ABSTRACT Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the outsourcing of asylum processing and resettlement from Global North to South. Many of these containment practices retrace the fault lines of more typically thought‐of colonial extractive regimes. This article draws on long‐term ethnographic research conducted in the Republic of Nauru, the world's smallest island nation, located in the equatorial Pacific. I consider how past toxic regimes give shape to the emergence of contemporary toxicities related to expanding outsourced border regimes. I advance the notion of toxic entanglement to help account for the relational production of damaging extractive sectors. Building on both literal environmental toxicity and the increasingly prevalent popular usage of “toxic” as a descriptor for harmful social relations, I argue that the concept of toxic entanglement—informed by local references to toxicity—allows for a deeper understanding of unevenly distributed risks that migrants and locals face. By attending to toxic entanglements across extractive industries and making visible moments of refusal, we can better amplify future responses to mutually constitutive forms of social oppression.
Julia Morris (Wed,) studied this question.