Biopolitics, communication and global governance

Review of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue SUPPL. 1, 2008, Pages 211-232

  Edkins, Jenny ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 43149092695     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210508007870     Document Type: Article

References (113)

1. Speech given near Tavistock Square, London, Monday 11 July 2005.
2. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign. Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998);
3. G. Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). For detailed discussions of Agamben's work in relation to the concerns here,
4. see Jenny Edkins, 'Whatever Politics', in Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (eds.), Sovereignty and Life: Essays on Giorgio Agamben (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 70-91;
5. and Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat, 'Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34 (2005), pp. 1-24.
6. See, for example, Benedikt Korf, 'Antinomies of Generosity - Moral Geographies and Post-Tsunami Aid in Southeast Asia', Geoforum, 38 (2007), pp. 366-78;
7. Ronit Lentin, 'Femina Sacra: Gendered Memory and Political Violence', Womens Studies International Forum, 29 (2006), pp. 463-73;
8. Christine Sylvester, "Bare Life as a Development/Postcolonial Problematic', Geographical Journal, 172 (2006), pp. 66-77;
9. Carsten B. Laustsen and Bulent Diken, Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp (London and New York: Routledge, 2005);
10. Jenny Edkins, Véronique Pin-Fat, and Michael J. Shapiro (eds.), Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics (New York: Routledge, 2004);
11. Jef Huysmans, 'Minding Exceptions: The Politics of Insecurity and Liberal Democracy', Contemporary Political Theory, 3:3 (2004), pp. 321-41;
12. Rens Van Munster, 'The War on Terrorism: When the Exception Becomes the Rule", International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 17:2 (2004), pp. 141-53;
13. Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr, 'The Irregular Migrant as Homo Sacer: Migration and Detention in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand', International Migration, 42:1 (2004), pp. 33-64;
14. Bulent Diken and Carsten B. Laustsen, 'Zones of Indistinction: Security, Terror and Bare Life', Space and Culture, 5:3 (2002), pp. 290-307;
15. Jenny Edkins and R. B. J. Walker (eds.), Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics: Alternatives, 25:1 (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000.
16. Ernesto Laclau, 'Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy?', in Calarco and DeCaroli (eds.), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, pp. 11-22. Examples of IR scholars critical of Agamben in various ways, including the argument that he dismisses sovereignty too easily, include: Claudia Aradau, 'Law transformed: Guantanamo and the "other" exception', Third World Quarterly, 28 (2007), pp. 498-501;
17. Mika Ojakangas, 'Impossible Dialogue on Bio-Power: Agamben and Foucault', Foucault Studies, 2 (2005), pp. 5-28;
18. Sergei Prozorov, 'X/Xs: Toward a General Theory of the Exception', Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 30:1 (2005), pp. 81-112;
19. Andrew Neal, 'Cutting Off the King's Head: Foucault's 'Society Must Be Defended' and the Problem of Sovereignty', Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 29:4 (2004), pp. 373-98;
20. Sergei Prozorov, "Three Theses on "Governance" and the Political', Journal of International Relations and Development, 7:3 (2004);
21. R. B. J. Walker, 'Sovereignties, Exceptions, Worlds', in Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, eds. Jenny Edkins, Véronique Pin-Fat and Michael J. Shapiro (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 239-49;
22. William E. Connolly, 'The Complexity of Sovereignty', in Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, pp. 23-40, at 29.
23. See also Calarco and DeCaroli (eds.), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life.
24. For other discussions of events in London in July 2005 as part of a globalisation of the localised state of exception, see Claudio Minea, 'Giorgio Agamben and the New Biopolitical Nomos', Geografiska Annaler, Series B: Human Geography, 88 (2006), pp. 387-403,
25. and Nick Vaughan-Williams, 'The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes: New Border Politics?', Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 32 (2007), pp. 177-95. These authors pay particular attention to the spatial aspects of the events, whereas I focus here on communication and the production of subjectivities.
26. Michael Dillon, 'Governing Terror: The State of Emergency of Biopolitical Emergence', International Political Sociology, 1 (2007), pp. 7-28.
