Ms Jemima Mckenna1
1University of Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Jemima McKenna is a PhD candidate in her final year, at the University of Melbourne in the School of Social and Political Science. Her doctoral research investigates the nature of power relations between destination-states and third states engaged in bilateral asylum agreements, employing the case studies of the Australia-Nauruan and UK-Rwandan externalisation agreements. In 2025, Jemima was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, and Visiting Fellow at the University of Bologna, Department of Political Science.
Abstract:
The engagement of the third states within the Global South as sites of external asylum governance has become an increasingly popular policy approach with states of the Global North. Whilst these bilateral asylum agreements are consistently described as ‘asymmetrical’, ‘imbalanced’ and ‘neocolonial’, the precise nature of these power relations remains unarticulated in existing literature. Through repurposing neo-republican domination theory, this paper identifies three conceptual elements of domination (inequality, dependency and interference) that comprise a theoretical framework for investigating power asymmetry within the practice of externalisation. In order to investigate these conceptual elements, they are broken down into functional dimensions for empirical study of externalisation and applied to the case study of the UK’s ill-fated externalisation agreement with Rwanda. This paper draws on 14 interviews with UK and Rwandan-based politicians, policy makers and NGO workers, as well as substantive document analysis. This paper finds that whilst inequality, dependency and interference are evident within the case study, these conceptual elements are also sites of significant normative contestation between actors and concludes that exploring these tensions offers greater insight into externalisation as a practice. This research thus contributes to bridging the gap between abstract theoretical conceptualisations of externalisation and the concrete empirics of the practice.