In the aftermath of World War II, the countries of the world signed on for a Convention giving rights and safeguards to refugees. Being a refugee involved discussion of human rights and protection.

Sharon Pickering documents how this has changed. Refugees and asylum seekers are dressed in the clothes of criminals, and national sovereignty has become the focus of the response of the Global North to forced migration. Pickering adopts a State Crime framework, emerging out of a critique of law and order refugee politics, to explain policy responses. The roles of the administration, the justice system, and the media are analysed to highlight the discourses of criminality. She shows how the spectacle of the refugee as criminal allied to the rise of transnational policing, has led to the opening up of extra-territorial, extra-legal spaces, how contradictions have emerged as to national "borders," and how the rule of law has been debased.

Table of Contents

Preface
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements

CHAPTER 1: Refugee law and order: Sovereign crime
CHAPTER 2: A mundane process of criminalisation
CHAPTER 3: The spectacle of refugee deviancy
CHAPTER 4: Deterring refugees
CHAPTER 5: Policing the border
CHAPTER 6: Refugees and the renegade judiciary
CHAPTER 7: Refugees, sovereignty and state crime

Select Bibliography
Index

"This ground-breaking book is a powerful and timely critique of the law and order politics which have come to define western approaches to refugees. In an elegant and scholarly account, Pickering locates refugee policy within a state crime framework and forces the re-examination of fundamental questions about the nature of sovereignty, political legitimacy and criminal justice. Forced migration is an appalling fact for millions of the world's population, a fact which states in the developed world have strenuously attempted to redefine for domestic and global political purposes. The importance of Refugees and State Crime lies in its authoritative and compelling portrayal of refugees as political victims of western state crime."

-- Professor Penny Green, University of Westminster