Necropolitics and the Migrant as a Political Subject of Disgust: The Precarious Everyday of Russia’s Labour Migrants

Abstract

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has positioned itself as a modernising country (re)built on the profits of its energy boom and the efforts of, currently, over four million labour migrants, the majority from Central Asia. Far too many migrants endure an extremely precarious everyday as they are forced to live in what this article describes as a citywide state of exception, within which legal frameworks protecting migrants are ignored or misinterpreted to the benefit of the market. Many migrants who desire ‘legality’ are forced into ‘illegality’ by their employers and landlords refusing to register their documents correctly, increasing their vulnerability. Such abuses are facilitated by the state construction of migrants as diseased and criminal, which in turn becomes embedded into cultural imaginations. Employing Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, this paper theorises how these constructions position migrants as superfluous and that they can be ‘let to die’. The research demonstrates that migrants are simultaneously visible and invisible to the state; with the latter, the legal uncertainty denies migrants access to welfare and a voice within the city, but they are visible for exploitation both in terms of their labour and the political capital gained from their presence.

Violent Inaction: The Necropolitical Experience of Refugees in Europe

“…Recent scholarship in this journal has drawn attention to the “let die” violence implicit in Mbembe's work. Gilbert and Ponder () have explored how withholding compensation for 9/11 victims can be considered tantamount to a violent act (see Davies and Polese ; Round and Kuznetsova ). Squire () discusses how “acts of desertion” in the Sonoran desert induces the “abjectification” of migrant others.…”

Pathogens and Immigrants: A Critical Appraisal of the Behavioral Immune System as an Explanation of Prejudice Against Ethnic Outgroups

“…When it comes to linking disgust and attitudes toward ethnic outgroups and immigrants, social science research suggests two ways to make the connection. On the one hand, a politics of disgust can use stereotypical characterizations of certain groups to elicit the emotion of disgust in processes of “othering” (Douglas, 1966; Tyler, 2013; Round and Kuznetsova, 2016). The BIS could be understood as the psychological basis that ensures the effectiveness of such a politics.…”

The Queue

“…While I acknowledge a debt to phenomenological anthropology in the analysis that follows, my approach emerges first and foremost from an ethnographic commitment, attentive to what people do and how people talk about what they do; how the 'everyday' is rendered livable in circumstances that are often cast as those of a 'living death' (Round and Kuznetsova 2016). In her study of the effort involved in making a livable life in the context of the US obesity epidemic, a chronic condition of contemporary capitalism 'where life building and the attrition of human life are indistinguishable', Laurent Berlant (2007: 754) draws attention to what she calls forms of 'lateral agency'.…”

“…Focusing on this active work of waiting takes my analysis in a different direction from some of the more normative analysis of migrant experience in Russia. In a recent article, Round and Kuznetsova (2016) argue that the intrinsic violence and human disregard implicit in the migration bureaucracy means that we should focus on the necropolitics of migration Madeleine Reeves management in contemporary Russia, rather than its biopolitics. 'The raison d'être of Central Asian migrants in Russia from the perspective of the state and the majority of employers', they argue, 'is simply and solely as a socioeconomic slave body, both individually and collectively, whose labour is abused so political and economic power can be advanced.…”