Rethinking the biopolitical: Borders, refugees, mobilities…

Polly Pallister-Wilkins,Claudio Minca,Darshan Vigneswaran,Annelies Van Uden,Alexandra Rijke,Henk Van Houtum,Martina Tazzioli

doi:10.1177/2399654420981389

Abstract

This Symposium reflects on the growing relevance of biopolitical perspectives in camps studies, border studies, refugee studies, and in particular in research at the intersection between mobility studies and political geography. The five interventions accordingly engage with questions regarding the use of biopolitics as an analytical framework, but also as a pervasive strategy and governmental tool in Western societies. Through an analysis of several empirical cases – most notably hotspots on the Greek Aegean Island, refugee’s forced hyper mobility in Europe, speech acts connected to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people in Myanmar and the ‘voluntary return’ policies in Europe, and the paper borders created by visa systems – the authors indicate new possible fields of enquiry related to the biopolitical critically inspired by the work of authors such as Giorgio Agamben and Jasbir Puar, while also clearly restating the fundamental importance of Foucault’s original contribution to any biopolitical analytical framework today.

Highlights

In the past two decades or so, biopolitics has become a catchy term used to analyse a vast range of processes, procedures, relationships of power and the workings of institutions related to the politicisation of life
Twenty years after the translation of Homo Sacer (1998) and the related impact of Agamben’s rereading of Foucault’s original formulation of biopolitics, the ‘biopolitical turn’ in the social sciences is certainly not over. It has become diversified with the emergence of different trajectories and an increasing separation between the literature on socalled ‘affirmative biopolitics’ and that on ‘negative biopolitics’, as well as ‘biopolitics’ versus ‘necropolitics’
With this Symposium - following a seminar held at Wageningen University in December 2018 – we wish to problematise this radical separation while at the same time reflect on the impact and the importance of the biopolitical in present-day camps studies, border studies, refugee studies, and in research at the intersection between mobility studies and political geography

Summary

Introduction

In the past two decades or so, biopolitics has become a catchy term used to analyse a vast range of processes, procedures, relationships of power and the workings of institutions related to the politicisation of life. This is done through five brief interventions in which the authors engage differently with the relevance of the biopolitical in studying mobility in relations to bordering practices and violence.

Results

Conclusion