Performing sovereignty: How to make a refugee disappear with legal magic

My PhD dissertation looks at how sovereignty iterates, presents and reifies itself in the Australian refugee context. In Australia, refugees can be detained without reasons for the decision and subjected to offshore processing where they can be treated in cruel and degrading ways. I argue that one of the reasons for this is the way we have conceived sovereignty through legal theory.

Theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes have viewed sovereignty as an abstract concept, where the sovereign is a metaphysical figure that is monarchical having absolute power. Instead, I draw on Judith Butler’s work on performativity to argue that sovereignty is performative and that uncovering the performance helps explain why it is so difficult to change how refugees are treated.

I show that sovereignty is performative because it is dispersed through real physical actors that perform legal magic. These actors such as members of the executive and judges use the law for legal tricks to frame the situation, use words and metaphors to change the material body of the refugee and load the deck so that every refugee is perceived to be a security threat, terrorist or the criminal other.

My thesis uncovers what lies beneath these tricks and how they operate to transfer them offshore. The effect of these tricks is that the body of the refugee disappears and can no longer be seen. What’s more, the performance of sovereignty works to deceive, distract and even entertain. This means that the way we have understood sovereignty in legal theory as something abstract or monarchical- makes it difficult to change the way refugees are treated.

A theory for performing sovereignty is important not only in the refugee context. For if we can demystify how a refugee can be made to disappear, we can also reveal how an indigenous person, woman, blue collared worker, lgbtqi person can disappear through a performance.