‘Stop the Boats!’: Hyper/Invisibility and Spectacle

Spectacular images and imaginaries of migration fuel political and legal debate in the United Kingdom. The state responds to this spectacle through various modes of hypervisibility and invisibility in asylum law and policy. These concepts have previously accounted for the use of offshore asylum processing in other jurisdictions – the invisibilisation of hypervisible arrivals. This article however identifies hypervisibilisation and invisibilisation as shaping UK asylum law whereby, these concepts are deployed within the borders of the state in addition to externally as in other jurisdictions. The spectacle and specifically the spectacle of deterrence shapes and informs these processes.