My thesis tells of the Cambodian refugee experience. It is based on the life stories of ten Cambodian refugees who presently live in Melbourne Australia. The stories that people told me were about their experiences of life before the Pol Pot regime, their survival of one of the twentieth century's totalitarian regimes, then their travel to and life in the Thai refugee camps and more recently their experiences of resettlement and life in Australia. My work explores the profound impact these life experiences had on Cambodian people and how they remembered and told stories about their past. Further, it considers how these experiences shaped the identities of survivors of the Pol Pot years. It is clear that the Cambodian refugee experience tells us that people can do the most terrible things to other people, but it is also clear that human beings can also survive almost any situation. In this regard my work shows that life is a most precious and fragile thing, but it also has an amazing strength and resilience.

This thesis provides a criminological perspective on the Australian state???s responses to unauthorised migrants. In particular, it attempts to build on recent criminological literature on state crime by contrasting the alleged deviance of unauthorised migrants with the organised and deviant human rights abuses perpetrated by the Australian state. The main argument of the thesis is that through the systematic alienation, criminalisation and abuse of unauthorised migrants, particularly refugees, the Australian state is engaged in state crime. While this can partly be measured by breaches of international humanitarian law, the acts in question are criminal according to the broader sociological understanding of state crime as ???state organisational deviance involving the violation of human rights???. The thesis develops this argument by locating the phenomena of forced and illicit migration within an increasingly globalised world economy in which the needs for international human migration are confronted by the restrictive migration policies of the dominant Western states. In this context, the Australian state has played a pivotal role in the development of three major Western exclusion zones, which are designed to contain unauthorised migrants in the developing world and are enforced by measures that systematically abuse human rights. The fundamental criminological dynamic of the Australian exclusion zone is its systematic assault on the movements and by definition, the rights, of forced migrants. This operates at a number of levels: unauthorised arrivals are alienated by their lack of legal status; they are denied access to a full refugee determination process; their status as refugees is subordinated to that of the resettled refugee; their experiences are denied and delegitimised through their construction as queue jumpers; they are criminalised through their participation in smuggling enterprises; they are punished and abused through the use of detention, dispersal and forced removal; and they are put at greater personal risk by the measures employed to enforce the zone. The thesis traces the development of this zone from the formation of the white Australia policy through to the Pacific Solution and critically analyses the ways in which current policy draws on and reinforces the exclusionist traditions of Australian nationalism.

Bibliography: leaves 309-330. / x, 330 leaves : map ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Politics, 1996

Diss. (sammanfattning) Umeå : Univ., 2003. / Härtill 5 uppsatser.

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Genève. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 306-324).

Thesis (M. Soc Sc.) -- University of Newcastle, 2005. / School of Social Sciences. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (LL. M.)--University of Toronto, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A. in Security Studies (Homeland Security and Defense))--Naval Postgraduate School, 2008. / Cover title. "March 2008." AD-A479 940. Includes bibliographical references. Electronic version available on the Public STINET.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Tübingen. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 267-280).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-115).