Book Review: The Criminalisation of People Smuggling in Indonesia and Australia: Asylum Out of Reach

Post by Victoria Taylor. Vicky is a DPhil Candidate at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford. Her research looks at the politics of border policing in and across the English Channel. Vicky is Associate Director of Border Criminologies. Her twitter handle is @vemtaylor 

Review of The Criminalisation of People Smuggling in Indonesia and Australia: Asylum Out of Reach by Antje Missbach (Routledge, 2022)  

Antje Missbach’s latest book brings together nearly a decade of empirical research on the interconnections between Indonesian and Australian border policing. In particular, she focuses on the criminalisation of people accused of facilitating irregular journeys between these two countries. A well-constructed and humanising critique of deterrence-based migration regimes, this book will be of interest not only to scholars working on this region, but also more broadly to those interested in the infrastructure of people smuggling networks and state efforts to stop irregular migration. 

The book makes several important contributions. In Chapter 1, Missbach lays out her starting point: that facilitators of unsanctioned journeys have been scapegoated for the harms associated with irregular sea travel. This, she demonstrates, is the result of state-led discursive efforts to homogenise smugglers as organised and ill-intentioned ‘criminals’, who get rich off the back of “criminal victims” (p. 4) allowing themselves to be taken advantage of. Attributing blame in this way, she suggests, obscures the role of both states in creating the conditions where people must rely on facilitators to travel. It forecloses the possible policy options to those which ‘crack down on people smuggling’, rather than addressing the systemic causes of demand for their services. 

The “contested figure of the smuggler” (p.24) is a central character in the book. In subsequent chapters, Missbach builds a persuasive counter-narrative, while neither vilifying nor romanticising their work. Chapter 3 maps out the different roles within ‘fluid networks’ of facilitation, where participation is “characterised by social marginality, precarity and inequality” (p. 70). This alternative portrayal foregrounds the human complexity of the motivations and vulnerabilities of those involved, emphasised through the methodological decision to include vignettes throughout the book.  

Chapter 4 moves to an analysis of Indonesian court cases, demonstrating unevenness in who has been prosecuted for smuggling since the introduction of new criminal offences in 2011. Only a minority of those involved in facilitation networks end up in court. Those targeted, she shows, are usually the poorest, most visible actors, who can be most easily convicted using minimal resources: those she terms “the hyper-precarious”. Missbach emphasises the human impact of these convictions, which usually attract sentences of 5 years, whilst also questioning why, ultimately, Indonesia’s enforcement of criminal offences is weak against the majority of those involved in facilitation. 

Threaded throughout the book is a critical evaluation of Australia and Indonesia’s ‘punitive approach’. Rather than achieving the stated aim of ‘deterrence’, she argues the criminalisation of people smuggling has been “cumbersome, costly and ultimately ineffective in reducing the number of boats arriving in Australia” (p. 177). Indonesia’s enforcement of these criminal offences is weak, she suggests, because it has little incentive to prevent the onward movement of irregularised migrants (p. 89). Turning to another commonly cited explanation for the reduction of boat arrivals, Chapter 5 focuses on information campaigns intended to discourage migration to Australia. However, again she argues these are “little more than symbolic tools” (p137) based on “the infantilisation of people when it came to their migratory decision-making” (p. 177). Through centring individuals’ motivations for movement, Missbach shows the futility of these communication efforts.  

Chapter 6 focuses on Australian anti-asylum policies designed to physically prevent irregular arrival, analysing the legality of pushback operations, maritime incarceration, and arbitrary offshore detention. The observed decrease in irregular migration has occurred, she argues, because of actions taken to physically block boats from entering the country. However, there has been a worrying “blanket policy of secrecy” (p. 139), about these activities. Assessing Australia’s own actions against the international definition of ‘smuggling’, Missbach highlights occasions in which the state’s own actions amount to the very action it vilifies. The result of Australia’s policies, therefore, is not the protection of those at risk (as it would argue), but the systematic violation of human rights justified in the war against people smuggling. 

Reading and writing from the UK, there are clear resonances between Missbach’s careful analysis and contemporary developments on the other side of the world. As she points out, Indonesia has been used as a “testing ground” (p. 9) for deterrence policies which have now been internationalised as a ‘successful’ model to put ‘asylum out of reach’. However, she argues, while there has been a decrease in maritime arrivals to Australia due to pushbacks physically preventing people from reaching the territory, overall numbers claiming asylum in the country have increased. “It is fair to conclude”, she argues, “that Australia did not “stop the boats” but rather redirected them elsewhere” (p. 178). Against the background of the book’s careful documentation of the human rights abuses committed in pursuit of this aim, the book presents a powerful critique of Australia’s deterrence regime and Indonesia’s role within it.  

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