An Authoritarian Spectacle: Visual Biopolitics and the Dramaturgy of the Poland-Belarus Border Migration Crisis

Abstract

This article analyzes the 2021–22 migration crisis at the EU-Belarus border through the conceptual lens of visual biopolitics. Based on data available from the regime-run media in Belarus it demonstrates how the engineered crisis was a case of authoritarian dramaturgy relying on numerous visual representations of migrants. The carefully staged authoritarian spectacle exploits both the vulnerability and grievability of refugee life, and the regime’s role as a self-appointed sovereign exercising comprehensive biopolitical care and protection over the population of migrants stranded at the border between Belarus and Poland.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I am grateful to Malmö University (Faculty of Culture and Society, RUCARR) for hosting me as a visiting scholar in 2022, which helped me in working on this research project.

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Aliaksei Kazharski

Aliaksei Kazharski holds a Ph.D. from Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. He teaches in the Department of International Relations, Institute of Political Studies, at Charles University, Prague; and has been a visiting researcher at the Universities of Oslo, Tartu, Vienna, and Malmö. He is the author of Eurasian Integration and the Russian World: Regionalism as an Identitary Enterprise (2019) and Central Europe Thirty Years after the Fall of Communism: A Return to the Margin? (2022). E-mail: [email protected]