Search

Begin New Search Topic Necropolitics

1. Migrant Death and Disappearability at Sea: Mediterranean Necropolitics as a European Strategy of Migration Deterrence

Author:
Bertille Motte
Publication Date:
04-2024
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Public and International Affairs (JPIA)
Institution:
School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University
Abstract:
The Mediterranean Sea has become the deadliest passage in the world over the past decade, as thousands of migrants lose their lives at sea each year. It has become a key actant of European border violence perpetrated against migrants, as European national and supranational migration institutions instrumentalize the Mediterranean’s natural properties through necropolitical strategies of deterrence. The sea must be understood as a wet ontology and a fluid hybrid border. It is shaped by dynamic and complex interactions between human actors and more-than-human elements through which European violence is passed onto non-European migrants’ bodies. It conceals migrants’ deaths and disappearances, as they become ‘inevitable accidents’ caused by natural and untamable elements. The Mediterranean Sea therefore invisibilizes European structural violence occurring at the border zone and acts as an archive and witness to this violence.
Topic:
Migration, Border Control, Refugees, Violence, Deterrence, Asylum, Necropolitics, and Refugee Policy
Political Geography:
Europe and Mediterranean

2. Biopolitics and Necropolitics on the Northern Border / La biopolítica y la necropolítica en la seguridad ciudadana de Tijuana

Author:
R. Guy Emerson
Publication Date:
06-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal on International Security Studies (RESI)
Institution:
International Security Studies Group (GESI) at the University of Granada
Abstract:
This article explores the functioning of citizen security. It is developed with reference to the initiatives in Tijuana, Mexico, and reveals how citizen security operates through technologies that simultaneously generate both compatible citizens and abject non-citizens. Both groups become an integral part of citizen security and operate within a logic through which one tries to ensure the life of the former (biopolitics) and the exclusion of the latter is generated (the necropolitics). From biopolitics, the population is understood through surveillance measures that allow the accumulation of information and the analysis of data. These concern the observed patterns of behavior within this population, with the aim of managing random events and populations outside of what is empirically normal. These abnormal populations are then regulated through initiatives composed of the National Program for the Prevention of Crime (PRONAPRED), with the purpose of giving them certain life skills to overcome their risk situations. On the other hand, non-citizens are treated based on an exclusionary inclusion (the necropolitics). In practice, this implies that the non-citizen population is seen as an object of hierarchical surveillance. The latter is designed to regulate movement and limit the danger that these non-citizens represent for public safety. Similarly, non-citizen individuals are marginalized to the extent that their inclusion in the PRONAPRED security programs makes possible their eventual expulsion from Mexico. Thus, the article concludes that citizen security determines and exacerbates the citizen / non-citizen distinction, a distinction that can mean life or death.
Topic:
Security, Citizenship, Biopolitics, and Necropolitics
Political Geography:
Central America, North America, Mexico, and United States of America

3. Reading Discourses of Power and Violence in Emerging Kashmiri Literature in English: The Collaborator and Curfewed Night

Author:
Amrita Ghosh
Publication Date:
12-2018
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Review of Human Rights
Institution:
Society of Social Science Academics (SSSA)
Abstract:
This essay studies two literary texts on Kashmir, The Collaborator (2011) by Mirza Waheed and Curfewed Night (2010) by Basharat Peer and analyzes the discourses of power, overt forms of violence that the works present. It first contextualizes events from the last three years that have occurred in Kashmir to present forms of violence Kashmiri subjects undergo in the quotidian of life. The essay, thus, argues that the selected literary works represent Kashmir as a unique postcolonial conflict zone that defies an easy terminology to understand the onslaught of violence, and the varied forms of power. As analyzed in the article, one finds a curious merging of biopolitics and necropolitics that constructs the characters as “living dead” within this emergency zone. For this, the theoretical trajectory of the essay is mapped out to show the transition from Foucault and Agamben’s idea of biopolitics to Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics. Thereafter, essay concludes how the two texts illustrate Agamben’s notion of the bare life is not enough to understand subjects living in this unique postcoloniality. The presence of death and the dead bodies go beyond bare life and shows how that bodies become significant signifiers that construct a varied notion of agency.
Topic:
Violence, Literature, Language, Biopolitics, Necropolitics, and Power
Political Geography:
Pakistan, India, and Kashmir