In June 2024, I attended a conference titled ‘Camps, Carceral Imaginaries and Critical Interventions’ at Graz University in Austria alongside a variety of scholars and thinkers from across the world. We gathered to create a dialogue around prison camps and border politics, with a focus on how current border regimes impact human rights and, more broadly, political culture. At that time, the key focus was the shifting refugee policies in Europe to banish refugees to other countries: the main example was the deal to send refugees from Italy to Albania and from the UK to Rwanda.
Throughout the conference, Australia was referenced constantly. Wherever I went, I heard of the nation’s banishment of refugees to Manus Island and Nauru cited as a cruel example of the detention industry.
Australia as a model of violence. By Behrouz Boochani, Substack