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Canadian Refugee Determination and Advanced Liberal Government*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2014

Randy Lippert
Affiliation:
Vanouver, Canada

Abstract

Significant changes in the refugee determination domain during the 1980s are made intelligible by deploying the concepts of programme, rationality, and technology drawn from the recent governmentality literature. Following a crisis of governability in the mid-1980s, refugee determination continued to move farther from the reach of political authorities. By 1989 it was reassembled in a manner involving a greater reliance on law, on the regular production of medical and psychiatric knowledge in new sites outside the state and a documentation centre, all of which is consistent with the onset of advanced liberal government. Closer examination of the documentation centre shows it permits scrutiny of information destined for use in legal oral hearings; is a form of political subjectification; and serves as a panoptic device that targets non-Western nations and populations consistent with advanced liberalism. In this way the documentation centre also illustrates the overlap of Canadian and international refugee regimes.

Résumé

On peut comprendre les changements significatifs dans le domaine de la détermination du statut de réfugié au cours des années 1980 en recourant aux concepts de programme, de rationalité et de technologie tirés de la littérature récente sur l'art de gouverner. À la suite d'une crise du contrôle de l'action gouvernementale au milieu des années 1980, la détermination du statut de réfugié a échappé de plus en plus aux autorités politiques. En 1989, le processus était réagencé de manière à reposer davantage sur les normes juridiques, sur un développement régulier des connaissances médicales et psychiatriques en dehors de la sphère étatique, et sur les ressources d'un centre de documentation, tous éléments compatibles avec la mise en place d'un mode de gouvernement de type libéral avancé. Un examen plus précis du centre de documentation montre qu'il permet d'analyser des informations destinées à servir dans des audiences de type judiciaire. Il s'agit là d'une forme d'assujettissement politique qui s'appuie sur un mécanisme panoptique ciblant les nations et populations non occidentales de manière compatible avec le libéralisme avancé. De la sorte, le centre de documentation révèle aussi la superposition des régimes juridiques canadien et international concernant les réfugiés.

Type
Discussions/Débats
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 1998

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152. Ibid. at 203.

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