ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores border security by focusing on a nation-state where its emergence can be seen starkly: the Commonwealth of Australia. Border Force observes the border as "a complex continuum that stretches", then makes a subordinate distinction between onshore and offshore. In Border Force's conception of the border continuum, each dot implicates the co-ordinated action of a group agent, working as an observing system, as its enabling constraint. Border Force's complex continuum, at all its points, resides 'within' the nation's sovereignty in ways. Exploring Australia as a space secured by these severances and sutures, 'border continuum' begins to tell people about the shores and horizons of a society of border security, marked by evacuations of politics and justice from border security's world, such as those just discussed.