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The State of Exception
Abstract
Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states. The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt. In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.
... Spectacles on the border take place continuously to reinforce the status quo bor-der policies. What is particularly interesting about former NSC official Restrepo's immediate migration policy recommendations are that they do not address the long term and militarized border security apparatus, symbolized by the border wall simulacrum, established on the US-Mexico border with the corporate interests who seek profits by creating homo sacer under a now-constant state of exception (see Agamben, 1995Agamben, , 2005Agamben, , 2009. The current US "illegal" drug policies that are in place also are not considered. ...
... Spectacles on the border take place continuously to reinforce the status quo bor-der policies. What is particularly interesting about former NSC official Restrepo's immediate migration policy recommendations are that they do not address the long term and militarized border security apparatus, symbolized by the border wall simulacrum, established on the US-Mexico border with the corporate interests who seek profits by creating homo sacer under a now-constant state of exception (see Agamben, 1995Agamben, , 2005Agamben, , 2009. The current US "illegal" drug policies that are in place also are not considered. ...
Utilizing French Situationist theorists, this piece analyzes
and examines border policies and the wall. Jean Baudrillard’s
simulacrum may help us come to a fuller understanding of
the meaning of the border wall and the security apparatus
utilized by the United States. Briefly put, a simulacrum is an
image that has multiple meanings for people encountering
the phenomenon: in this case, the border wall. The simulacrum
of the border wall as a representation of security is
promoted by the US government through the Department
of Homeland Security (DHS) and its agencies as well as
by elected officials, interest groups promoting the security
apparatus for financial reasons, and news media. Additionally,
this is an analysis of Debord’s spectacle concept and how
it applies to Biden border security policies. COVID-19, the
border wall, and affective policies have effectively stopped
migration along the US-Mexico border because of the
border security apparatus (based on Agamben 2009). In
contrast, Iglesias-Prieto’s transborderisms are images of
overcoming the militarization of border walls and associated
policies. It is within our power to transcend the oppression
of the border wall simulacrum and border spectacles
through borderlander empowerment, and to advocate for
openness and ending the division of communities. In this
piece I examine the struggle of openness for borderlanders
(transborderism) versus the border security apparatus
during the coronavirus pandemic.
By framing the displacement of people fleeing war, persecution and violence as a short‐term problem, refugee camps have emerged to offer temporary accommodations and services to displaced refugees. In Bangladesh, refugee camps were built in Cox's Bazar and Bhasan Char in recent years to house Rohingya refugees escaping from state‐sponsored persecution by Myanmar. Constructed in two very different geographic contexts—mainland and island—yet intended to address the same refugee problem, the two camps reveal different built environments intended to instill different feelings of permanence and impermanence to affect control over refugees’ lives. We argue that planning and design thus serve as strategic biopolitical instruments by controlling and perpetually redefining the production and manifestation of (im)permanence in both sensual and tactile terms. The geographic locations of the refugee camps vis‐à‐vis their distance from the host country population function as an important driver of planning decisions. However, as these cases demonstrate, the biopolitics of exclusion are inherently incomplete, transforming camps into emerging, negotiated, and fluid campscapes. By providing a comparative analysis of the biotechnology of exclusion through the politics of (im)permanence in mainland versus island settings, we contribute to the understanding of the role of planning in reproducing spatial boundaries for social control.
This paper is the first in a series examining the political, legal, and social implications of internet shutdowns in Kashmir, based on a unique and extensive dataset compiled over 5 years. It analyses previously unseen data detailing the frequency and scope of shutdowns, particularly following the 2019 abrogation of Article 370. The study investigates these shutdowns as tools of state control, while exploring their broader material, political, and discursive meanings. We approach these shutdowns through the lenses of Permanent Emergency and Interpellative Discourses, highlighting how they function as mechanisms of governance that contribute to the production of “bare life”—a state of existence where basic rights and freedoms are suspended. By examining the legal and political dimensions of internet blackouts, this paper aims to, first, lay the groundwork in introducing the issue and, second, to unravel the complex dynamics that shape the lived experiences of Kashmiris, contributing to the discourse on state power, sovereignty, and the effects of technological governance in the contested region of Jammu and Kashmir.
