School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemPower in transformation: Christmas Island, border security, governance( 2012)In 2012, Christmas Island is best known as a place of immigration detention, a component of Australia’s expanding border security apparatus. In the 124 years since it was annexed by the British, Christmas Island has continued to take on changing political forms. In exploring these changes empirically and theoretically, this thesis gives an account of the mutation of political sovereignty, the emergence of globalisation, the installation of governance, and their current co-operation through the practice of border security and immigration detention, as seen from the Island. It considers the way shifts in thinking and ways of imagining problems – as political, as urgent – have provoked and continue to prompt the construction of certain kinds of structures: mines, casinos, and now the immigration detention centre. The centre is a high-tech, medium security prison situated in the middle of a tropical rainforest that includes back-to-base surveillance technology, wheelchair access, and specially designed concrete tunnels constructed to facilitate the orderly migration of red crabs across the Island. The core argument stems from the recognition that all governing is a matter of problem solving, but that, every time, problems are solved within the enabling constraints characterising each problem space. Governing moves from imagination to application to a materiality that turns out to be perennially unruly: nothing works as intended; yesterday’s best laid plans are today’s follies; things fall apart. The picture of power’s transformations depicted points not only to the transience of all things human, but that what is characteristic of power’s shape in our time is that it holds without the centre. And yet, Christmas Island’s story is also full of ironies and impasses. The attempted passage of authority through governance and the restless, anxious search for accumulative mobility characteristic of today’s capitalism also, paradoxically, produces specific sites of friction and immobility, certain kinds of paralysis, and a curious desire to project messages into a region and future that border security can only recognise and secure as a threat-filled theatre of interdiction. Christmas Island is strange, but the ways in which it is tell a striking and disquieting story about how power came to be what it is, while suggesting what we might be becoming. In accounting for transformations of power on Christmas Island, this thesis also offers an account of the conceptual and intellectual resources necessary to make sense of the power relations to which we are subject: here, now and in the future.