In Nowhere Countries: Exclusion of Non-Citizens from Rights through Extra-Territoriality at Home, Pauline Maillet offers a new theoretical framework to understand the mechanisms by which non-citizens are excluded from the rights attached to sovereign territory when arriving at states’ borders.
Initiated in Charles de Gaulle airport, the analysis encompasses similar cases in countries other than France. This interdisciplinary study traces how some liberal democracies create spaces construed as extra-territorial on their own soil to circumvent obligations owed to sea or airborne asylum seekers under the Refugee Convention and its Protocol. How do states make their territory vanish to prevent asylum seekers’ arrival? Using a combination of legal analysis and ethnography, this book identifies the legal techniques, enforcement practices and mental landscapes that have sustained nowhere countries.