Between governance and sovereignty : remaking the borderscape to Australia's north

Tough but humane' -- this was the political sound bite offered in October 2009 by Australia's Prime Minister to describe his government's approach to migrants attempting to reach Australia by boat. The pronouncement foreshadowed a series of events that would reshape the borderscape to Australia's north. Following the fate of migrants on board two boats, the Oceanic Viking and Jaya Lestari 5, this paper argues that these changes need to be understood in the context of a general fragmentation of normativity, where the gaps, discrepancies and differences between legal orders are at once uncertain and contested. Of particular interest is the role that the gaps and discrepancies created by borders play in the production of subjectivity. Exploring this problematic implies two claims. First, borders are at once spaces of control and spaces of excess, at once sites for the restriction of mobility and sites of struggle. Second, borders are social institutions involved in producing the very conditions for governance. Understanding the relation between these two claims means analysing how borders seek to convert ungovernable global flows into governable mobile subjects.