27. See also Michael Dillon, 'Governing through Contingency: The Security of Biopolitical Governance', Political Geography, 26 (2007), pp. 41-7;
28. Michael Dillon and Luis Lobo-Guerrero, 'Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century', unpublished paper (2007);
29. Agamben, Homo Sacer; Agamben, State of Exception.
30. Dillon, 'Governing Terror', p. 19.
31. Or, in Dillon's phrase, there is 'more to life than meets the molecular biopolitics of contemporary biopower': 'Governing Terror', p. 20.
32. Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
33. Although 'life, especially the life of populations, is characterised by contingency', in this context 'contingency is not arbitrary chance' (Dillon, 'Governing through Contingency', p. 45). The contingency of the traumatic (the contingency beyond the contingent) is precisely a demonstration of the absolutely arbitrary; it is the reduction of population to a singularity: a population of one, the level at which statistics no longer apply.
34. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, p. 233.
35. Sandra Laville, 'Mother's Fury at "Slaughter of the Innocents'", The Guardian (London and Manchester), 12 July 2005, p. 1.
36. 'Communication' is used here not with any connotations of the transference of previously formulated thoughts or images or events from one person to another or several others, but rather as 'encompassing the multiple circuits of exchange and circulation of goods, people and messages': Armand Mattelart, The Invention of Communication (Minneapolis, MN and London: 1996), p. xiv.
37. 'Excommunication' is Mattelart's term (see Interview with Armand Mattelart in this Special Issue, pp. 33-4); for 'dissidence' in IR writing,
38. see Richard K. Ashley and R. B. J. Walker (eds.), 'Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissident Thought in International Studies', International Studies Quarterly, 34 (1990),
39. Special Issue; David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 4.
40. I capitalise to indicate the academic discipline, following convention for once.
41. Jenny Edkins (ed.), 'Ethics and Practices of Engagement: Intellectuals in World Polities', International Relations, 19 (2005), Special Forum Section, pp. 61-134.
42. The term 'performative writing' is gaining currency in the humanities and social sciences. See Ronald J. Pelias, 'Performative Writing as Scholarship: An Apology, an Argument, an Anecdote', Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, 5 (2005), pp. 415-24.
43. More frequently perhaps, 'traumatised victims' become academics. There are numerous examples-in 'Holocaust Studies', for example, many people now writing as academics have reached that position via a family or personal history of involvement.
44. Susan J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002).
45. Marie Fatayi-Williams, For the Love of Anthony: A Mother's Search for Peace after the London Bombings (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006);
46. John Tulloch, One Day in July: Experiencing 7/7 (London: Little, Brown, 2006). Tulloch's book is most notable to me for the postscript in which he addresses the bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan, directly, as a fellow person.
47. The London authorities had obviously learned the lessons of the aftermath of Diana's death in 1997 and the street memorials in Manhattan in 2001 : by July 2005 memorial activities were allowed but closely circumscribed, in this case by iron railings. See Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg, Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), for example, p. 51.
48. For discussions of memorial practices in New York after 9/11 see, for example, David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006);
49. Jenny Edkins, 'Ground Zero: Reflections on Trauma, Indistinction and Response', Journal for Cultural Research, 8 (2004), pp. 247-70;
50. and Jenny Edkins, 'The Rush to Memory and the Rhetoric of War', Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 31 (2003), pp. 231-51.
51. The Guardian later reported that 'Magda Gluck, whose 29-year-old twin sister, Karolina, was killed at Russell Square, said the aftermath was a "big mess. It took us more than a week to find out that she was killed. It was too long to find out that kind of information". The family received compensation of £11,000'. [Victims of 7/7 bombs were not given enough help, ministers admit: Alan Travis, The Guardian (London and Manchester), Saturday 23 September 2006.].
52. Jenny Edkins, 'Missing Persons: Manhattan, September 2001', in Elizabeth Dauphinee and Cristina Masters (eds.), The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror: Living, Dying, Surviving (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 25-42.
