Governing Potential

Biopolitical Incorporation and the German 'Open-Door' Refugee and Migration Policy

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2236852
AutoresPatrick Pinkerton (Queen Mary University of London, autor correspondente)
Ano2019
Volume13
Fascículo2
Páginas128-144
Data de publicação2019-06-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoInternational Political Sociology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1749-5679 • E-ISSN: 1749-5687
EditoraOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ips/oly033
OpenAlexW2907106978
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas9
Referências citadas31

Many scholars of international political sociology have turned to biopolitics in their attempts to understand the “European migration/refugee crisis” that has unfolded in and around the Mediterranean Sea in the last several years. This article makes an intervention into this debate by suggesting a new means of understanding the biopolitics of migration and refugee management, based on a detailed consideration of the role of potentiality in biopolitical governance. After first discussing current understandings of potentiality within biopolitical literatures, and the analyses of migration and refugee governance they suggest, the article engages in a reading of Agamben's recent work The Use of Bodies, in order to develop a new understanding of life's potential within biopolitical logics as potential toward the “correct use” of bodies. This allows for a focus on biopolitical practices of incorporation and inclusion which goes beyond analyses of the acts of securitization or abandonment that only partially characterize reactions to the movement of people across the Mediterranean Sea. This understanding is employed to provide fresh insights into one of the defining responses to the “European migration/refugee crisis”: the “open-door” migration and refugee policy pursued by the German government under Chancellor Angela Merkel from the summer of 2015 onward.

Biopower · German · Migration studies · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Gender Studies · Global Security and Public Health · History · Law · Political Theology and Sovereignty