Epistemological justice, which exposes the role of colonialism in conceptualising contemporary society, particularly racial inequalities, has gained prominence within sociology. Yet, sociologists often ignore that the material conditions of professional sociology inhibit racial justice-oriented knowledge making. This article argues, to realise epistemological justice, sociology must travel to the margins, wherein certain sociological publics offer opportunities for reverse tutelage that can redirect the discipline towards racial-colonial literacy. This participatory qualitative study spotlights Muslim women as one such public whose lives and imagined future emancipation depend on critiquing intolerable social conditions and conceptualising alternatives. Through their enhanced racial-colonial literacy, they generate historically and geopolitically aware theories on intersectionality, dialectic self-identities and refusal as joy. We pinpoint reverse tutelage opportunities from their theorising that can re-orient professional sociology towards meaningful epistemological justice that can serve scholars and communities of resistance, anti-colonialism and anti-racism everywhere.
In Germany, women categorised as refugees are often depicted homogenously, as potential victims of (sexual) violence. However, many of these women strongly criticise their collective representation as victims. Drawing on interviews, informal conversations, and observations from my fieldwork (2020-22), I will argue that vulnerability cannot be regarded as a ‘characteristic’ of so-called ‘refugee women’; rather, its rhetorical utilisation in the German public should be carefully examined. Using the example of the local discourse on violence prevention in Munich and Bavaria after 2015, I will examine how the construction of ‘refugee women’ as being particularly at risk of violence can pose a challenge to social workers’ efforts to prevent violence in municipal reception centres. Finally, I will argue that both the ascription of vulnerability to so-called ‘refugee women’, and their experiences of structural violence contradict established portrayals of German society as a social and geographical safe haven for people living through, and living after, the asylum process.
Available Open Access here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2025.2454913
During the twentieth century, many countries underwent processes of ‘de‐institutionalisation’—closing ‘asylums’ for people with mental health problems, learning disabilities and dementia. Despite this, the UK has witnessed a subsequent process of ‘re‐institutionalisation’ with the creation of new public/private sector facilities providing ‘secure’ care to large numbers of people, who can be residents for many years with no sense of when they may leave. In 2023, 2035 people with learning disabilities and/or autistic people were receiving inpatient hospital care in England, with 54% in hospital for over two years. Drawing on the lived experience of people in hospital/families, and the practice knowledge of front‐line staff, this paper critically analyses why this process of re‐institutionalisation may be taking place. Our argument is that institutional forms of care have gradually been re‐introduced—despite the influence of neoliberal health policies that have previously aimed at deinstitutionalisation and self‐care—because some people are viewed as ‘too difficult’ to govern through the prevailing dispositive of self‐care, and therefore become the subjects of more disciplinary forms of power. Once in hospital, the primary routes to ‘escape’ require performative acts of ‘good conduct’ that give confidence to professionals of a person’s capacity for self‐government.
This article disentangles the nexus between coloniality, territoriality, and gendered necropolitics of state in Iran and how it shapes the lives of the Kurdish female cross‐border laborers (kolbers, in Kurdish) in Eastern Kurdistan (Rojhelat, in Kurdish). Drawing on Achille Mbembe's notion of “necropolitics,” we conceptualize kolberi as a work of death that subjects Kurds to indiscriminate and collective punishment through necro‐disciplinary measures, exposing them constantly to precarious conditions. The necropolitics of Kurdish female kolberi underlines how the meaning of death, like the meaning of life (in biopolitics), is produced and managed through elements of embodiment―bodies, of who kills, and of who is marked for death and for taking life. We interviewed 13 Kurdish women in Rojhelat who have been involved in kolberi over the last few years. By bringing the gendered dimension of kolberi to the forefront, our article theorizes the experiences of women kolbers as occurring in a “death world”―a world where female kolbers' lives are perpetually endangered by the state apparatus of death and silenced by the patriarchal regime of “truth.” Our analysis reveals a form of state violence that highlights the gendered expression of “colonized subjects.”
Conspiracism has become a powerful explanatory category for major political events (Brexit vote, January 6 th Capitol attack) and the subject of a diverse body of research. Yet geography has largely ignored such debates and has, on some occasions, adopted this term with little critical examination. I call on geographers to think through the implications of this silence. I especially highlight how conspiracism presents an opportunity to think through the questions of epistemic authority, the hegemonic control of knowledge production, and the limits of the regulation of dissent. I argue that further work is needed to understand the historical and spatial conditions that make it possible for practices, attitudes, and speeches to become available to be invested and discerned as a distinctive mode of thought called ‘conspiracy theories’. To that end, and drawing on Foucault's method of problematisation, I make two propositions. First, conspiracism is the performance of a critical attitude that is activated in a field conditioned by the felt pressures and limits of a collective commitment to the liberatory promise of critique. Second, conspiracism, as a collective geo-historical experience, is born from the pressures of knowing, locating, and naming power. These propositions seek to destabilise the certainties that allow conspiracism to function as a category of individualised ‘bad thinking’ by inscribing it as a collective experience held together by an ensemble of affective conditions. Having established conspiracism within this affective field, I provoke geography to think through its position, as an institutional science within this field.
