Sovereign power and refugees in the Polish parliament

ABSTRACT

This paper shows that contemporary Polish politics under the tutelage of Law and Justice (PiS) can fruitfully be analysed as a biopolitical production of political subjects. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s take on biopolitics, this paper asks how biopolitics and sovereign power materialized in two recent Polish parliamentary debates on EU sanctioned refugee quotas. The paper uses linguistic tropes to operationalize sovereign power and applies them to the analysis. The findings demonstrate the centrality of contingent factors in the ways to which biopolitics materializes in the debates and reveals the radically politicizing effects for a contemporary democratic system.

KEYWORDS:

• Parliamentary debate
• Poland
• Agamben
• biopolitics
• sovereignty
• refugees

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All translations from Polish are mine. The translations reflect the original, including all grammatical errors and signs of spoken language, to the extent it has been feasible.

2. All references to parliamentary debate follow the structure: Sejm, Date, Speaker’s name. All references to debates from the parliamentary committee follow the structure: Komisja ds. UE, Date, Speaker’s name.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jaakko Turunen

Jaakko Turunen has a PhD in Political Science from Uppsala University. He is a lecturer at Södertörn University, Sweden. His research focuses on language and politics, civil society, and social media. He is a member of the editorial board of the Finnish Review of East European Studies.