Our article illuminates a particular way to think about the relational nature of public accountability and how that might guide further study of liberal democracies’ treatment of asylum seekers and refugees. Public accountability is in trouble in liberal democracies, conceptually and practically. Scholars in the field identify a lack of clarity surrounding the ‘ever-expanding’ idea of accountability—its meaning and want of deep conceptual roots; the separation of theorizing from lived practice. At the same time, we see in liberal democracies, particularly in cases regarding the treatment of non-citizens, disturbing attacks on traditional mechanisms of accountability. We focus on the crisis of public accountability manifest in Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers in offshore detention. We suggest that the lack of clarity around the concept of public accountability—and the lack of an ethical understanding of the public’s critical role in demanding it—informs what is occurring in countries like Australia.
This article contrasts two distinct sets of prisoners who were held by foreign governments: sailors from the United States held captive in Algiers in the late-eighteenth century and British citizens detained in Guantánamo Bay in the early-twenty-first century. The article uses social movement theory to examine and compare the campaigns orchestrated by these men and their supporters, and the role of those campaigns in securing their freedom. It demonstrates the utility of social movement theory in comparing cases of foreign detention that transcend centuries, regions and communication technologies. We find that successful campaigns on behalf of citizens held captive abroad, and the timeline of those successes, are contingent on the exploitation of domestic political opportunities and an external event to trigger government action on behalf of the captives.
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