ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the alignment of Australian border security with the goals and values of global logistics. It also weaves the theoretical account given so far into recent discussions examining globalisation as a transformation of power and political space,2 adding in insights from recent critical explorations of logistics. At the same time, the chapter presents a more open and speculative set of observations as ways of thinking otherwise by giving border security's backgrounded elements direct and sustained attention. The chapter discusses the analysis of where global logistics' normative understandings of people, things and space are imported into border security operations, revealing the outlines of Australian border security's alignment with a global normative order with an ecumenical jurisdiction underpinned by an idealist metaphysics. In Border Force's key documents, logistical norms are applied that posit the movement of objects as 'activity', and imagine 'seamlessness' as the ideal state of motion for objects of interest.