The literature of neopaganism often evokes an indigenous medieval past to resist social and religious convention and assert a queer identity in the present. Using theories of untranslatability, this article shows how a medieval incantation mobilizes queer language and forms communities in the novel High Magic’s Aid by Gerald B. Gardner. This novel outlines the keys to the religion Gardner sought to promote in the 1940s: pagan witchcraft. It features an initiation incantation spoken by a High Priestess, beginning: ‘Eko; Eko; Azarak’, which is a cobbling together of a ‘sorcerer’s cry’ and a gibberish passage from a medieval French play. This chant, which is linguistically meaningless, nevertheless acts as a microcosm of modern witchcraft ideology, and enables practitioners of the Craft to establish a cultural contact with a transtemporal medieval past (identified by indigenous mythologising and the ability to summon demonic spirits), thus unsettling linguistic and temporal hegemony through untranslatability. In this way, High Magic’s Aid depicts a modern witchcraft continuously rediscovering itself as a queer religion resistant to cultural translation, even as its untranslatable aspects are adapted into mainstream contexts in ways that counter this agenda.
In this article I offer a critical examination of Giorgio Agamben’s vision of political liberation as it is articulated in his philosophy of language. Focusing on his affirmative politics as a particular kind of performance, I show that he has in mind a radically ‘pure’ performative that affirms only language as such. This conception is very different from other influential approaches to performativity in the contemporary scene of political thought, such as those developed by Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. Rather than offering a meaningful alternative to these approaches, however, I argue that this pure performative makes visible the specific problems connected to Agamben’s model. Ultimately, Agamben risks affirming what he sees as problematic in political terms, namely the isolation of his preferred type of experience of language to a separate ‘sphere’. It is, moreover, questionable whether his performative points to a plausible model of political contestation in an age where careless and void utterances have become widespread.
After 50 years of research on urban informality, why is it that we seem unable to either clearly define this concept or move beyond it? On the one hand, urban informality is identified with ‘slums’ and substandard outcomes, on the other, with deregulated markets and neoliberal urbanism. Yet it is also identified as a self‐organized urbanism that adds vitality, affordability, diversity, creativity and adaptability to the city—a form of urbanity that embodies the ‘right to the city’ and urban commoning. How are we to understand this paradox and move beyond the informal/formal as a binary distinction? If informality is more than a lack of formality, then what is informality‐in‐itself? The key argument here is that urban informality is the original form of urbanity—the ur ‐form—while formal urbanism is its necessary counterpart. Informal urbanism is not a lack of formality, but the ground from which the formal emerges. This inversion changes the way we understand the city as an in/formal assemblage. While rampant informality may seem the very antithesis of urban planning, to erase it is to kill urbanity itself. The challenge is to engage this paradox—planning for the unplanned, keeping the ur‐ in urban studies.
This article focuses on how the monks of Mount Athos embody its unique timescape in their presentation of the monastic self in everyday life, as it emerges out of the musicality of the Athonian landscape. The article unfolds the embodied dialectics in play between the experience of messianic time and its spiritual affordances against which one's bodily resilience is sociomaterially tested in and by the ‘Here and Now’, following the metronomic measuring of time and its historical affordances. By comparing two ways of measuring each ‘hour’, the article further investigates the use value given to one's personal time as an experiential means of teaching the ‘ techne of time’ for cultivating a monastic ‘self’ within and against a ‘world’ out there. The article draws three overlapping nested temporal cycles in terms of per‐forming the ‘self’ within the organic community and the institution, through which one naturalizes, synchronizes, and interiorizes the horologion with the tempos of everyday life. Finally, it argues that the crossing from the secular to the monastic timescape disrupts the continuity of common life and its expectations, by opening a self‐revelatory time rupture revealing Eternity in every instance of one's paradoxical presence in the present moment in and out of time.
