Managing, now becoming, refugees: Climate change and extractivism in the Republic of Nauru

Abstract

The Republic of Nauru, the world's smallest island state, was almost entirely economically dependent on the phosphate industry in the twentieth century as part of a colonial extractive arrangement. After the wealth Nauru derived was depleted by the 1990s, the by then sovereign state resurged on the back of the refugee industry, agreeing to process and resettle Australia's maritime asylum‐seeker populations. In this article, I explore how forms of refugee extractivism factor into Nauruans’ ontological experiences of climate change. While Nauruans are imbricated in managing refugees—with an extensive program of financialization and institutionalization in place—environmental changes are heightening the prospect of islanders becoming refugees. I argue that Nauruans’ understandings of refugeehood are entangled in the operations of a local industry in refugees but also humanitarian philanthropic portrayals. In Australian activist campaigns, Nauruans are distanced from refugees through representations of savagery and underdevelopment. These discourses intersect with how islanders see and experience refugeehood, while also revealing the fetishizing logics employed by refugee rights campaigners.

Interaction between islands and special economic zones: Spatial processes of containment and exclusion

“…Whereas SEZs designed for external benefit create a spatial mismatch between harms and benefits, SEZs for local benefit that occupy the entirety of an SNIJ or island state cannot fully externalise harms. Focus on financial services, port services, passport sales, gaming, manufacturing, offshore detention, high‐end tourism, real estate speculation, and other specialised services supported by deregulation produces numerous negative social, economic and environmental impacts for islands (Behuria, 2022; Clark, 2013; Hampton & Jeyacheya, 2020; Morris, 2022; Perry, 2022). Even island smart eco‐cities for local benefit are problematic, given their dependence on exclusionary processes (Caprotti, 2014), and the fact that SEZ processes are enhanced by being islanded does not necessarily make SEZ processes good for islanders.…”