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ABSTRACT
The article highlights the shared technologies of power at work in the biopolitical governing of human mobility, and the management of ‘nature’ through shaping and preserving biodiversity. Reading three cases – the restoration of biodiversity of long-lost ecosystems in Chicago’s natural preserves, the EU biodiversity legislation for the management of alien invasive species, and recent changes in the management of diversity and migration in the aftermath of the ‘summer of migration’ in 2015 in Germany – the article illustrates how the notion of valued diversity inherently rests on the definition and devaluation of its Others, who are rendered disposable, harmful, and de facto killable. Necropolitics thus emerges as the inevitable underside of any biopolitical investment.
Acknowledgments
I sincerely thank the journal editors and the anonymous reviewers who provided thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of this article. I also thank Natascha Compes and Christina Gericke for discussing initial ideas and reading earlier versions, and David Wise for his encouragement.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. This perspective follows Foucault’s notion of critique as the scrutiny of the constitution of the acceptability of a knowledge–power nexus (Foucault, Citation1997, p. 61).
2. The here presented ‘at first sight familiar’ (Mbembe, Citation2003, p. 17) Foucauldian notion of racism does not speak about or do justice to the ample scholarly and activist debate about specific formations of racialization and racism. The term is here used only in the sense of the constitution of classes of humans that allows their (d)evaluation, that is, racism as a ‘technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower’ and that ‘regulate[s] the distribution of death’ (Mbembe, Citation2003, p. 17).
3. Consider, for example, the erosion of legal rule in the face of imminent threats and the creation of dangerous classes such as ‘terrorists’, ‘rogue states’ (e.g. Opitz & Tellmann, Citation2015, p. 117), or ‘poachers’ (Büscher, Citation2018, p. 165).
4. I work with Foucault, Mbembe, and Haraway rather than mobilizing the notion of ‘bare life’ (Agamben, Citation1998) in this article. Agamben’s stressing of the state of exception seems too limiting here. Moreover, the notion of ‘bare life’ is not a very helpful trope when wishing to leave room for conceptualizing unstable dynamism and capacities to respond (Butler, Citation2015; Haraway, Citation2008).
5. While this term echoes Sahlins’s ‘uncontrolled comparison’ (Sahlins, Citation1963, p. 285), the created encounters serve to think cases through one another, rather than compare in sensu stricto.
6. For a more extensive reading of this case, see Woodworth (Citation2013).
7. For the notion of ‘nature’ as stable, as equilibrium, and ‘without history’, see Cronon (Citation1993), p. 10.
8. Woodworth makes a similar point, quoting Packard who ‘writes that the Native Americans were “as much part of nature here as … the beaver, bear and bumble bee”’ (Woodworth, Citation2013, p. 110). On Native Americans’ controlled burnings in New England and their effects on New England’s ecology, see also Cronon (Citation1983).
9. Making killable allows seeing the human reasons for the causing of suffering or the killing of non-human animals as sufficient based on scientifically securing the Otherness of the species-Other (Haraway, Citation2008, pp. 77–82).
10. For an elaboration of the performativity of emergency imaginaries for the creation of the necessity of a constant state of alertness, and a readiness for quick and often pre-emptive actions that disrupt the time of the law, and that leave no time for slowness or doubt, see, e.g. Opitz and Tellmann (Citation2015).
11. I wonder if this imagery would nowadays still serve to humanize in order to create empathy. The refugee seems to have become the pinnacle figure of suspicion and threat, an image of uncontrollable invasion, so that the term may no longer serve to depict someone or something as innocent or besieged and as a victim.
12. Due to unusually high numbers of refugees arriving in Germany in the summer and fall of 2015, the notion of the ‘refugee crisis’ became the common term with which to address the matter in the aftermath. Rejecting this notion of ‘crisis’ as a crisis only for the imagined community of the ‘normative white national population’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguéz, Citation2018, p. 17; Keskinen, Citation2018), the term ‘summer of migration’ frames the events of 2015 in more positive terms (e.g. Altenried et al., Citation2018).
13. For example, the then head of the green party stated in Bremen: ‘Wir kriegen jetzt plötzlich Menschen geschenkt’ [We are suddenly given people] (Flüchtinge machen Deutschland religiöser, vielfältiger und jünger, Citation2015).
14. A similar point about how belonging and citizenship can be achieved through economic potential has been made by Ong (e.g. Citation2006) for the Asia-Pacific region.
15. See, for example, the infamous police acronym ‘NAFRI’ (northern African intensive perpetrators) for arrested male youth of colour (Kritik am Polizeieinsatz in Köln hält an, Citation2017).
16. ‘Gefährder’ creates a subject from the verb ‘to endanger’ (German: gefährden), turning the assumed threatening potential of the individual into their very essence.
17. The Masterplan Migration suggests creating ‘safe spaces’ in northern Africa and the Sahel region, where refugees should be discouraged from the continuation of their journey towards Europe by way of ‘expectation management’ (BMI, Citation2018, p. 8), thus de facto relocating the external frontier of the EU to Africa.
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Eike Marten
Eike Marten is Assistant Instructional Professor in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago. She has previously held appointments in Sociology, Gender Studies, and Educational Science in Germany and the Netherlands. Her research focuses on themes of diversity, intersectionality, and decolonization, biodiversity conservation and sustainability, and discursive practices of scientific knowledge production. Her research monograph Genealogies and Conceptual Belonging: Zones of Interference between Gender and Diversity is published by Routledge (2017).