2025/01/02 by Tamara Tubakovic, Amy Nethery · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Migration, Refugees, and Integration #Migration, Health and Trauma #Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography
paper · doi:10.1080/15562948.2024.2382475
openalex publication_date 2025/01/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
As Global North countries act to obstruct unwanted asylum seeker arrivals, the expenditure of immense amounts of financial capital is crucial to achieving their policy goals. The funding is directed toward securing the cooperation of third country governments and privatizing the operation of offshore facilities by non-state for-profit actors. We argue that in addition to the cooperation of host states, infrastructure, and service provision, the immense levels of funding purchases attenuated governance. Attenuated governance is a notion that describes policies that enable governments to evade responsibility and accountability for direct human harms and poor social outcomes caused by refugee externalization policies. What looks like financial mismanagement is, in fact, the government achieving its goals of attenuation. Australia’s policy of offshore processing is an emblematic case, where significant financial investments to PNG and Nauru, and the private corporations operating the detention centers, has contributed to a weakened accountability structure.