the treatment of refugees by sovereign states. In order to‘ make life live’ and protect the population“ there must be a distinction between a valued life that is productive and a devalued life that threatens.“ 8 To this end, the justification of strict or extreme immigration policies is often grounded in the concept of biopower, the need to control the movement and circulation of those who threaten. As will be discussed below, the image of the refugee has been transformed into this‘ threat’ and therefore must be destroyed or detained in order to protect the valued life.
Having discussed the areas of‘ biopolitics’ and‘ biopower’, the concepts advanced by Giorgio Agamben that will be used to analyse the actions of both Australia and the private companies on Nauru will be examined. Firstly, Agamben notes that all power is essentially biopower that“ is constituted by its ability to suspend itself in a state of exception and determine who lives and who dies” 9. An example here is the Auschwitz concentration camp whereupon human bodies were declared to be merely biological. Consequently, prisoners were stripped of all rights and transformed into HomoSacer. This concept of the HomoSacer is derived from Roman law, where a person labelled as such is expelled from both“ human and divine law” 10 leaving their life“ bare or depoliticised” 11. In this bare state the HomoSacer may be killed with no repercussions, yet the person would remain subject to the sovereign power and are included via their exclusion. This state of bare life is achieved within a state of exception; a created biopolitical space within which the actions of the sovereign power are justified. Here, such policies which would only be justified during a state of emergency, a temporary phenomenon enacted when the state is perceived to be under threat therefore justifying the suspension of the normal legal order and the suspension of political rights from the population- are allowed due to the creation of a‘ permanent state of exception’. It can thus be argued that this permanent state of exception exists today due to the impact of continuing global conflicts.
State of Migration / Attitudes Towards Refugees
Towards the latter part of the 20 th century we begin to see new discourses arising. The economic crisis in the 1970s as well as refugees“ producing conflict in the 1980s and the end
7
Ibid., 30.
8
Ibid., 30.
9
Ibid., 36.
10
Steven, DeCaroli.“ Boundary Stones: Giorgio Agamben and the Field Of Sovereignty” in On Agamben: Sovereignty and Life”, ed. Mathew Calarco and Steve DeCaroli( Stanford University Press, 2007), 46
11
Prem Kumar, Rajaram, and Carl Grundy‐Warr. " The irregular migrant as homo sacer: Migration and detention in Australia, Malaysia, and Thailand." International Migration 42, no. 1( 2004): 33-64, 34
34