This essay explores the struggles of second‐generation Tibetan refugees under an exclusionary Indian citizenship regime. Confronted with a national orthodoxy that entwines legal status, entitlements, and national identity, Tibetans respond by “disaggregating” citizenship. First, stateless Tibetans, born in India to refugee parents, won legal appeals by demonstrating that Tibetan nationality was no bar to Indian citizenship. In response, Indian authorities demanded that Tibetans give up refugee entitlements and remove themselves from their national space and political community in exile as the price of Indian citizenship. This article explores the diverse responses of Tibetans to the citizenship‐on‐offer: some aspiring for it, some accepting it, and others actively rejecting it. These responses illustrate strategies refugees employ to navigate citizenship regimes that often render them liminal. Refugees act both to mitigate the precarity of statelessness and to preserve their identity, community, and political aspirations against erasure. In doing so, they not only disrupt the national orthodoxy of states that negates refugee experiences but also reveal the incompleteness and contradictions of citizenship regimes.
This article critically examines the governance of the COVID-19 pandemic in Croatia, focusing on the interrogation of (r-e)merging forms of governance amid perpetual crises. Our analysis dissects governmental strategies that formed a state of exception while derailing from the constitutional framing of a state of emergency. This intentional deviation served to re-solidify the intertwining politics of ethno-nationalism and securitization, rooted in a long trajectory of Croatian emergency governance, from the 1990s onwards. Moreover, the article scrutinizes the effects of governance during the pandemic on migrants and other minoritized populations. Through two case studies, we look into inequalities reproduced against racially, ethnically, culturally, and class-wise different social groups. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of crisis governance in a context of uncertain futurities.
In De Oratore Cicero modifies the metaphor of the persona (theatrical mask), used by some early Stoics to explain their doctrine of indifference, arguing that one must be not the actor but the author (auctor) of one’s own persona. Understanding Cicero’s concept of auctoritas allows us to reread his famous doctrine of the four personae in De Officiis as a rejection of Stoic indifference and as suggestion of a new relation between the self and its personae. For Cicero, to be an auctor in the most profound sense is not to produce but rather to foster and give testimony. Thus, to be author of one’s own persona is not in the first place to construct and adopt a social role, but to accept and affirm both one’s rational human nature and the contingencies of existence in the world.
Emergency powers have always posed a threat to the rule of law, particularly standards of legality and respect for individual rights. Although system-wide impacts to legal norms and the rights of the general population continue to pose real dangers, we argue that the most egregious violations of the rule of law in liberal democratic societies in times of emergency now tend to be restricted to historically marginalized groups depicted as disorderly, dysfunctional, or pathological. As exemplified in official responses to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, reports of rampant child abuse in aboriginal communities in Australia’s Northern Territory, and high levels of homicide in Jamaica, emergency powers are often applied in discriminatory ways that reflect and reinforce existing disparities in race, gender, and class. Even when emergency measures are nominally adopted for the entire population, their application is often limited to highly specific geographical areas that place marginalized groups into “zones of otherness.” The result, we argue, is to establish a de facto system of legal pluralism that subjects subordinate groups to enhanced forms of regulation, surveillance, detention, and violence, but generally leaves established legal rules and protections intact for everyone else.
How do states use migration control to track both foreign and domestic threats? This article approaches this question historically, examining colonial migration control policies employed by the British Empire in South Asia. Studying the imperial state reveals important antecedents for the contemporary migration regime and shows that empire states engaged in similar practices even as they were monitoring imperial rather than nation-state borders. Papers – in the form of identity documents such as passports that could be flagged – emerged as a critical tool in the quest to repress transnational solidarities and anti-colonial resistance. Examining the ways in which migration control was operationalized within the empire along with the logics guiding such regulation, this article argues that colonial migration control was deployed as a tool to target threats to the empire, not only those considered Britain’s enemies abroad but also British subjects and citizens. The pretext of collaboration with enemy aliens allowed the hardening of borders and an intensification in how they were policed. I argue that states use the justification of external or foreign threats to monitor internal or domestic threats. The colonial border did not merely serve as a tool to constrain the movement of enemy aliens or foreigners, but also to enable the surveillance of ‘undesirable’ British Indians who were considered suspicious. This article thus centers the imperial security perceptions that undergird the contemporary racialized migration regime and shows that these perceptions were crystallized at the height of empire.
