In the 2018 Boe Declaration, Pacific Islands Forum leaders recognized that the region is facing ‘an increasingly complex regional security environment’ and committed to ‘strengthening the existing regional security architecture’. Given uncertainty about the existence and nature of this architecture, we address the question: is there a security architecture in the region, or does security cooperation take a different shape? We find that security cooperation in the Pacific Islands does not constitute a security architecture, as there is no ‘overarching, coherent and comprehensive security structure for a geographically-defined area’. We also find that the region is neither a security complex nor a community, due to the extensive involvement of metropolitan powers and external partners. Instead, we argue that security cooperation in the Pacific Islands is best described as a patchwork of bilateral, minilateral, and multilateral, formal and informal agencies, agreements, and arrangements, across local, national, regional, and international levels

While global travel largely stopped and borders closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, states continued to deport individuals who had been sentenced for committing criminal offences. In Australia and New Zealand, questions over whether and how deportation of migrants during a global pandemic should occur were raised: weighing up arguments of legality, public health, and security. This left many migrants uncertain, isolated in immigration detention waiting for an unknown departure date. The decision was made to continue the deportation process for many, and in some cases breaches of public health restrictions were the basis for deportation. Once deported, mandatory quarantine on arrival under COVID-19 restrictions highlights and exacerbates the challenges that returning offenders normally face. These include extended detention periods; surveillance through detention and monitoring; and securitised discourse by the media and public creating ongoing stigma. This snapshot enables us to understand how states prioritised the removal of ‘the crimmigrant other’, a securitised threat, while facing the material threat of COVID-19.

The trend of deportation of convicted non-citizens to the Pacific has grown over the last decade, due to increasingly harsh deportation punitive measures placed on non-citizens, known as crimmigration. When further parole-like policies and legislation are placed upon the returnee once they have completed their sentence and have been returned to their country of origin, it is known as ‘crimmigration creep’. ‘Crimmigration creep’ has been seen in the New Zealand Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Act (2015), and appears to be proposed in the similar Samoan Returning Offenders Bill (2019). This article tests the diffusion of ‘crimmigration creep’ to understand how international relations norm diffusion theory can be applied to border criminology concepts. This is done within a norm circulation model, and by testing the normative strength of ‘crimmigration creep’ in Samoa.

In Australia, past and present, Pacific Islanders have been labelled as undesirable others, included to temporarily fill labour shortages as required, controlled while resident in the country and removed when no longer deemed necessary. Pacific Islanders’ experiences in Australia reveal the inception, continuity and durability of differential inclusion produced by border control mechanisms. This paper traces Australia’s history of deporting Pacific Islanders over more than a century: from indentured labour and blackbirding, colonial occupation of Pacific Islands and the White Australia Policy, to more recent patterns of selective inclusion, such as the labour mobility schemes, to the disproportionate effects on Pacific Islanders of modifications to the criteria for deportability introduced in 2014 with the amendments to Section 501 of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth). By tracing the past–present circular border policies, this paper argues that the high number of Pasifika New Zealanders deported from Australia represents a continuation of a regime of differential inclusion.

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