ABSTRACT

Border security's unilateral projection of Australia's national sovereignty relies on offshore and offshoring. The chapter looks at the emergence of maritime interdiction in the US Caribbean and considers key aspects of the US' vanguard use of offshore detention at Guantánamo Bay. It considers Christmas Island (CI) to directly consider offshore detention, as well as offshore processing on Nauru, and Manus Island Empirically, the chapter seeks points of global emergence and greater analytic precision responsive to oft-made historical and international comparisons between Guantánamo and CI, between islands and offshore sites. The chapter points beyond then back to contemporary Australia, and allows to apprehend general global dynamics and observe comparable international political relations at work in the production of offshoring processes and sites through offshore's form, with a view to the fate of asylum seeking by boat in the Mediterranean in the political present of the time of writing.