1 The biopolitics of corpses of mass violence and genocide Yehonatan Alsheh Introduction For the past four decades, students of biopolitics have been probing why the spectacular growth in the application of technologies and policies that aim at the optimization of human life has been articulated with a parallel proliferation of human death. Various studies have been suggesting many objects or sites that are arguably highly symptomatic of the issue at hand – a privileged epitome of the biopolitical quandary. The most famous of these is the camp that Giorgio
International interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, that ultimately brought the war to a standstill, emphasised recovering and identifying the missing as chief among the goals of post-war repair and reconstruction, aiming to unite a heavily divided country. Still, local actors keep,showing that unity is far from achieved and it is not a goal for all those involved. This paper examines the various actors that have taken up the task of locating and identifying the missing in order to examine their incentives as well as any competing agendas for participating in the process. These efforts cannot be understood without examining their impact both at the time and now, and we look at the biopolitics of the process and utilisation of the dead within. Due to the vastness and complexity of this process, instead of a conclusion, additional questions will be opened required for the process to keep moving forward.
This article considers the contexts and processes of forensic identification in 2004 post-tsunami Thailand as examples of identity politics. The presence of international forensic teams as carriers of diverse technical expertise overlapped with bureaucratic procedures put in place by the Thai government. The negotiation of unified forensic protocols and the production of estimates of identified nationals straddle biopolitics and thanatocracy. The immense identification task testified on the one hand to an effort to bring individual bodies back to mourning families and national soils, and on the other hand to determining collective ethnic and national bodies, making sense out of an inexorable and disordered dissolution of corporeal as well as political boundaries. Individual and national identities were the subject of competing efforts to bring order to,the chaos, reaffirming the cogency of the body politic by mapping national boundaries abroad. The overwhelming forensic effort required by the exceptional circumstances also brought forward the socio-economic and ethnic disparities of the victims, whose post-mortem treatment and identification traced an indelible divide between us and them.
the root of the evolution of humanitarianism. From this point of view, humanitarianism could be seen as a biopolitical regime that combines, depending on the context, various technologies of power, some forms of violence and discourses of human rights, suffering and charity. Traditionally, humanitarianism has been playing a leading role in the proliferation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Its various functions have been the rescue of wounded civilians in war, assistance to refugees and displaced persons and the transmission of information against
role of ongoing knowledge production in biomedical and public health fields as defining features of the pandemic response. However, his analysis highlights the importance of social factors, notably ‘the intersections of questions of race, class and power with public health interventions’ as key mediators in the success of health responses. Questions of biopolitics and power loom over the discussions of public health interventions, especially in the call to consider the possibility of a plague
resulting from the systemic urge to deepen automation at a time of declining profitability ( Smith, 2017 ). Within a post-social world, risk and security have been individuated. Compared to the normative welfare systems of the past, a new disaggregated and personalised biopolitics has emerged. If biopolitical regimes could be likened to animal species, the welfare state catered for the herd. Today, it is the turn of the predator . 4 Rather than share risk, there is a new emphasis on individual responsibility. In the global North, the downturn
awaits its realisation. Hence, despite the impotence of violence, that doesn’t mean to say it cannot be put into service to reproduce or create entirely new regimes for political power and bio-political control. Violence is not simply negative. It conditions the possibility of political rule, setting out in the clearest ways the lines of belonging and expendability, the force that’s always measured versus the plight of the damned. This is why violence can so easily be accommodated by the technocratic wisdom of a progressive mind. We are governed, as Foucault noted, by
, S. ( 2011 ), ‘Humanitarian Sex: Biopolitics, Ethics, and Aid Worker Memoir’ , Australian Literary Studies , 26 : 2 , 43 – 56 . Cain , K. , Postlewait , H. and Thomson , A. ( 2006 ), Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone ( London : Ebury Press ). Friesen , I. ( 2016 ), The Experiential Core of the Humanitarian Vocation: An Analysis of the Autobiographical Narratives of Contemporary Humanitarians ( PhD thesis , University of Kent ). Polman , L. ( 2010 ), War Games
. Whereas the cemetery looms large as the site where modern (biopolitical) states have sought to contain dead bodies and separate them effectively from the living, this part opens with a counterimage to the (double) containment of dead bodies in the soil of the cemetery. Benedikte Møller Kristensen writes about ideas and practices of ‘open-air burials’ among the Duha in Mongolia that involve the opposite of containment, namely the dispersal of the dead body as it is left to be eaten by animals in the wilderness; a sort of nomadic territorialisation as it were. Framed by
were born in Greece but the family had decided to return to Syria some years before. Their deaths could have been avoided had a new Greek citizenship law – relaxing criteria for the acquisition of Greek citizenship to children of immigrants born in Greece – been implemented (Christopoulos 2012).2 The two girls could have legally entered the country as Greek citizens, instead of risking their lives to cross the militarised border illegally. These three deaths reflect the biopolitical power of the two key instruments of contemporary sovereign states, namely control