To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations

Abstract: A biopolitics of the population, when it succeeds in securing life and wellbeing, is surely worth having. It has become urgent in rural Asia, where a new round of enclosures has dispossessed large numbers of people from access to land as a way to sustain their own lives, and neoliberal policies have curtailed programs that once helped to sustain rural populations. At the same time, new jobs in manufacturing have not emerged to absorb this population. They are thus “surplus” to the needs of capital, and not plausibly described as a labour reserve. Who, then, would act to keep these people alive, and why would they act? I examine this question by contrasting a conjuncture in India, where a make live program has been assembled under the rubric of the “right to food”, and Indonesia, where the massacre of the organized left in 1965 has left dispossessed populations radically exposed.     

By Any Means Necessary: Urban Regeneration and the “State of Exception” in Glasgow's Commonwealth Games 2014

When compulsory purchase for urban regeneration is combined with a sporting mega‐event, we have an archetypal example of what Giorgio Agamben called the “state of exception”. Through a study of compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) on the site of the Athletes' Village for Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games, we expose CPOs as a classed tool mobilised to violently displace working class neighbourhoods. In doing so, we show how a fictionalised mantra of “necessity” combines neoliberal growth logics with their obscene underside—a stigmatisation logic that demonises poor urban neighbourhoods. CPOs can be used progressively, for example to abrogate the power of slum landlords for social democratic ends, yet with the increasing urbanisation of capital they more often target marginalised neighbourhoods in the pursuit of land and property valorisation. The growing use of CPOs as an exceptional measure in urbanisation, we argue, requires urgent attention in urban political struggles and policy practice.     

Mobilizing ‘juvenocratic spaces’ by the biopoliticization of children through sustainability

Northern children have been increasingly referred to as competent, participative and influential, called on to protect and produce certain life at times of climate risks. Child–adult relations and the required transition to adulthood are thus transformed by a re-configured ‘biopolitics’. We trace how various collaborative actors invite children to foster life at an aggregate level and illustrate how different age categories are governed at a distance. The results show that pedagogic expertise, in conjunction with sustainability, is mobilized in and by ‘juvenocratic spaces’, where youths are obliged to foster sustainable consumption and ways of living beyond territorial borders.     

Between Tragedy and Farce: 9/11 Compensation and the Value of Life and Death

This paper examines how lives have been valued (or not) in the US federal compensation programs set up in the wake of 9/11. The Victim Compensation Fund (VCF), implemented within days of the attacks, provided unlimited funds to the victims. In contrast, many first responders who developed illnesses later have had access to limited support. Only in 2011 was the Zadroga Act signed into place, which extends compensation to these workers and others. This paper compares and contrasts the two programs to make two points. One, the debates around compensation lay bare the differential values that are ascribed to life, and how biopower not only fosters life but abandons some to the point of death. Two, despite the controversies around extending compensation, the Zadroga Act was eventually enacted. Our second point is thus that war is not just destructive, but can be used to reconstitute the social and political in unanticipated ways.     

Governing Homo Subprimicus: Beyond Financial Citizenship,Exclusion, and Rights

The paper presents an alternative to scholarship on the distributional politics of finance that emphasizes citizenship‐based claims to new financial rights. To compensate for the dominance of exclusion‐based etiologies of financial marginality in financial geography, I reframe financial exclusion as a problem of financial government—that is, as a problem of conducting the conduct of risky populations without threatening the security and autonomy of financial markets. Drawing on Foucault's distinction between technologies of discipline and security, I describe how barriers to the extension of financial government create tiered processes of financial subject formation. The inchoate “subprime’ financial subject produced is the correlate of a specialized financial governmentality—a homo subprimicus eminently governable by financial means. I close by calling for greater attention to questions regarding the relationship between technologies for valorizing bare life, new systems of financially mediated value extraction, and emerging capitalist class processes.     

