Biopolitics and Mobile Populations

• Critical research uses biopolitics to question how states differentiate and govern mobile populations.
• Biopolitical theory has limitations as an analytic lens for empirical research.
• Many biopolitics theorists focus on historical shifts and binary oppositions like life/death and inclusion/exclusion.
• Recent research challenges these binaries, emphasizing nuanced belonging, ambiguous power relations, and individual agency.
• Assemblage thinking and Deleuze/Guattari's work offer useful terms to reconsider biopolitics analytically.
• Assemblage thinking challenges oppositions between individual/collective, structure/agency, oppression/resistance.
• It is sensitive to the complexity of power relations integrating migrants' lives.
• Revised conceptions of power, life, difference, and population challenge the idea of a central power origin.
• These also challenge any confinement of biopolitics spatially or historically.
• Analysis becomes more sensitive to migrants' biopolitical experience by viewing biopolitics as multiple and evolving.
• It also becomes more senstive to the formation of alternative collectives and subjectivities.
• These alternative formations challenge the violent biopolitics of contemporary migration regimes.
• Keywords include assemblage, biopolitics, migration, borders, and camps.

Introduction

• Annually, thousands die attempting to cross international borders.
• Many survivors face marginal conditions in camps.
• They may also face abuse, hazardous work, or limited healthcare.
• Abuse, violence, and death are inherent in many contemporary migration regimes.
• These regimes politically calculate to restrict border crossings.
• Migration policies directly target mobile populations' lives and conditions, inspiring researchers to use 'biopolitics'.
• Michel Foucault introduced the term in 1970s lectures at the College de France.
• Since then, biopolitics has seen revisions, adaptations, and replacements.
• Migration research uses it to question state power categorizing populations.
• It is also used to differentiate the worthiness of lives.
• This differentiation is engendered in government practices at borders or in camps.
• Giorgio Agamben's work on exception and sovereignty is particularly prominent among geographers.
• This is especially so for geographical scholars interested in biopolitics' spatial dimensions.
• Biopolitics has received substantial criticism despite its popularity in migration research.
• Rutherford and Rutherford (2013) claim the term lacks clarity and is used exuberantly.
• Theorists cast social differences as binary oppositions like life vs. death, hindering complex differentiations characteristic of politics.
• Biopolitics implies a coherent governmental rationale tied to a historical epoch or geographic setting.
• This contrasts with migration regimes, which involve various actors and institutions following different rationales.
• It also conflicts with research challenging the focus on repression and emphasizing agency and autonomy of people on the move.
• Diverging interests within biopolitical theory creates tension with migration research.
• Theorists (Foucault, Agamben) circumscribe shifts and broad historical conditions.
• Researchers account for complexity and particularity of empirical situations.
• Key biopolitical themes like life, sovereignty, difference, and population appear problematic from the migrant perspective.
• These themes are also problematic to researchers focused on dynamics of settings, migrants' experiences and possibilities for resistance.
• Despite reasons to dismiss biopolitics, its continued popularity and relevance of critical research examining politics targeting migrants' bodies/lives justify its retention as an analytic concept.
• Assemblage theory and Deleuze/Guattari offer a promising way to reconsider biopolitics and associated concepts, relating them to migration research problems.
• Foucault and Agamben's works have been applied in migration, borders, and camps research.
• Deleuze and Guattari's ontology of power allows conceptualizing biopolitics as an assemblage not necessarily having coherent forces.

Using Assemblage Theory

• Assemblage theory emphasizes biopolitics' material dimensions and the agency of life.
• It conceptualizes difference as segmentarity.
• It also considers multiple collectives or populations.
• The contribution remains conceptual, and arguments are illustrated by drawing on the work of scholars.
• Assemblage theory also highlights state power and violence and potentials for change and resistance.

