Starting an analysis of asylum with asylum's obituary is nothing short of bold. So begins Alison Mountz's compelling text, The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago. Tracing the paths of migrants and the intensification of states’ border games, Mountz critically analyzes the aggressive offshore enforcement of anti-immigrant policies. Methodically unpacking state policies that increasingly utilize forms of remote interdiction and detention in what Mountz refers to as an “Island Archipelago” of bordering practices, Mountz also sheds light on racism, xenophobia and the state of exception, which are now constants in this “architecture of enmity” that dominates contemporary asylum. An essential contribution to a growing conversation within the literature on the unabashedly racist, xenophobic and exceptional power of the state increasingly marshalled in anti-immigrant fervour—a conversation that also includes contributions such as Harsha Walia's (Reference Walia2021) Border and Rule, Todd Miller's (Reference Miller2021) Build Bridges, Not Walls and Reece Jones's (Reference Jones2021) White Borders—Mountz's careful, critical analysis provides a welcome intervention. If Walia's Border and Rule accounts for why states have pursued racist, exclusionary and exceptional policies toward migrants and refugees, then Mountz advances a compelling analysis of how contemporary states effectively mobilize this to disastrous effect.
Scrutinizing a range of case studies, including Australia, Canada, the EU and the US, Mountz tackles how, despite the futility of fences and the prevalence of international agreements and norms of hospitality, states manage to harden their borders to migrants. Grappling with this “futility of fences” and the strange simultaneous proliferation of border walls, Mountz engages in a genealogy of the sovereign state's externalization of bordering practices. Here, Mountz describes “the complex interplay between hypervisible, spectacular infrastructures of enforcement and that which is hidden from view, the more insidious forms of violence at work beneath the surface” (13). Simply put, Mountz exposes how states, through externalizing borders and boundaries and proliferating an archipelago of detention, have managed to keep migrants at bay, denying them the ability to even claim asylum. Mountz's rich, theoretically astute analysis puts meat on the bones of the all-too-familiar images of migrants gathered on islands, in forests and deserts near borders, or in detention, and it unpacks how states have so effectively prevented asylum seekers from claiming their “well-founded fears,” in the process maintaining migrants’ precarity and invisibility well away from the border and the pressures of international norms.
Although not focused on the burgeoning role of surveillance, artificial intelligence and identification technologies in the management of borders and asylum, Mountz's genealogy of the externalization of exclusionary bordering practices and the subsequent demise of asylum is robust and takes account of the related development that has seen the body become the border. Frequently drawing on the “tunnel bureaucracy” thesis, devised in her earlier book, Seeking Asylum, Mountz exposes the lengths to which states will go to conceal their maleficence toward migrants and asylum seekers while simultaneously reinforcing sovereign power and its monopoly through exclusionary bordering practices. In terms of why states continue to pursue such policies, particularly targeting those seeking asylum, Mountz draws on Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and others to emphasize the centrality of precarity, exclusion and violence experienced by migrants and how liberal democratic states manage to rationalize these vile acts. Mountz deals delicately with contributions of often controversial philosophers like Agamben, acknowledging the insights on liberal democracies’ latent tendencies to exceptionalism while highlighting the significant problems and shortcomings of his work, including differentiations between the exclusionary dynamics of Agamben's camp and Mountz's islands of detention, as well as the scant space for resistance in Agamben's totalizing, exceptional imaginary (132–33).
Speaking to the news headlines of the day, as much as shining light on what the media neglects, Mountz brings a shrewd account of the Janus face of states’ approach to borders and mobility in the twenty-first century. Mountz exposes the hypocrisy of contemporary state politics and policies toward asylum, which simultaneously foster discourses of hospitality, global community and even cosmopolitanism while proliferating exclusionary violence. Whether it be the exclusionary violence perpetrated by frontier states of the EU with the aid of the EU's border agency, Frontex, or the continued escalation of policies of deadly deterrence along the southern US border overseen by President Biden, Mountz exposes the extent to which an “archipelago of detention” is systemic in contemporary border and migration politics and policies. Less focused on the web of private interests and actors, bound up in what Miller (Reference Miller2019, Reference Miller2021) refers to as the “Border Industrial Complex,” Mountz's attentive lineage of the EU's externalization of borders, and its manifestation elsewhere, shows an awareness of the deep relationship between securitization, externalization and neoliberalism. Mountz's The Death of Asylum is required reading for anyone trying to come to terms with the dire and deteriorating plight of migrants today and blends theoretical insight and critique with materially based accounts of asylum's tragic demise.