53. Faces of Tragedy: Survivors survey posters of missing tsunami victims in Indonesia's Aceh province. Photo by Matthew Miller. 2 April 2005. SBC Baptist Press News, Southern Baptist Convention, Baptist Press 〈http://www.bpnews. net/images/IMG2005249686HI.jpg〉. Last accessed 6 February 2007.
54. Edkins, 'Missing Persons: Manhattan, September 2001'.
55. This argument is presented more fully in Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics.
56. For an account of the production of famine as 'disaster' see Jenny Edkins, Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of A id (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
57. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics.
58. Dillon, 'Governing Terror'. Of course, neither of these practices can succeed: both are impossible.
59. Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
60. For a more detailed development of this argument, see Jenny Edkins, 'Remembering Relationality: Trauma Time and Polities', in Duncan Bell (ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 99-115.
61. Agamben, Homo Sacer.
62. There is much more to be said about the distinctions between the two ways of developing Foucault's thinking proposed by Agamben and Dillon, but I do not have space here. The state of emergency is of course a feature of the work of Carl Schmitt as well: Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For another reading of contemporary biopolitics that develops Foucault's thinking,
63. see Brian Massumi, 'The Future Birth of the Affective Fact', in Sinews of the Present: Genealogies of Biopolitics: Proceedings of the Colloquium (Workshop in Radical Empiricism, 2005), 〈http://www.radicalempiricism.org/ biotextes/anglais_index.html〉. Accessed 26 September 2006.
64. Dillon, 'Governing Terror', p. 18.
65. Ibid., p. 18.
66. Straight from the heart. The Guardian (London and Manchester), Wednesday 13 July 2005, 〈http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0.,5237594-117079. 00.html〉. Accessed 10 November 2006.
67. Ibid.
68. London Assembly, Richard Barnes AM (Chair), 'Report of the 7 July Review Committee', June 2006, Report, vol. 1, 157 pp., paragraph 9.3 p. 98.
69. 'Missing People Sought after Bombs', BBC News Sunday 10 July 2005. 〈http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4666679.stm〉. Last accessed 18 October 2006.
70. London Assembly Report, vol. 1, paragraph 7.3, p. 84.
71. London Assembly, Richard Barnes AM (Chair), 'Report of the 7 July Review Committee', June 2006, vol. 3: Views and Information from Individuals, 296 pp., p. 43.
72. London Assembly Report, vol. 1, paragraph 7.2, p. 84.
73. Ibid., paragraph 9.9, p. 99.
74. Ibid., paragraph 9.9, p. 99.
75. Ibid., paragraph 9.9, p. 99.
76. Ibid., paragraph 9.5, p. 98.
77. Duncan Gardham and Nicole Martin, 'How Much Blood Must Be Spilled, A Mother Asks", Daily Telegraph (London), 13 July 2005, 〈http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid= V1AYTHXQSP1ZVQFIQMFCFF4AVCBQYIV0?xml=/news/2005/07/12/nvictl2.xml〉. Accessed 14 November 2006.
78. Gardham and Martin, 'How Much Blood Must be Spilled'.
79. London Assembly Report, vol. 1, paragraph 9.1.
80. Ibid., paragraph 9.3.
81. 'Bomb Victim IDs May Take Weeks - Coroner', The Guardian (London and Manchester), Friday 15 July 2005, p. 7.
82. Joshua Rozenberg, 'Relatives of Tube bomber Want another Post Mortem', The Daily Telegraph (London), 29 October 2005. 〈http://www. telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?〉 Accessed 15 November 2006.
83. Yusuph Olaniyonu and Frank Kintum, 'Anthony Fatayi-Williams Body Recovered', Online Nigeria, Friday, July 15, 2005 〈http://nm.onlinenigeria. com/templates/?a=3831&z=12〉. Accessed 15 November 2006.
84. "Inquest into Oil Executive Opens', The Daily Telegraph (London), 14 July 2005. 〈http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ news/2005/07/14/uinquest.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/07/14/ixportaltop. html〉. Accessed 14 November 2006.
