Asylum and extraction in the Republic of Nauru By Julia CarolineMorris. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023. 318 pp.

Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru, by Julia Caroline Morris, is a detailed analysis of asylum processing in Nauru—a small island republic 2,046 miles northeast of the northern tip of Queensland, Australia, which has yet to be the subject of sustained ethnographic and historical research. Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork and archival analysis in Nauru, Australia, and Geneva from 2014 to 2016, Morris offers an unprecedented look at how offshore detention functions as a global industry that has come to organize the everyday lives of local Nauruans. Morris treats detention as one node in an assemblage that deters refugees from entering Australia. A range of actors participate in this assemblage: private security firms, the Australian Border Force, and the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection, as well as NGO workers, journalists, and activists seeking to document human rights abuses. As some readers might know, the Australian government has historically used Nauru to incarcerate asylum seekers who attempted to arrive to Australian shores by boat. This first took place from 2001 to 2008, and again from 2013 to 2016, when people began arriving mainly from the following countries: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. The second instance was distinct in that the government vowed that no asylum seekers who came by boat (labeled as “unauthorized maritime arrivals”) would be resettled in Australia. The Australian state poured billions of dollars into ensuring that the refugees stayed put on Nauru and gave up the very idea of Australia. And yet Nauru's marketing as a site of permanent resettlement has a much deeper history, one that goes back to Australian colonial exploits. Such infrastructures of extraction have set the precedent for Nauru's more recent carceral landscape, and this constitutes the book's core focus. The first half of the book traces the transformation of Nauru from a phosphate mining company town to a refugee detention company town, with detailed focus on the built environment and the relationship between local people, space, and the land. The second half of the book lays out the interests of the many stakeholders, from private security firms to Australian refugee resettlement workers to humanitarian organizations, who make up the offshore asylum industry. The central argument that organizes the book is that today's offshore asylum processes in Nauru share parallels and continuities with Australian state-led phosphate mining projects on the island in the early to mid-20th century. Morris writes that “extractive operations converge on the lives of minority populations.” Like phosphate, refugees also undergo a process of “extractive metallurgy,” which refers to the process of removing valuable raw metals from an ore and cultivating them into a purer form, without contaminants. Just as phosphate rock was subject to product testing, processes to verify “genuine” refugee claims are also subject to quality testing. By undergoing a barrage of medical tests, credible threat assessments, and other “fitness to travel” assessments (pp. 85–86), refugees also experience “refining” and “purification” processes, thus producing distinctions between “true refugees” and economic migrants. Here, more ethnographic detail on how asylum processes worked in practice would have strengthened this claim. This is worth mentioning because the book begins with the chemical equation for phosphate rock and sulfuric acid, which produces “superphosphate,” a fertilizer. This is followed by the 1951 Geneva Convention's definition of the refugee, implying that refugees and phosphate are treated in similar ways. While this is theoretically compelling, the reader wonders if it is necessary to analogize refugees to phosphate and refugee processing to phosphate mining in order to illustrate that refugees are being dehumanized in Nauru. While the book effectively shows that the phosphate industry has set the infrastructural precedents of the refugee-processing industry, this claim would have been supported by more elaboration on who in the offshore asylum assemblage is mobilizing this analogy. The book's strengths lie in its extraordinary historical and legal analysis of the mining agreements between the British Phosphate Commission (BPC) and the Nauruan government, as well as the mining industry's effects on Nauruan identity. Morris brilliantly lays out how phosphate is a “cultural identity” for Nauruans who took what was used as a colonial exploit and turned it into a source of economic independence. For this reason, phosphate is a symbol of both toxicity and self-governance, a marker of dispossession and decolonization depending on the historical period. And yet the Nauru Rehabilitation Corporation's takeover of phosphate mining, which was designed to rehabilitate several hectares of land destroyed by BPC mining in the 1960s, did little to revitalize things. This history, combined with powerful narratives of locals who have had to confront the consequences of the phosphate industry, such as chronic bronchitis and bodily injuries, show the devastating effects yet ongoing pull of phosphate on the island. This analysis marks an important moment in the study of a distinctly Australian brand of migrant deterrence, one that uses resource-poor islands to outsource the violence of border control. And yet as Morris shows, the Australian state is everywhere in Nauru even as it seeks to render itself invisible in the psyche of refugees. This book will undoubtedly activate new horizons of inquiry, including how the Australian state imagined Nauru as part of a larger “enforcement archipelago” (Mountz, 2011) in relation to Manus Island and Christmas Island, and the economic and cultural life of other similarly situated prison towns throughout the world. This book will be of interest to interdisciplinary scholars and anthropologists who study asylum, the production of migrant illegality in colonial settings, the social life of commodities, and labor and infrastructure. In sum, this book will leave a profound impact on readers, compelling them to think more critically about the question: For whom do refugees matter and why?

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