Teaching the Politics of Obesity: Insights into Neoliberal Embodiment and Contemporary Biopolitics

Abstract:  This article reflects on the author's experiences teaching an undergraduate lecture course on the politics of obesity. The course involved a critical examination of the construction and representation of the so-called epidemic of obesity and the major causal explanations for the rise in obesity. Students were unusually discomfited by the course and invoked pedagogical concerns and instructor embodiments in expressing their reactions. Student responses demonstrate how obesity talk reflects and reinforces neoliberal rationalities of self-governance, particularly those that couple bodily control and deservingness and see fatness as weakening the health of the body politic. The course also animated many students to scrutinize more deeply their own diet and exercise practices. I argue that the intensity of reaction stems from the productive power of the discourse of obesity and considerable investment students had in their bodies as neoliberal subjects. Besides classroom observations, the data in this paper are taken from student journals.     

Adaptation Machines and the Parasitic Politics of Life in Jamaican Disaster Resilience

This paper unpacks a politics of life at the heart of community‐based disaster management to advance a new understanding of resilience politics. Through an institutional ethnography of participatory resilience programming in Kingston, Jamaica, I explore how staff in Jamaica's national disaster management agency engaged with a qualitatively distinct form of collective life in Kingston's garrison districts. Garrison life has been shaped by the confluence of political economic, cultural, geopolitical force relations, which creates a hyper‐adaptive life that exceeds the techniques and rationalities of neoliberal disaster resilience. I draw on autonomist Marxist and Deleuzian readings of biopolitics to identify a new subject of disaster politics that I call, after Deleuze and Guattari, “adaptation machines”, decentralized apparatuses of capture that are parasitically reliant on the population's immanent adaptive capacities. The concept of adaptation machines enables us to envision resilience politics as a struggle over how to appropriate vulnerable peoples’ world‐forming constituent power.     

Practising Development at Home: Race,Gender, and the “Development” of the American South

Drawing on a range of works that extend from gendered historical analyses of colonialism to critical histories of development, and based on archival research in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, I argue in this paper that what we now call international development—a form of hegemony different from but related to colonialism—needs to be understood not only as a geopolitical tool of the Cold War, but also as a technique of governance that took shape within the realm of the domestic and through a racialized gaze. I do so by tracing some of the key elements of the US international development practices in the postwar era to a different time and place: the American South, a region considered “undeveloped” in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the agricultural extension practices that targeted the rural farm home and farm women, particularly African‐American women.     

The crime of choice: abortion border crossings from Chile to Peru

Since 1989 abortion in Chile has been illegal in every single circumstance. This means that tens of thousands of women every year undergo clandestine abortions at great risk to their health. Class directly influences Chilean women’s relationships to abortion; wealthier women can pay for the confidentiality of a safe doctor whereas poorer women cannot. There is just one region where women regardless of class can easily travel to another country in search of abortions, Arica in northern Chile. This article considers the previously unstudied phenomenon whereby women cross the border quickly and cheaply from northern Chile to the Peruvian city of Tacna where numerous clinics offer the procedure. This article utilises Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to trace how women are forced to cross a border to avoid government legislation and finds that even by leaving the territory of the state, women do not fully leave state control. Despite the lack of official statistics, interviews with healthworkers and a young woman who made the crossing show that abortion border crossings do occur and this article reflects on the legal, safety, and biopolitical ramifications of these journeys for Chilean women.     

Between compassion and racism: how the biopolitics of neoliberal welfare turns citizens into affective ‘idiots’

A sharp increase in racism and xenophobia, alongside an increase in philanthropy and charity, mark Europe’s Janus-faced reaction to the social consequences of the economic crisis. This paper goes beyond the racism/xenophobia vs. charity/philanthropy dualism, arguing that these seemingly antithetical responses have more in common than we may think.

• (1)?Both are equally divisive and ‘othering’ practices. Whilst racism transforms human beings into de-humanized entities in order to be able to hate them, charity transforms human beings into dependent objects in order to be able to offer aid.

• (2)?Both are strongly affective yet deeply apolitical reactions of people who lose their political agency as they become imbued with fear and insecurity; of citizens who turned into indebted apolitical objects, when social solidarity and welfare provision turned from a collective responsibility into a private affair.

When housing, healthcare, etc. became accessible mainly through private loans and mortgage markets, private welfare debt became the biopolitical tool that enrolled the workforce into volatile financial speculative practices and turned citizens into fear-imbued ‘idiots’, i.e. private individuals who can only care for their private matters. Understanding the biopolitics of privatized welfare and increased household debt as the process that drives this transformation of citizens into ‘idiots’ allows us to move beyond the false dilemma of charity vs. racism, in search of a politics of solidarity.