Lives in the Balance: Weak and Disabled Prisoners and the Biopolitics of the Gulag

Healey, Dan

doi:10.1353/kri.2015.0047

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…With these models of discipline in mind, we now turn to the post-Soviet prison to flesh out the apparatus of collective self-governance, which has deep roots in Soviet structures of punishment. Informal governing structures—responsible for all aspects of prison life from sanitary work to law enforcement—ran to the core of Stalin’s vast prison camp apparatus (Healey, 2015). These were reduced, but structurally unchanged, by Khrushchev during de-Stalinization, and propelled to the center of prison life after the fall of the Soviet Union (Applebaum, 2003; Varese, 2001).…”

Section: Collective Self-governance In the Soviet Unionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The collective body: Legacies of monastic discipline in the post-Soviet prison

Azbel

Morse

Rhodes

2020

Theoretical Criminology

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The emergence of the prisoner subject is an element of local practices, including how health is governed. Yet, disciplinary practices have been overlooked in research on health in post-Soviet prisons. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 40 male prisoners in Kyrgyzstan, this article performs a genealogical analysis by applying models of subjectivity from Christian monasticism to understand how a healthy body emerges through the contingent governing relations of the post-Soviet prison. An apparatus of “collective self-governance” produces bodies that extend the self to the collective and blur the boundaries between physical and moral health. Here, unlike in the West, the idealization of an autonomous subject is inimical to agency and, by extension, health. Rather, a healthy body is produced through a healing process that rests on submission to the collective, with the threat of exile imminent. In such settings, health interventions aimed at the individual are unlikely to succeed without a consideration of collective healing practices.

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Section: Collective Self-governance In the Soviet Unionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The collective body: Legacies of monastic discipline in the post-Soviet prison

Azbel

Morse

Rhodes

2020

Theoretical Criminology

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“…Russia: the immortal regiment, the blockade blood and the party of the dead Among a bulk of works written about the USSR and post-Soviet Russia, there is only a handful that approaches the topic from a wider biopolitical paradigm (Bassin 2016;Makarychev and Yatsyk 2018b;Kalinina 2017;Toropova 2015;Khagi 2011). Some focus on the Stalinist times (Sandomirskaya 2012;Prozorov 2016;Healey 2015), using the concepts of biopolitics and thanatopolitics through the lens of governing people's death to preserve the existing regime. The narrative dictating that those, who are alive, should be ready to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the whole nationif it is required by the stateis at the core of thanatopolitical policies, and it remains an important pillar of the current Russian nation-building.…”

Section: Poland: Memory Politics Based On Martyrological Messianismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biopolitical conservatism in Europe and beyond: the cases of identity-making projects in Poland and Russia

Yatsyk

2019

Journal of Contemporary European Studies

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In this article, I compare Polish and Russian national identity projects as they are being developed by the Kremlin and the ruling PiS (Law and Justice) party after 2012 and 2015, correspondingly. I raise a question about nodal points of Poland's and Russia's collective identities and their institutional references as 'illiberal democracies' to the European normative order. I argue, that despite the existing differences between the two national projects, they are similar in opposing themselves to the EU liberal paradigm and emphasizing the traditional and religious values as the key principles in family planning, gender and sexual issues, migrants and workforce policy. In other words, I understand both national projects as illiberal biopolitical conservatisms, which imply concepts of separation and defence from the 'liberal West' in their discursive core.

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“…In Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag, the penal system was presupposed as a world physically cut off and remote. Recent scholarship has challenged this by arguing that there was porosity between the barbed wire fences and Soviet society and, further, that there was a dynamic and interactive relationship between penality and Soviet society (see Healey, 2015). As Brown (2007) notes, the prison system existed at one end of a spectrum of repression but at the other end, all Soviet citizens were subject to an incarcerated geography of Soviet-style socialism (through rigid restrictions on internal movement, brutal labour laws and internal exile).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Carceral framing of human rights in Russian prisons

Piacentini

Katz

2016

Punishment & Society

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This paper introduces to punishment and society scholarship a new carceral framing of human rights in Russian prisons. Russian imprisonment remains elusive to prisons scholars and ethnographers around the world. Moreover, on the subject of prisoners' rights specifically, the scholarship is dominated by legal discourse. The empirical and theoretical scholarship that has developed over the last twenty years has argued that Russian imprisonment is exceptional in the study of world penal systems with the research seeking to gain a sense of this exceptionality through looking at the inertial legacies of Gulag penal culture on present day punishment forms. This article attempts to challenge this claim and will argue that specifically in the area of human rights, Russia has followed a not dissimilar carceral formation to Western prisons. Through an interrogation of the cultural, political and historical factors underpinning how rights are framed in Russian prisons the article suggests that human rights are operationalised as a lever for legal and penal control. This is a significant new finding in the study of Russian imprisonment because of the questions that arise around penal resilience, how rights and penal power develop through discourse and how global penal norms converge across jurisdictions.

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Lives in the Balance: Weak and Disabled Prisoners and the Biopolitics of the Gulag

Cited by 5 publications

References 25 publications

The collective body: Legacies of monastic discipline in the post-Soviet prison

The collective body: Legacies of monastic discipline in the post-Soviet prison

Biopolitical conservatism in Europe and beyond: the cases of identity-making projects in Poland and Russia

Carceral framing of human rights in Russian prisons

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