In an era of global border outsourcing, Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru provides rare insight into one of the world's most controversial offshore border arrangements. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Julia Morris traces Nauru's transformation from colonial phosphate extraction to a new extractive industry in asylum processing and refugee resettlement. She examines how transnational networks of lawyers, social workers, private security firms, and policy makers sustain this system, and how Nauru's colonial infrastructure facilitated the transplantation of Australia's asylum operations. Morris reveals the institutional frameworks and mobile expertise enabling border externalization practices now adopted worldwide. This investigation becomes increasingly urgent following Australia's August 2025 announcement of a US$1.6 billion, thirty-year deal with Nauru and the US private prison firm, Management and Training Corporation, to detain non-citizens with cancelled visas—demonstrating the deepening entrenchment of privatized, externalized border control. By exposing the everyday operations behind sensationalized headlines, Morris illuminates how offshore asylum systems function and their impacts on local communities, workforces, and racialized migrant populations.
Julia Morris is Associate Professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is Visiting Politics Faculty at Scripps College for the 2025-26 academic year. She holds a DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Previously, she was a Post-doctoral Fellow at The New School’s Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility and a Research Student at Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. Her research focuses on the political economy of migration governance and outsourced border regimes, from ethnographic fieldwork in Nauru, Australia, and Geneva to research projects in Jordan and Guatemala. She has published widely and is the author of Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru (2023) with Cornell University Press.