Biopolitical Theory and Migration Research

• Michel Foucault outlines biopolitics in lectures at the College de France, particularly in ‘Society must be Defended’ and ‘Security, Territory and Population’.
• Foucault examined "anatomo-politics" in earlier works; this is discipline performed in institutions like hospitals or prisons).
• Foucault identifies a new way to govern human life in the late 18th/early 19th century in those lectures, (2003: 243).
• New types of knowledge, like statistics, make biopolitics possible.
• This allows addressing political demography, public health, or environment problems in novel ways (Foucault, 2003: 243–245).
• 'Bio' highlights the concern with biological, physical, and material condition.
• This concern is not for individual bodies, but a population.
• The combination with ‘politics' situates the concept within Foucault's interest in the relation of knowledge, power and government.
• Biopolitics at the turn of the 19th century concerned security understood as the government of 'aleatory' processes.
• These were processes that elide certainty and are characterized in terms of likelihoods, risks, and uncertainty.
• This created an inward turn of power characterized by a shift in attention away from territory/war to the biological processes risks of the population.
• This also created an emphasis on optimizing life driven by economic growth and increasing demand for work (Foucault, 2003).
• Foucault's interest is historical; he considers broad trends in how Western states included their citizens’ lives and populations.
• Agamben occasionally includes historical references in his work on biopolitics, such as the medieval figure of homo sacer or Ausschwitz.
• Agamben's main concerns focus on legal and political theory and the essence of terms, such as bare life, sovereignty, and state of exception.
• Modern politics, according to Agamben, is biopolitics because "the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original nucleus of sovereign power".
• The modern state foundation rests in the conversion of bare life (zoe) into political life (bios); this conversion marks the original function of sovereign power but is usually concealed by the juridico-political order.
• Sovereign power becomes visible in a state of exception, where the norm/law is suspended.
• In a state of exception, subjects are denied political subjectivity and are governed as bare life/homines sacri.
• Agamben explicitly discusses refugees' role as they break the continuity between man/citizen, nativity/nationality and cause the secret presupposition of the political domain— bare life— to appear for an instant within that domain.
• The paradigmatic space of exception of modernity, for Agamben, is the camp.
• A camp is simultaneously inside and outside the juridical order.
• It is inside because it is located within a state territory, but outside because of a suspension of norms and neglect of rights to its inhabitants (Agamben, 1998: 95–101).
• Understanding these sketches helps to understand why bipolitical theory is of interest when researching migration, borders and camps.
• Biopolitics categorize populations in ways that change the valuation and government of the physical condition of people.
• Biopolitics involves optimizing life through devaluing some lives.
• As Foucault says, biopolitics means to make live and let die.
• Biological state racism of the 20th century fosters the life of some segments of the population but allows the killing of others.
• People governed in Agamben’s state of exception are categorized and devalued.
• Biopolitics of migration research considers situations and knowledge.
• Spatial configurations may cause migrants lives to be valued differently compared to the majority population, exposing them to deterioration of health, physical harm or death.
• Foucault's differentiation of political rationalities and technologies of government informs migration and border studies.
• The EU border combines territorial control with biopolitical government of migrants bodies.
• The EU border regime relies on governing life integrating soft governmental mechanisms.
• These mechanisms include educating potential migrants in countries of origin in dangers of migration.
• The EU border also relies on aggressive refoulement and deterrence, making deaths a part of the political calculus, and forms of detention and enclosure.
• Agamben’s work on camps is a final reason researchers are interested in biopolitics.
• Various authors analyze refugee camps function as spaces of exception of restricted political rights.
• Agamben developed an important critique of humanitarian aid, viewing of a separation between humanitarianism and politics.
• Humanitarian organizations can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life.
• Also, they maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight.
• Humanitarian aid primarily concerns itself with basic physical needs migrants.
• It may do little, or even solidify their relegation to bare life.
• Biopolitics is employed within the context of migration research in order to critically examine the devaluation and government of migrants' lives. Foucault's biopolitics is based on conceptions population by the territorial states of the 18th and 19th centuries.
• Foucault showed no interest in how migration challenged the assumed integrity of state, territory and population.
• Agamben addresses migration/refugees explicitly.
• Agamben's analysis is anchored in his interest in the modern states legal/political foundation.
• Critical migration research has challenged the state perspective when considering issues of mobility/migration as it disregards migrants’ own views/experiences.
• Some argue biopolitics produces binary distinctions of inclusion/exclusion, life/death, leaving little scope for nuanced belonging.
• Agamben relies on the logic of the sovereign ban which allows biopower to embrace everything coherently.
• Highlighting migrant autonomy emphasizes the subversive potential in migration practices, readjusting the researchers view to agency/community of migrants.
• A similar concern is mirrored in work on citizenship acts that questions hegemonic legal/political categories and belonging.
• Important detail is brought to the discussion due to the empirical detail, and by solidarizing with change and resistance practices.
• Assemblage theory can help sketch a critical approach to biopolitics accounting for both situations where life is subordinated and coherency is challenged.

