Neoptolemus: the governmentality of new race/pleasure wars?

Abstract

This paper explores the Australian government’s 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) intervention into Indigenous communities, conceptualizing it as a form of neoptolemus or ‘new war’. The paper argues that not only violence but also sexuality is central to the modalities of power in neo‐colonial domination. Using Foucault’s notions of ‘biopolitics’ and the discourses of war from Hobbes to Mbembe, we explore the management, surveillance, and administration of violence, sexuality, and sovereign ‘pleasure’ in the NTER to conceptualize the intervention as a novel form of racialized combat. These new configurations of race/pleasure war reinforce the elements of biopower and population management that have remained foundationally connected to sovereignty within the Western tradition. Governmentality and the bureaucratic and organizational regimes of control enacted through the NTER are correlated with the prurient, sexualized, and intensely moralizing public discourse about Indigenous Australians. The NTER intervention into Indigenous communities is analyzed from a critical perspective. We identify the political economy of neo‐colonial power, the ways in which ‘race power’ is embedded in both organizational and discursive environments, and the links between violence, pleasure, and the state. We analyze how violence, pleasure, and sovereign power intersected to discursively produce a punitive response by the sovereign state to serious issues of abusive behaviors and sexual transgression(s) as ‘new war’ on Indigenous peoples. The paper concludes by conceptualizing ‘new’ links between administrative knowledge, governance, power, sex, race, and violence and argues for the importance of understanding these assemblages of power to the field of organization studies.

Keywords:

• Indigenous
• Foucault
• sovereignty
• governance
• postcolonial
• pleasure
• race
• war
• sexuality
• critical theory

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and the two special issue editors Alison Pullen and Carl Rhodes for their advice and guidance.

Notes

1. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Indigenous peoples of Australia. ‘Aboriginal’ is the preferred term used predominately in the northern, central, and southern parts of Australia. Where the term ‘Indigenous’ is used, it is done so generically and is intended to be inclusive of all first nation peoples.

2. When the NTER was formally announced by the prime minister, it was given the mission to ‘stabilize’, ‘normalize’, and then ‘exit’ the proscribed communities. The intervention was to be operationalized under the military command of Major General Chalmers, with the guidance of a team of ‘experts’. Military language is evident throughout primary documents regarding the intervention, which refer to, for example, ‘boots on the ground strategy’, ‘command operations’, ‘strategic plans’, and an ‘embedded’ national media presence. A joke circulated in Australia throughout 2007–2008 that Australia was the first member nation of the US President Bush’s ‘Coalition of the Willing’ to invade itself.

3. We seek to theorize the Foucauldian neo‐colonial dimensions of the sovereignty of pleasure in the opportunistic deployment of governmental moral panic generated around the NTER, not in any way to minimize the seriousness of the issues Indigenous communities have long sought appropriate support to address. We note that there have been several critical responses published that have examined the social policy implications and effects of the NTER, including Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson’s (2007) collection.

4. More information on the scale of Indigenous disadvantage in Australia can be obtained from the Australian Productivity Commission’s Report ‘Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key indicators 2009’, which was released on 2 July 2009. http://www.pc.gov.au/gsp/reports/indigenous/keyindicators2009

5. Rosalie Kunoth‐Monks is a leading Indigenous activist and actor who is currently the elected president of a large local government regional area composed of Aboriginal communities and homelands and non‐Indigenous communities across a major part of the NT. At the age of 16, she became internationally famous for playing the title role in the classic film ‘Jedda’.

6. Compulsory checks were later abandoned. On 5 June 2007, the then Health Minister Abbott announced a softening of the initial approach so that parents would be asked for consent and forensic examinations to detect violence and sexual abuse might not be forced in all health checks.