Biopolitics of migration: An assemblage approach

Abstract

Critical research on migration, borders and camps has used the notion of biopolitics to interrogate how sovereign power or the state differentiate and govern the life of mobile populations. Yet despite its popularity, biopolitical theory is not without limitations, particularly when used as an analytic lens for empirical research. Many theorists of biopolitics are concerned with grand historical shifts and binary oppositions between life and death, inclusion and exclusion, bare life and political rights. Such binaries have been challenged by recent research that points to complex and nuanced differentiations of belonging and citizenship, to the ambiguity of power relations, and that prioritizes the agency and experience of individuals over structuralist conceptions of oppression. Against this background, I suggest that assemblage thinking and the works of Deleuze and Guattari offer terms and concepts that can be made useful to reconsider biopolitics as an analytic approach. Assemblage thinking challenges traditional oppositions between the individual and the collective, structure and agency, oppression and resistance and may thus be more sensitive to the complexity of power relations that integrate the life of migrants. In particular, I examine how revised conceptions of power, life, difference and population challenge the assumption of a central origin of power and an understanding of biopolitics as spatially or historically confined. By considering biopolitics as multiple and becoming, analysis can become more sensitive to the biopolitical experience of migrants, and to the formation of alternative collectives and subjectivities that challenge the violent biopolitics of contemporary migration regimes.

Migrant subjectivities and temporal flexibility of East‐Central European labour migration to the United Kingdom

“…Our paper reveals how temporal "flexploitation," which closes links with the past and future pathways, unsettles expectations of a relatively coherent migrant identity. Our findings add to the existing discussions on "assembled" migrations (Collins, 2018;Wiertz, 2020) by highlighting the increasing pressures of temporal flexibility supported by instrumental values and measurable functionality. Such pressures hollow out migrant identity by creating emptiness ("antiproductivity") and develop what Blanchot (1992, 6) describes as "morcellated self."…”

“…In conversation with Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Collins (2018:967) argues that "the multiple temporalities of migration, the relational spatialities … emanate from particular "assemblages," arrangements of bodies, things and ideas." Different bodies (recruiters and migrants), temporal functions (durations and techniques of speed), and objects like food, cultural valorisations constitute migrant assemblages and enable temporal relations that cut across geographical boundaries (Wiertz, 2020). In this paper, we draw on the productive function of assemblage to develop new temporal configurations of flexibility and unexpected connections between mobile subjects, flows, and signs.…”

Desired Muslims: Neoliberalism, halal food production and the assemblage of Muslim expertise, service providers and labour in New Zealand and Brazil

“…The assemblage approach can illuminate the spatio-temporal dynamics, complexity, contradictions and nuances of phenomena and is therefore useful for analyses in the fields of ethnicity and migration (e.g. Collins, 2018; Düvell, 2019; Wiertz, 2020) and the context of the international halal business (e.g. Bergeaud-Blackler et al., 2016), which are all structured by diverse and somewhat contradictory logics.…”

Foucauldian Biopolitics, Irregular Immigrants and COVID-19 in Malaysia

“…This paper applies the "biopolitics of migration" as the conceptual underpinning of the discussion. While the term "biopolitics" referred to management and governing of life in the 1970s, the "biopolitics of migration" refers to the administration of migrants, spatial configurations and any form of power relations (Wiertz, 2020). In Southeast Asia, immigration control regimes have employed Foucauldian disciplinary power (Nah, 2012).…”