An Assemblage Approach

• The encounter between biopolitical theory and migration scholarship has gives reason for further conceptual thoughts.
• A first contribution of an assemblage approach shows a purpose of theorizing biopolitics.
• Deleuze/Guattari says concepts need to be considered assemblages of other concepts/problems which gave rise to their formulation.
• This implies a dynamic/pragmatic theory approach.
• Dynamic because every has history that changes as related concepts/problems may change.
• Pragmatic because the important questions ask isn't concept’s meaning
• The key questions are not whether the concept is correct, but instead what something does or can do in a particular context.
• Foucault/Agamben use biopolitics as descriptor, but migration research values by providing analytic lens which helps understand political phenomenon/processes at the interface of power, life and populations.
• Assemblage theory offers ontology power which doesn't attempt capture historical situation which helps understand biopolitics as the the results of a multiplicity of interactive forces (rather than sovereignty).
• Assemblage theory is useful because empirically situations are not clear cut as the binary logic of theory suggests.
• Assemblage theory has become a point of reference in geography, because considers material, affective processes that undergird social processes and matter (without reverting deterministic social constructivism).
• Deleuze/Guattari’s notion of assemblage appears useful to research on biopolitics because rests an ontology of relations of power at its center.
• Deleuze views reality as a field of forces bringing about becoming.
• Forces have no origin; rather they are immanent to the relations of assemblages.
• Assemblages' histories result from interacting forces that exhibit desires to change and interact with others.
• Assemblages cause the formation of larger assemblages characterized and scale, from atoms to friendships (DeLanda, 2006).
• Biopolitical assemblages (life, politics) must be conceived as components a field of not converging forces.
• Foucault states the state is the center of power, contrasting the body-organism-discipline and the population-biological processes-State series and associates biopolitics with the latter.
• Foucault argues state power occurs via transactions (Jessop, 2007: 37).
• An assemblage approach implies tendencies state institutions Effects within a multiplicity power relations.
• Consequence analytic attention directed at dissonance and lines of flight.
• The system is a global which implies interconnecting processes (Deleuze, 1992: 210).
• Conceptualizing institutionalized power escapes the duality between state vs structure versus agency.
• Migrant camps living shaped by different actor, institutions, knowledge (Maestri, 2017b).
• Dunn argue camp politics incongruent outcomes.
• Follow critique term aleatory sovereignty can recreate normal lives (Dunn, 2014: 93–94).
• The organization institutions exclusion and solidarity (Castañeda, 2013; Ottosdottir and Evans, 2014).
• An assemblage approach is disentangling that shapes life, resonances convergence.

Materiality and Life

• Assemblage theory Researchers' bodies power.
• Biopolitics of physical populations.
• Foucault Agamben argues power.
• Consequently, separates lives (Lemke,
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• Deleuze (Deleuze, identify,
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• Assembblages' organization
• Machinic assemblages
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Difference

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Multiple Populations

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• Theory functioning to Tsianos, to is other collectives.

Conclusion

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