ABSTRACT
When the hardships of protracted asylum in Africa, and even death, are preferable to being resettled in Australia, it is clear that the assumptions of benevolence that are attached to the resettlement of refugees conceal enduring formations of power. In this chapter, Ramsay reflects on the ways in which displacement clearly persists even within contexts of supposed refuge and the ways in which such continuities of displacement are routinely overlooked in broader narratives of refugee experience. Based on this analysis, Ramsay develops a new theory of sovereignty as control over time. When some lives, such as those of newly settling refugees, come to be viewed as incommensurable to hegemonic futures, it is those people who become targets of intervention from dominant governing institutions. When the futures imagined by refugees themselves become not only precarious but impossible, the work of sovereign power is realised and complete.
