The carceral wet: Hollowing out rights for migrants in maritime geographies

Over recent decades, various governments have turned to the spatiality of the maritime realm in the pre-emptive policing of migration, deploying concentrated efforts of mobility regulation to territorial and extra-territorial seas. With and through this process of increased policing, the maritime has concurrently been expunged of frameworks of rights for migrants. This article explores the hollowing out of rights at sea and how it has allowed governments to use maritime environments and more broadly the condition of wetness as a means to hold migrants beyond the juridical order and administrative bodies of the state. This practice emerged in a discernible way in the United States in the early 1990s, when the Refugee Convention was ruled not to apply on the high seas. De-territorialising the maritime from the state's geography of protection allowed the US Government to re-territorialise the sea as a space of heightened policing. Similar strategies of de- and re-territorialising the sea subsequently developed in Australian policies of migration control. Through this, the maritime is used to contain migrants not only in a condition of partial rights and exaggerated policing, it is also used to relocate migrants, exposing a “disciplined mobility” that works through the sea. Interrogating these various legal renditions of the maritime exposes the carceral wet that has developed in migration regulation at sea.