The statistical politics of exceptional territories

The so-called Rotterdam Act enables municipal governments in the Netherlands to bar poor households with no or limited residential history in the metropolitan area from moving into certain neighborhoods. Although evidently at odds with principles of equality enshrined in law, the Act has emerged as a standard part of the policy tool kit. This article seeks to explain how the Rotterdam Act came to pass. Asking this question sets us on the path of reconstructing how specific urban areas suffering from extraordinary problems were identified and how using exceptional measures to exclude specific groups were instituted. In a word, we are interested in the construction of exceptionality. We show that the construction of exceptional territories is based on the interplay of discretionary power and statistical calculation. We discuss the wider relevance of our analysis to the emerging field of critical data studies and for understanding the links between sovereignty, territory and statistics in constitutional democracies.     

War without end? Military humanitarianism and the limits of biopolitical approaches to security in Central America and the Caribbean

In 2008, the U.S. Southern Command launched Operation Continuing Promise as an ongoing mission to provide humanitarian aid and assistance to vulnerable populations in the Caribbean and Latin America. Conceived as a means of fostering regional security, the Operation's humanitarian aim was designed to improve regional security by ensuring life against the risk of a range of disasters. Much as that mission reflects biopolitical analyses of humanitarianism that emphasize the ability to protect life as the basis for sovereignty, closer attention to the timing and location of SOUTHCOM's efforts offers a more contextual understanding. That approach is developed here through an analysis of Operation Continuing Promise's stop in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, contrasting SOUTHCOM's focus on biophysical vulnerability with intended recipients' sense of their condition as a historical and political outcome. That contrast frames a contextual understanding of Operation Continuing Promise, placing it within broader efforts to construct Puerto Cabezas as vulnerable. That approach also points up the limits of biopolitical analyses of humanitarianism, suggesting the ways in which vulnerability is never merely a biological condition. The narrow humanitarian focus of Operation Continuing Promise can therefore be assessed in terms of its inability to address political and historical factors shaping vulnerability. So long as vulnerability persists, the potential for intervention persists indefinitely, making humanitarianism into a means of waging war without end.     

Geographies of the camp

Facing the current growing global archipelago of encampments – including concentration, detention, transit, identification, refugee, military and training camps, this article is a geographical reflection on ‘the camp’, as a modern institution and as a spatial bio-political technology. In particular, it is about the past and present camp geographies and the apparatus of dispositifs that make them an ever-present spatial formation in the management of custody and care characterizing many authoritarian regimes as well as many contemporary democracies. I especially focus on the works of Paul Gilroy, Giorgio Agamben and Reviel Netz to discuss camp spatialities, the normalization of camp geographies, and related biopolitics. In doing so, I advance the argument to resist on present-day proliferating manifestations of camp and ‘camp thinking’, calling for the incorporation of ‘camp studies’ into the broader field of political geography to considering the geographies of the camp as constitutive hubs of much broader, modern geo-political economies.     

Geographies of precarity and violence in the Kurdish kolberi underground economy

This paper investigates the precarious lives of the Kurdish kolbers, underground laborers who transport cargo on their backs across Iran's border with Iraq. Throughout their arduous journeys, kolbers experience various forms of violence, including direct shooting by border guards. Findings from interviews with the kolbers indicate that kolberi, a strenuous, dangerous, precarious type of labor, is a response to pervasive unemployment in Iranian Kurdistan (Rojhelat), and a long-term consequence of the Iranian state's systematic economic disinvestment in the Kurdish region. Although kolbers assert agency within their labor at localized scales, the social organization of kolberi is a reaction to the Iranian state's biopolitical strategies of economic disinvestment and violence. Drawing on a biopolitical framework, we illustrate the analytical interconnections among the economic marginalization of Rojhelat, violence against the kolbers, and the kolbers' precarious lives. The article offers ideas for future research that come out of our examination of the complexities of kolberi—an examination that demonstrates the importance of incorporating political-economic, ethno-territorial, and biopolitical factors in analyses of underground border exchanges and precarious marginalized lives.     

