The racialized death-politics of urban resilience governance

ABSTRACT

In the essay, ‘Necropolitics’, Achille Mbembe attends to the contemporary subjugation of life to the power of death – exceptional violence that exceeds the biopolitical aim of fostering life – thus alluding to a state of emergency in which law is suspended and martial rule is brought into force. However, as several commentators have suggested, exceptional politics does not need to be legitimized by a declared state of emergency, such as in cases where governmental and non-governmental actors are vested with powers to take strong measures against specific urban sub-populations in the name of security or order maintenance. Still, even these reworked and expanded approaches to death-politics revolve around sovereign exceptionality and the accompanying fabrication of undesirable ‘others’. Somewhat counterintuitively, the present article advances an analysis of racialized security politics issuing from the breakdown of representational, topographical boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘us’ and ‘others’. Illustrated by a case from Malmö, Sweden, it urges greater attention to how necropolitics could operate entirely outside the trope of emergency as exception. The principal argument is that urban security politics, when operating within the frame of resilience governance, involves distinctly different configurations of necropolitics, which require a critical-theoretical vocabulary outside the traditional framework of securitization.

KEYWORDS:

• Necropolitics
• urban resilience governance
• prevention
• emergency
• (in)security
• non-exceptional death-politics

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, the special issue editors as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Schmitt’s appreciation of spatial enclosure as an enabling condition of political order and law is captured by the term nomos, which expresses the production of (political) order through spatial orientation: ‘nomos is the immediate form in which the political and social order of a people becomes spatially visible  … i.e., the land-appropriation as well as the concrete order contained in it and following from it’ (Schmitt, 2006, p. 70).

2 That which is ‘beyond the pale’, Wendy Brown (2010, pp. 45–46) notes, appears uncivilized in two disparate and yet politically linked senses: ‘It is where civilization ends, but it is also where the brutishness of the civilized is therefore permitted, where violence may be freely and legitimately exercised’.

3 See e.g. Grežinić and Tatlić (2014) for a discussion of necropolitics in relation to racialization and global capitalism; see Puar (2007) and Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco (2014, Eds.) on racialized queer necropolitics.

4 Mbembe (2003, pp. 26ff.) makes a connection between colonial zones and enclaves along the model of the apartheid state – the racial compartmentalization of space of the townships in South Africa and the concomitant denial of citizenship to Africans – before proceeding to draw a parallel between the splintering occupation of colonialism and the spatial dispersal of populations in terms of splintering urbanism.

5 In Agamben’s view, the potentiality of a biopolitical nomos is virtually everywhere, which is to say that the spatial arrangements of the camp – understood as a modality of containment and demarcation – is always in sight qua potentiality (potenza), even if it is not actualized. See Debrix (2015) for a useful discussion of Agamben’s argument about the proliferation of camp life.

6 The temporal plasticity of partnership agreements presumably allows for long-term commitment between actors without losing adaptability and the ability to respond in new ways to emergent problems. Founded on the assumption that the environment is increasingly complex, turbulent and continually changing – and the future hence incalculable – partnership commitments emphasize the description of general perspectives and visions rather than facts and detailed goals (Andersen, 2008, pp. 100–105).

7 It is worth mentioning that the Swedish state, shortly before ‘Our Lives’ was granted funding, designated 53 geographical areas (distributed among 22 cities) as ‘vulnerable’, out of which 15 were designated as ‘particularly vulnerable’, some of which are in Malmö (Polisen, 2015). In 2017, several new areas were added to the list.