Governing global slums: The biopolitics of target 11

Global Governance

Volumn 14, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 305-326

  Di Muzio, Tim ^a  

^a TRENT UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Biopolitics; Community based organizations; Governance; Neoliberalism; Nongovernmental organizations; Slums

Indexed keywords

EID: 52649105375     PISSN: 10752846     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/19426720-01403005     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Space does not permit a complete listing ot the relevant literature here. How-ever, important contributions and representative samples would include Rodney Bruce Hall and Thomas Biersteker, The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Securityq (New York: Zed Books, 2001); and Thomas G. Weiss and Leon Gordenker, eds., NGOs, The United Nations, and Global Governance (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996).
2. Michael Edwards and David Hulme, "Too Close for Comfort? The Impact of Official Aid on Nongovernmental Organizations," World Development 24, no. 6 (1996): 961-973.
3. UN Human Settlement Program, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003 (London: Earthscan and UN-Habitat, 2003).
4. Isabelle Milbert, "Slums, Slum Dwellers and Multilevel Governance," European Journal of Development Research 18, no. 2 (June 2006): 299-318.
5. UN Habitat has divided the range of actors working in slums into three categories: (1) international, multilateral, and bilateral agencies, (2) networks, and (3) national and local bodies; see UN Settlement Program, The Challenge of Slums, p. 135, box 7.9.
6. United Nations Development Programme, Task Force on Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers, Achieving the Millennium Development Goals, A Home in the City (London: Earthscan, 2005), p. 3.
7. There are eight UN Millennium Development Goals; see www.un.org/mil- lenniumgoals.
8. Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill, eds., Power, Production and Social Reproduction (New York: Palgrave, 2003); John McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 1999); Caroline Thomas, Global Governance, Development and Human insecurity: The Challenge of Poverty and Inequality (London: Pluto Press, 2000).
9. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, "Biopower Today," BioSocieties 1 (2006): 195-217.
10. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
11. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), p. 200.
12. UN Human Settlement Program, State of the World's Cities 2006/7 (London: Earthscan and UN-Habitat, 2006/07), p. 50.
13. This, of course, is not to suggest that slums are extermination camps on par with Auschwitz or Treblinka. Nor is it to suggest that all slum ecologies are identical. However, there are three reasons for making the "camp" analogy. First, rural-to-urban migration is leading to a tremendous concentration of bodies in these environments, and overcrowding is common in many slum settlements. Second, although slum residents are not forced by walls and arms to remain in their settlements, their poverty generally limits their mobility. Third, it is well documented that living in informal settlements such as slums increases the chances of morbidity. For an earlier comparison of slums with Nazi extermination camps (something I do not do in this article), see Paul Chodoff, "The Nazi Concentration Camp and the American Poverty Ghetto: A Comparison," Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy 1, no. 1 (1968): 27-36.
14. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Toronto: Penguin, 1990); see especially section 8.
15. UN Human Settlement Program, State of the World's Cities, p. 19.
16. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revision (New York: United Nations, 2003), p. 3.
17. UN Human Settlement Program, State of the World's Cities, p. x. See also UN Human Settlement Program, Slums of the World: The Face of Urban Poverty in the New Millennium? Working Paper (New York: United Nations, 2003), p. 54.
18. UN Human Settlement Program, State of the World's Cities, p. 20.
19. Ibid., p. 19.
20. Mark Duffield, "Governing the Borderlands: Decoding the Power of Aid," Disasters 25, no. 4 (December 2001): 311.
21. Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended," Lectures at the Collége de France, 1975-1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 241.
22. Rabinow and Rose, "Biopower Today," pp. 197-198.
23. Sheldon A. Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (London: Edward Arnold, 1977).
24. Mike Davis, "The Urbanization of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of Chaos," Social Text 22, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 9-15.
25. UN Human Settlement Program, State of the World's Cities, p. xiii.
26. Ibid., p. x.
27. Ibid., p. 16.
28. Ibid., p. 16.
29. Ibid., p. xi.
30. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, p. 23.
31. Ibid.
32. UN Human Settlement Program, State of the World's Cities, pp. ix-x.
33. United Nations Development Programme, A Home in the City, p. xiv.
34. World Bank, A Better Investment Climate for Everyone: World Development Report 2005 (Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2005).
35. United Nations Development Programme, A Home in the City, p. 61.
36. UN Human Settlement Program, State of the World's Cities, p. 168.
37. UN Millennium Project, Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals (London: Earthscan, UN Development Programme, 2005), p. 126.
38. UN Settlement Program, The Challenge of Slums, pp. 160-161.
39. Robert Cox, quoted in Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (New York: Zed Books, 2001), p. 4.
40. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, pp. 201-206.
41. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Handbook for Joint Urban Operations (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2000), p. 3. See also US Space Command, Vision 2020, available at www.middlepowers.org/gsi/docs/ vision_2020.pdf (accessed 26 December 2006), p. 6, where the report notes the expected widening of the division between the haves and have-nots under conditions of globalization.
42. UN Settlement Program, The Challenge of Slums, p. 128ff.
43. United Nations Development Programme, A Home in the City, pp. 42-43.
44. UN Settlement Program, The Challenge of Slums, p. 132.
45. For a discussion on technologies of the self, see Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
46. United Nations Development Programme, A Home in the City, p. 3.
47. James Petras, "Imperialism and NGOs in Latin America," Monthly Review 49, no. 7 (1997).
48. Sangeeta Kamat, "The Privatization of Public Interest: Theorizing NGO Discourse in a Neoliberal Era," Review of International Political Economy 11, no. 1 (2004): 169.
49. John Gerard Ruggie, "International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order," International Organization 36 (1982): 379-415.
50. Akbar S. Zaidi, "NGO Failure and the Need to Bring Back the State," Journal of International Development 11, no. 2 (March-April 1999): 269. See also UN Settlement Program, The Challenge of Slums, p. 148.
51. Robert Cox, "Civil Society at the Turn of the Millennium: Prospects for an Alternative World Order," Review of International Studies 25, no. 1 (1999): 3-8.
52. Arjun Appadurai, "Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics," Environment and Urbanization 13, no. 2 (2001): 23-43.
53. Kamat, "The Privatization of Public Interest"; James Petras, "NGOs in the Service of Neoliberalism," Journal of Contemporary Asia 29, no. 4 (1999): 438.
54. Zaidi, "NGO Failure," p. 263; UN Settlement Program, The Challenge of Slums, p. 158.
55. Andrea Cornwall and Karen Brock, "What Do Buzzwords Do for Development Policy? A Critical Look at 'Participation,' 'Empowerment' and 'Poverty Reduction,'" Third World Quarterly 26, no. 7 (2005): 1054.
56. Zaidi, "NGO Failure," p. 269.
57. UN Human Settlement Program, State of the World's Cities, pp. xi-xii.
58. Kamat, "The Privatization of Public Interest," pp. 167-168.
59. Ibid., p. 171.
60. United Nations, Millennium Development Goals Report 2005 (New York: United Nations), p. 35, available at: www.un.org/Docs/sununit2005/MDGBook. pdf (accessed 26 December 2006).
61. UN Settlement Program, The Challenge of Slums, p. 36.
62. Ibid., p. 40.
63. Michael Dobbs, "Free Market Left Haiti's Rice Growers Behind," Washington Post, 13 April 2000; Jane Regan "Some Areas Really Miss Tariff," Miami Herald, 26 October 2003.
64. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 3.