85. Fatayi-Williams, For the Love of Anthony, p. 38.
86. Ibid., p. 48.
87. London Assembly Report, vol. 3, p. 223.
88. Paula Dear, 'Don't Wait for me Tonight, Mum', BBC News 〈http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5098448.stm〉, accessed 12 November 2006.
89. Fatayi-Williams, For the Love of Anthony, p. 86.
90. London Assembly, Richard Barnes AM (Chair), 'Report of the 7 July Review Committee', June 2006, vol. 1, Report, vol. 2, Views and information from organisations, vol. 3, Views and Information from Individuals.
91. London Assembly Report, vol. 1, paragraph 9.3 p. 98. The Guardian had noted on 12 July that following the Madrid bombings in 2004, where more than 190 people died, most of the bodies had been identified within 24 hours and most were buried within three days of the attacks (Giles Tremlett, 'Spanish Reaction: Admiration Mingled with Astonishment over Calm Response'), The Guardian (London and Manchester), 12 July 2005, p. 3.
92. UK Cabinet Office, John Reid (Home Secretary) and Tessa Jowell (Culture Secretary). 'Addressing the Lessons from the Emergency Response to the 7th July 2005 London Bombings: What we Learned and What we are Doing about it.' 22 September 2006. 32 pp.
93. UK Cabinet Office. 'Addressing the Lessons', paragraph 49, p. 12.
94. The International Criminal Police Organization - Interpol. 'Disaster Victim Identification'. Accessed 6 February 2007 〈http://www.interpol.int/ Public/DisasterVictim/Default.asp〉. The manual is available at 〈http://www.interpol.int/Public/DisasterVictirn/guide/default.asp〉.
95. The forms are available at 〈http://www.interpol.int/Public/ DisasterVictim/Forms/Default.asp〉, accessed 15 November 2006.
96. The fact that there is no space for name on the form that the authorities recovering bodies use could explain why, even when the victim had given a name before they died, it did not link with the body.
97. Marie Fatayi-Williams confirms that this is the case: she was asked repeatedly whether Anthony was wearing a watch. Since she had not been staying with him on the morning of the bombings she did not know. Personal communication 7 December 2006.
98. Alan Travis, 'Victims of 7/7 Bombs Were Not Given Enough Help, Ministers Admit', The Guardian (London and Manchester), Saturday 23 September 2006.
99. Jason Bennetto, 'Terror in London: Police Identifying Victims of Asian Tsunami Switch', The Independent (London), 12 July 2005 〈http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20050712/ ai_n14719312〉. Accessed 12 November 2006.
100. Bennetto, 'Police Identifying Victims'.
101. David Hare, The Permanent Way or La Voie Anglaise (London: Faber & Faber, 2003).
102. 〈www.disasteraction.org.uk〉, accessed 15 November 2005.
103. Disaster Action. 'When Disaster Strikes - Disaster Victim Identification: Issues for Families and Implications for Police Family Liaison Officers (FLOs) and Coroner's Officers (COs)', p. 3. 〈http://www.disasteraction.org.uk/ guidance.htm〉, accessed 6 February 2007.
104. BBC News UK. 'In Full: Blair on Bomb Blasts. Statement from Downing Street, 1730 BST 7 July 2005', 〈http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4659953. stm〉, accessed 12 November 2006.
105. London Assembly Report, vol. 1, paragraph 11.6.
106. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror.
107. Dillon, 'Governing Terror", p. 9.
108. Ibid., pp. 15, 18.
109. Ibid., p. 24.
110. Ibid., p. 20.
111. For the development of a similar idea about how 'responding to threat requires the time of government to be politically corrected", see Massumi, 'The Future Birth of the Affective Fact'. Thanks to Nick Vaughan-Williams for drawing my attention to the similarities here.
112. London Assembly Report, vol. 1, paragraph 1.15, p. 9.
113. Ibid., paragraph 1.17, p. 9.