Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers by David Scott Fitzgerald (review)

In Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers, David Scott Fitzgerald addresses one of the significant global issues of our times: how the rich democracies of the Global North strategically manage the growing flow of refugees by creating an "architecture of repulsion": a global system of converging policies and practices aimed at keeping asylum seekers away from spaces where they can ask for sanctuary.

Carefully researched and comprehensive in scope, Refuge Beyond Reach, traces how this global system of deterrence emerged in response to the constraints imposed on states by the legal principle of nonrefoulment which prohibits governments from sending refugees back to their persecutors. Australia, Canada, the European Union, and the United States are all signatory to international conventions which establish the international human rights norm of nonrefoulment. Yet, this principle collides with these states' sovereign interests in controlling access to their territory, creating incentives for governments to engage in practices aimed at keeping out unwanted asylum seekers.

Fitzgerald persuasively shows how the prosperous countries of the global north strategically work to overcome this tension by developing policies that manipulate territoriality and push the control function of borders hundreds and even thousands of kilometers beyond the state's territories. These policies enable governments to formally comply with the letter of international law, while simultaneously securing their interests in maintaining control over who can access their territory. These policies are diverse and fall along a continuation of coercion. Examples include countries' deployment of maritime forces at a distance from their territory to deter visa-less asylum seekers attempting to arrive by sea, the creation of legal spaces where rights are restricted, the offshore processing of claims made by asylum seekers intercepted at sea (e.g., Guantanamo and the Northern Mariana Islands for the United States and Papua New Guinea and Nauru for Australia), the investment in building the migration-control capacity of buffer states, and various caging mechanisms of keeping refugees and potential asylum seekers in their places of origin. Underlying these policies is a concept of remote control aimed at keeping asylum seekers away from spaces where they can execute their legal right to claim asylum, thus allowing states to repel asylum seekers without violating formal law. This, in turn, creates what Fitzgerald terms a "catch-22," whereby the rich democracies of the Global North are telling refugees "We will not kick you out if you come here. But we will not let you come here" (10). Countries' formal legal obligation to the international principle of nonrefoulment has generated a new asylum regime of extraterritoriality.

Fitzgerald's pioneering work draws on a vast array of evidence sources. These include official documents such as the texts of asylum laws, formal policy statements, court cases and statistical data on asylum applications, in addition to interviews, diplomatic cables from the 2000s released by WikiLeaks, and declassified CIA documents that provide a window into policymaking behind the scenes. Using these diverse data, Fitzgerald provides a conceptually innovative analysis of the processes through which the rich democracies of the global north work in tandem to create remote control policies that, in practice, leave the obligation to protect refugees up to states that do not have the resources to protect those most in need. Remote control policies are not an invention of the late 20th century but have intensified and spread since the 1980s. Fitzgerald attributes this intensification to three central processes: the widespread institutionalization of practices initially created to deter specific groups, the reduced political value of accepting asylum seekers as a means to publicly shame East bloc origin countries, and the increased process of securitization which has shaped and informed policies around asylum. He shows that although remote control policies in each country are a product of particular historical trajectories and vary in intensity and scope, there is a convergence of techniques to repel asylum seekers across national borders, with governments...