Outrage, Responsibility and Accountability

Abstract

This chapter examines how migrant and refugee rights activists have reclaimed a politics of outrage to challenge violent and repressive policies and hold those responsible to account. Focusing on the campaign to end Australia's use of offshore immigration detention on Manus Island and Nauru, the chapter highlights the Australian government's long-standing denial of responsibility and discrediting of the physical body as a mode of testimony and how it has obscured from public view — and physical proximity — the violence of its asylum and immigration policy. The #LetThemStay protests which took place in early 2016 against the deportation of refugees from Australia to the offshore detention centres, and the #CloseTheCamps and #BringThemHere protests reflect how asylum seekers and activists turn to the suffering body as a means of rearticulating compassion and connecting it to the feminist ethics of care, as well as directing outrage towards the causes of suffering.