In a crisis‐shaken globalised world, migration‐related sites of detention emerge as a harmful figure of attempts to contain human mobility. The new Closed Controlled Access Centre (CCAC) on Samos is a blueprint for the EU's future border practices. While openly dehumanising conditions contributed to the previous “old camp” amounting to a torturing environment, the new remote and securitised CCAC promised safety and humanitarian care. Psycho‐geographical counter‐mappings by people living in the camps and of human rights defenders allow the reading of the hotspot camps as a built environment and social space. They expose how the violent neglect of the old camp transforms into the surveilled and weaponised space of yet another torturing environment. This time, it operates a necropolitical space of uncare that distributes harm differentially. The findings emphasise the abolitionist argument that camps cannot be turned into “better” places.
Exploring the relationship between governmental infectious disease management and emergency systems, I examine the turn to emergency in European measles management during the resurgence of the disease between 2017 and 2020. While measles management was shaped by hope for disease eradication and as a progressive pursuit of elimination, amid growing concerns with vaccination coverage, hope was redirected toward reversing regression in the struggle against infectious disease. I argue that perception of and action on public health issues as emergencies is intricately tied to change in the fundamental construct of governmental infectious disease management, regardless of change in the disease or its categorization.
Countless conflicts characterise the road-scape of Nagaland, a frontier border state in the Northeastern region of India. In such a milieu, transport routes in the form of roads transcend the technical imperative of mobility of people, goods, and services and become vehicles of hope, regulation and control. Keeping this duality of roads in mind, this article, through archival research and ethnohistoric accounts, explores how roads in this region became objects of dominance and their surfaces a potential space for conflicts and mitigating conflicts. It traces how roadways viewed as pathways to “civilisation” during the British colonial era (nineteenth century) came to define the state's conception of “appropriate” mobility and movements. The article contends that infrastructures built to connect people can augment a divide between “us” and “them” and signal newer forms of disconnect within the state-defined logic of connections.
The article aims to interrogate the contested category of womanhood by looking at literary narratives. Adopting a critical vocabulary underpinned by ‘corporeal feminism’, this reading investigates fictional episodes that dramatise the construction of a cultural imaginary informed by the hegemonic enterprise of masculine subjects. Such settings accommodate the complexity of a gendered landscape by bringing the female selves into problematic proximity with the male agency. In this article, an attempt has been made to analyse two Assamese novels written by women novelists— Dantāl Hātir Uñe Khowā Hāwdāh [Trans. The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker] by Mamoni Raisom Goswami and Phelāniı̄ [Trans. The Story of Felanee] by Arupa Patangia Kalita—both refracting serious slippages of the gendered spaces. The texts also accommodate inversions of such spaces. In so doing, it has been argued that a significant shift in the dominant practices of representations is marked by the novels. Both texts connect the embodied personal experience of womanhood with the socially situated selves and articulate what appears to be a subversive logic of corporeal performativity. Drawing on the critical currents in feminist literary theory, the current article offers a close reading of the novels, analysing the ways in which the fictional frames respond to the production and prohibition of gendered identities.
The paper discusses empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives on structurally and spatially ingrained racial capitalism, dispossession, and precarisation in what is identified as ‘neo-apartheid’ Sweden. Theoretically, the argument rests on a critical re-engagement of the notions of ‘racial capitalism’ and ‘neo-apartheid’ in contemporary critical research, inspired, historically, by rich research on racial capitalism in South Africa under apartheid. The argument is illustrated, empirically, by a scrutiny of processes of segregation, racial stigmatisation, and ‘the return of primitive accumulation’ reflected in predatory housing policies and super-exploitation of labour, conditioning livelihoods and opportunities of subaltern Others in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods. Through a local case in the region of Järvafältet in metropolitan Stockholm, the paper addresses subaltern struggles contesting these realities of racial capitalism in a society that used to be an international showpiece of social equality and inclusive diversity policy.
