Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru by Julia Morris (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023)

Review by Ali Bhagat, Simon Fraser University

I repeatedly get asked about my views on the practice of offshoring refugees at academic conferences and in Q&A sessions around my own book Governing the Displaced (2024). However, it was not until I read Julia Morris’ book Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru that I realized my answers to these questions were hollow. Indeed, these questions reflect the timely nature of Morris’ book. We are contending with the fact that refugees face widespread racism and xenophobia while also being transformed into potentially valuable commodities for states. With global displacement reaching unprecedented heights, states in Europe and elsewhere are quickly realizing that they can shift the burden of refugee hosting to willing countries in the global South with new initiatives such as the humanitarian development nexus.

The practice of offshoring gained massive media traction with Australia sending asylum seekers to Nauru. This Australian model has in turn informed the UK Conservative Government’s plan to off-shore their own asylum seekers to Rwanda. What Morris covers in her magnificent book is perhaps the most concrete and well-researched understanding of these phenomena we have to date. Morris’ book provides the definitive voice on questions of off-shoring where Nauru—a relatively small and seemingly insignificant nation—receives incredible spotlight as a so-called dumping ground for refugees attempting to attain asylum in Australia. Morris’ book sheds critical light on the practice of offshoring and provides much needed nuance and complexity to the story which thus far has painted Nauru as a passive recipient of asylum seekers from Australia without any agency.

This book is a must-read for those interested in migration and political economy because it situates the asylum industry in Nauru within a broader context of phosphate extraction in the island nation-state. Morris draws on various literatures including anthropology, global political economy, economic geography, and political ecology. Combining archival and ethnographic research, Morris masterfully weaves an analytic of past, present, and future challenging many strongly held views about Nauru, refugee life, and the seeming violence of offshoring. Very little, if any, ethnographic research has been conducted in Nauru. This work is not only an excavation of hidden colonial histories, but also shows us how the political economy of a small island state is inseparable from global capitalism.

Morris argues, “My work lends a new perspective to life in Nauru, reframing the offshore asylum system as part of a global industry that shares deep parallels and continuities with the island’s colonial industry in phosphate extraction. I utilize a theoretical frame centered on resource extraction to argue that the figure of the refugee has become entangled in extractive capitalism” (2023, pg. 4-5). Key to this argument, and the book in general, is the way refugee studies and political ecology can dovetail and show us how ecology, commodities, and the lives of people are intertwined.

The theme of colonialism runs a throughline throughout the book as the reader is taken from the extraction of phosphate to the creation of refugees as a commodity. As Morris highlights, the media spectacle surrounding the treatment of migrants in Nauru cast age-old tropes of island savagery in a new light—refugees were unsafe in Nauru because its inhabitants posed a danger to them. Instead, Morris challenges these views and shows us the intense debates, challenges, and plurality of views held by the public in Nauru, many of whom were not fully in support or against the refugee extraction industry. Morris illustrates an ongoing cycle of boom-and-bust. Refugees as commodities are but a new iteration of an age-old cycle of value, colonialism, and extraction. This industry is portrayed throughout by an existential anxiety where state officials continually warn their citizens that the money could dry up.

In my favorite chapter, Resource Frictions, Morris writes, “Extractive industry have a history of carving out discriminatory labor practices along carefully designed racial/ethnic hierarchies” (2023 pg. 156). Race thus appears as another important theme that cuts through the book and frames the extractive industry under global capitalism. This chapter, in particular, shows us competing tropes where two racialized categories (re)emerge. Refugees are potential threats to state security through imagined connections with global terrorist organizations and Nauruans show a continuity of the ‘savage’ Indigenous islanders who are now in charge of refugee governance on their own land. Both these tropes appear amidst state officials claiming that refugees and Nauruans live peacefully as they envision a wonderful multicultural utopia; however, the lived realities for both groups seem disconnected from these aspirations. What Morris makes exceptionally clear is that the industry of asylum extraction is produced through the creation of jobs around refugee status determination. The commodity—like all commodities perhaps in the Marxist sense—must be produced through human ingenuity in order to hold exchange value. In reading this chapter, I was reminded of the classic political economy question—who benefits and why?

Morris provides a very compelling answer to this by arguing that it is elites who benefit from this extraction. One of the most interesting developments she explores is how Australian activists perpetuate the extraction system as refugee offshoring moves to new frontiers. She writes, “This book has shown that activist campaigns can inadvertently promote representations of migrants as victimized refugees that strengthen practices of border control to new extraction sites. This is not to call into question the pain and suffering of migrants in Nauru as in any way inauthentic…The reality, I found, is that in this human extractive industry, the effects are manifold, negatively impacting Nauruans, contracted personnel, migrants, and ecological environments entangled in the system” (2023 pg. 256). Morris never lets the reader off the hook. The reader is constantly asked to think in intersectional ways about a world where displacement is never-ending and where much of the planet will become uninhabitable. As such, race, colonialism, ecology, and capitalism, are central to understanding our current moment and the bleak future to come.