Necropolitics as accumulation: Enforcement and enclosure in Brisbane during COVID-19

Abstract

This article explores the uneven impacts that Indigenous and detained migrant populations have endured in Australia in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Australia has one of the most restrictive immigration enforcement systems in the world. Along with imposing practices of mandatory detention in rural and remote regions, the Australian government finances the carceral systems of nearby countries and island nations. These logics of enforcement are embedded within histories and techniques of Indigenous quarantine, incarceration, and colonial erasure. Following Achille Mbembe (2019), I advance a theoretical framework of ‘necropolitics as accumulation.’ I argue that rather than disposable or ‘wasted’ populations, those subject to slow violence are within heightened circuits of accumulation. I draw on long-term ethnographic research in Brisbane to emphasize the intensification of governing measures that not only inflict slow death but also make a profit from capitalizing on it. People are kept alive through precarious visa statuses and in prisons, detention centers, camps, remote communities, reserves, and other institutional facilities in relation to their utility for capital, even as death in such spaces is inescapable. In focusing on racial capitalism, I center the differential experiences of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people from COVID-19 in long-standing histories of capitalist exploitation. By attending to the cross-cutting ways in which people are prevented from participating in society, made plain in the pandemic, I call for intersectional advocacy that works towards collective flourishing.