This article delves into the relation between the terms social dissonance, necropolitics and Sophocles' tragedy, Antigone. By attempting an interdisciplinary analysis and by bringing together elements of sound studies, political theory and classical literature, I will explore the contemporary dynamics between social dissonance, necropolitics and resistance. The key point is that beyond contemporary contexts or rather recent modernity, resistance to the authoritarian volition can be understood metaphorically as noise within a context of a wider social dissonance arrangement. While examining Antigone's defiance in the face of oppressive power, we are reminded of the individuals striving for justice and autonomy in the face of oppressive systems, as resistance to generalized capitalism prevailing positivity and appropriation. By juxtaposing the sociopolitical context in which Sophocles wrote Antigone and various manifestations of necropolitics in our times, this article explores the relevance of the play in today's ubiquitous surveillance and subjugation. Moreover, it emphasises the significance of the term 'social dissonance', as proposed by Mattin, in understanding the responses towards power struggles and forms of resistance. The collision of these concepts occurs, here, in their shared focus on power dynamics and resistance against oppressive systems: it explores the ways in which power operates, so as to control and manipulate individuals and communities, creating conditions of voluntary servitude and subjugation. As this analysis emphasises the potential for resistance, these terms can serve as a framework to challenge dominant narratives. When examining the intersection of necropolitics and social dissonance, we can explore how the exercise of necropolitical strategies leads to oppression by silencing dissent, suppressing alternative narratives and perpetuating oppressive structures. Silence is metaphorically seen here as a system of perpetuating power, subordinating resistance and ultimately, incorporating noise into the capitalist narrative. The clash between the dominant necropolitical regime and the underlying resistance exposes the tension and contradictions within society, laying the foundation for social movements.
Within this article, the often-used phrase of Special Educational Needs (SENs) is examined by pivoting upon three points of analysis. These being: its history, its definition, and its possible futures. This analysis reveals the hidden deceit contained within the lexicon, history, and the present performative acts of SEN. It is argued that SEN is haunted by the ghost of extant discourse and practices, namely, those of special needs. To move forward and to actually support children labelled with SEN, it is argued that extant discourses and practices must be allowed to pass into history, that a rights discourse should displace the ableist discourse of needs and that governments, all over the world, should listen to, hear, and act upon the voices of those labelled as SEN.
The article questions the paradigmatic nature ascribed to "the zone"-and the con-comitant dismissal of the camp's-by some analyses of the politics of capital's operations , and problematizes the very notion of the paradigm. Elaborating on previous reflections concerning contemporary agro-industrial zones in Italy, the article rethinks camps against state-centric and exceptionalist readings that consider them purely as sites of exclusion. At the same time, it retains a stress on the symbolic dimension of forms of containment and extraction, going beyond a narrow political economic approach. The zone and the camp, it is argued, are mutually imbricated "infrastructure spaces" of present-day agro-capital's operations, which, however, result from the sedimentation of spatialized techniques for labor disciplining, reproduction , and containment that have developed alongside capitalist forms of agriculture throughout the contemporary period. The camp is thus defined as a function of the political, sovereign dimensions of extraction, that may operate within but also beyond the state. Furthermore, it is underlain by differential attributions of humanness, and therefore by a specific biopolitical anthropology. Engaging in a genealogy of the (humanitarian and/as labor) camps that today proliferate in agro-industrial zones, I argue that to understand the spatial formations emerging from and sustaining the politics of contemporary capital operations a recursive analytics
How do the flexibilized scenes of cruel optimism crystallize and resonate with the situational displays of crises as a governmental oversight? Centering around this question, the paper aims to offer a critical fulcrum for problematic attachments toward future-mediated fantasies in the aftermath of the Kahramanmaras earthquakes. It starts with evaluating how the pastoral mode was applied as a cruel diagram of positivity by the Turkish government through the omnipresent prowess of the media, which presents an ‘ordinaryizing’ affect in regularizing the fatalistic discourses and relief efforts. It then continues to analyze the retributive discourses by the politicians and officials that triggered the oscillatory porosity among varied (de)subjectivities, toggling between sovereign misrecognitions and exclusions, as well as spiritually vivifying the optimistic barriers of cruelty. Lastly, it discusses in what ways the hopeful projections reconciled with the preemption by the dominant scientific narratives paradoxically prolong the preexistence of uncertainty and trust.
This article centres on contemporary mergers between state security practices, popular media and religion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It discusses the actions and the representations of BOPE – Batalhão de Operações Especiais da Polícia Militar do Rio de Janeiro – the special operations battalion of the military police of Rio de Janeiro, to show how this unit frequently employs Christian symbols and practices to legitimate violence at the border between the legal and the illegal. BOPE’s religious iconography is amplified by movies, memes, toys and popular clothing. BOPE’s military pop-culture can best be regarded as theopolitical because such a perspective underscores the fact that different Christian symbols and practices, derived from Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism, produce incoherent political theologies that are fuelled by bottom-up innovations and institutional legacies.
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