Book review: The death of asylum: hidden geographies of the enforcement archipelago by Alison Mountz

In The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago, Alison Mountz explores how the proliferation and normalisation of the island as a site of enforcement and detention is threatening the right to asylum. Drawing on field trips to Italy’s Lampedusa Island, Australia’s Christmas Island and the US territories of Guam and Saipan to show how the enforcement archipelago is resulting in ‘the slow death of asylum’, this book is a critical contribution to current debates on how geography is used by state actors to protect their interests, writes Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa. The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago. Alison Mountz. University of Minnesota Press. 2020.