Women, (im)mobilities and ethical loneliness: re-defining 'justice' and 'sovereignty' through care

The nation-state in its present form, with internal and external bordering structures, is designed to render disadvantaged migrant and refugee women (im)mobile through punitive measures. This chapter draws on the narratives of three individuals to show how it works: a Bangladeshi woman in a prison in India, a woman from Suriname in a detention centre in the Netherlands and a woman from a Middle Eastern country imprisoned in Australia. The geo-political regimes in each of these countries and the women’s trajectories of migration vary, but there are striking similarities in the gendered ways in which their pathways to different spaces of confinement are defined. Specifically, their accounts of intersecting cycles of violence, abandonment and institutionalisation provide crucial insights for exploring alternatives to the idea of the nation-state and the way justice and sovereignty are defined within it.