The slow violence of life without cash: borders, state restrictions, and exclusion in the UK and Australia
The slow violence of life without cash: borders, state restrictions, and exclusion in the UK and Australia Journal Article
Geographical Review
- Author(s): Coddington, Kate
- Published: 2018
Abstract: In the UK, refused asylum seekers who are considered destitute are provided with subsistence-level financial support through the Azure card, a cashless technology similar to a debit card. In Australia, identical technology is used to quarantine fifty per cent of the welfare benefits of mainly Aboriginal residents of the Northern Territory. In this paper, I explore the underlying state logics driving such punitive financial policies directed at these populations, arguing that cashless technologies represent a form of slow violence that employs financial tactics to undermine the provision of care for populations with precarious citizenship status. This slow violence leads to increased precarity among asylum seekers and Aboriginal Australians. Under the guise of ‘caring’ and ‘for their own good,’ these paternalistic financial tactics act as measures of intense control. Financial tactics enact new forms of border securitization, slowly but permanently excluding people with precarious claims to citizenship from participation in the nation. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
- Urls: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gere.12332
- Keywords: Aboriginal Australians, asylum seekers, cashless, care, slow violence