A sea of potential: The politics of global ocean observations

The Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) is creating a new understanding of the world ocean. With a vast and heterogeneous network of sensors, it converts the ocean's properties into flows of information, creating a “data double” of a dynamic sea. This view of the ocean underlies not only international geopolitics but also more broadly emergent modes of government. This paper analyzes changing strategies for governing global ocean observations to better understand the shifting coconstitution of nature, technology, and politics. In particular, I inquire into the GOOS's recent developments, which indicate a new conception of the ocean as a space of potentiality. I argue that this emergent understanding poses problems for our conventional political analytics, particularly that of biopolitics. To account for this shift, I draw on and extend Elizabeth Povinelli's offering of geontopolitics, which identifies a departure from the fundamental distinctions between life and nonlife made by biopolitics, seeing instead the potential for unpredictable changes not only in human subjects but also in geophysical systems and the contemporary planetary environmental conditions they shape. Emphasizing how geontopolitics both names a new mode of government and signifes its limits, Povinelli suggests three figures, following Foucault's four figures of biopolitics. I conclude by suggesting the world ocean as a fourth figure of geonotopolitics, as that which is so imbricated with life as to be indistinct from it. Throughout, I maintain that like Foucault's figures of biopolitics, the world ocean must be understood as inseparable from the knowledge relations that make it legible.     

Between improvement and sacrifice: Othering and the (bio)political ecology of climate change

In this article, we argue that othering is central to the government of climate change. Critically engaging with Foucault’s ideas on biopolitics and racism, we elaborate a conceptual perspective for analysing how such a “technology of government” operates. We review diverse literatures from geography, political ecology, critical adaptation studies and the environmental humanities dealing with discursive constructions of the other in three exemplary areas of intervention—mitigation (particularly “green” mineral extraction for renewable energy production); constructions of “vulnerability” in adaptation policies; and the governing of “climate migrants”. We contend that these interventions largely work through the extension of capitalist relations, underpinned by racist and colonial ways of seeing populations and territories as “in need of improvement”. And that, by legitimising and depoliticizing such interventions, and by suspending responsibility for their unwanted or even deadly impacts, othering helps to preserve existing relations of racial, patriarchal and class domination in the face of climate-induced social upheavals. Othering, we conclude, is not only a feature of fossil fuelled development, but a way of functioning of capitalist governmentality more broadly—which has important implications for thinking about emancipatory and climate-just transformations.     

“Playing the away game”: AFRICOM in the Sahara-Sahel

This article presents evidence to revise hypotheses of how biopolitical strategies are deployed in contemporary global security regimes, and with what effects. It is based on research into the US military's Africa Command (AFRICOM). Elaborating on two concepts that Michel Foucault hypothesized in his Security, Territory, Population lectures –the “people” and the “milieu” –I argue that AFRICOM's strategy is informed by biopolitical rationalities, but that this does not necessarily situate African populations as either part of a population to secure or as a threat to that population. Instead, I suggest that (unlike in the urban and national contexts that Foucault analyzed) biopolitical security strategies at the global scale are characterized by varying degrees of distance between the way(s) of life they aim to defend and what Foucault termed the “field of intervention” or “milieu” that they target. This hypothesis, and its elaboration through the case of AFRICOM, contributes to efforts to historicize and spatialize accounts of contemporary biopolitics. Specifically, it suggests that we can better understand the production of very uneven geographies of security and insecurity by attending to the relationships between the ways of life being secured and the (potentially distant) material contexts situated as relevant “fields of intervention”.     

Skilled Natives,Inept Coolies: Marmot Hunting and the Great Manchurian Pneumonic Plague (1910–1911)

Taking as its setting the great Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic of 1910–1911, this article examines the construction of epidemiological blame that targeted migrant labourers from the peninsula of Shandong employed in the hunting of the Siberian marmot (Marmota sibirica), a natural reservoir of the disease. The article demonstrates how Chinese epidemiologists sought to pathologize marmot-hunting migrants from Shandong as unskilled pestilent “coolies”, while at the same time valorizing Mongol and Buryat marmot hunters as a “native” counter-paradigm; a binary anthropology of skill and sanitation, which instituted “coolies” as an anthropological type essential to the construction of hygienic modernity in China.     

Measuring Inuit Health from Ungava to Nunavik via Nouveau Québec: Episodes in the History of Researcher–Subject Relations

ABSTRACT

Inuit have been the subject of research attention since the earliest encounters with Europeans. Using the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics this article explores the history of researcher–research subject relations produced through health knowledge in the region now known as Nunavik. This history is organized in three time periods: The first is the “Ungava” era and is explored in the observations of members of the Hudson Bay Expedition and subsequent mapping efforts. The second “Nouveau Québec” era begins in 1912 when the current borders of Québec were established and lasts until 1975. After a period of indifference, research interest grows rapidly in the post-war period with a focus of social adaptation and culture change. The third era begins in 1975 with the signing of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement. This marks the beginning of Inuit political development within an Inuit-controlled regional governance structure. The conceptualization of three different health surveys during this period shows an emerging complexity in how Inuit health is imagined. An upcoming fourth survey which marks the first time the study of Inuit physical, social, and community health will be initiated by an Inuit-led health authority.