Rethinking Compliance: How Street-Level Bureaucrats Implement International Refugee Law

This book explores why liberal democratic states like Australia and the United States continue to engage in practices that contest and risk violating the principle of non-refoulement, despite the oversight of courts, legislatures, and other decision-making bodies.

The book demonstrates that understanding street-level bureaucrats and the organisations within which they work as outlets for applying rules developed by high-level political and international bodies ignores the potentially significant role that these actors play in interpreting, contesting, and ultimately shaping transnational law.

Both Australia and the United States have developed and implemented asylum-seeker deterrence policies throughout conservative and progressive administrations. Both states have also built significant bureaucratic structures to implement asylum and refugee law systems, which they have located primarily within the national security apparatus of government. The national security context is key to understanding the motivations and constraints that street-level bureaucrats face, including how their decision-making is structured, rules regarding hiring and job-performance, agency culture, as well as laws and policies prescribing when and how asylum seekers may access international protection.

In detailed, comparative case studies of Australia and the United States, the book uses social network analysis to challenge the idea of a gap between law and practice, while orienting readers to ways in which organisations interact as part of the asylum system and provide opportunities for street-level bureaucrats to understand, interpret, and contest international legal norms