The last decade and a half have seen a dramatic increase in the outsourcing of border-making processes to countries in the Global South. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in several externalized asylum processing and refugee resettlement sites (including the Republic of Nauru and Jordan), but specifically in Guatemala, this talk looks at these recent developments through the lens of ‘resource frontiers.’ Morris centers her analysis on the US-driven development of an asylum regime in Guatemala’s northern Petén region. She considers the specificities of Guatemala’s emerging ‘asylum frontier,’ detailing how this arrangement sits with the country’s own histories of international asylum and enforced return. In doing so, Morris show how different political actors – migrants, Indigenous Mayan refugees, and deported Guatemalans – ‘live with’ and challenge these frontier economies.

Presenter: Julia Morris is Associate Professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is Visiting Politics Faculty at Scripps College for the 2025-26 academic year. She holds a DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Previously, she was a Post-doctoral Fellow at The New School’s Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility and a Research Student at Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. Her research focuses on the political economy of migration governance and outsourced border regimes, from ethnographic fieldwork in Nauru, Australia, and Geneva to research projects in Jordan and Guatemala. She has published widely and is the author of Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru (2023) with Cornell University Press.

Sponsor(s): Latin American Institute, Center for Study of International Migration