Regulating epidemic space: the nomos of global circulation

Opitz, Sven

doi:10.1057/jird.2014.30

Cited by 16 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…Nadine Voelkner’s account relating to Burmese migrant communities in Thailand highlights the ‘productive interplay of a range of human and non-human elements’ in the governance of ‘pathogenic circulation’ (Voelkner 2011 : 253). Sven Opitz ( 2016 ) describes how preparation planning by international organisations such as the WHO does not only use a range of technologies to control the spread of disease but problematises materialities of global traffic: infrastructures and objects of mobility are the main concern of WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR), which outline the preparations for a global pandemic and have been amended after the first SARS pandemic (ibid. : 265).…”

Section: Theorising Infrastructures Beyond Circulation: Good Circulation Bad Circulation and Safe Assemblagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It provides for moments of disconnectivity by means of spatial separation until bodies can, again, be securely released into circulation. (Opitz 2016 : 276) Opitz engages with Foucault’s genealogy of liberal government as it emphasises the inherent connection between political rationalities, space and infectious disease and thus allows an understanding of the entanglement of circulation and its interruption. Moreover, it allows a focus on a consequence of the entanglement of circulation with interruption and of the orders of circulatory (il)legitimacy that has so far gone largely unnoticed, since it mainly entered the analytical optic as a ephemeral entity, namely the formation of assemblages.…”

Section: Theorising Infrastructures Beyond Circulation: Good Circulation Bad Circulation and Safe Assemblagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Within literatures on global health and infrastructures alike, the dilemma of crisis governance has mostly been captured as an interplay of disabling and enabling good and bad forms of circulation (Collier and Lakoff 2015 ; Voelkner 2011 ; Opitz 2016 ). As the current crisis has made clear, economic circulation pertains to, and presupposes, not only the circulation of commodities, of capital and the securing of supply chains, but also, and crucially, the mobility of people: commuters and border crossers travelling to work; consumers shopping around; tourists indulging in long-haul travel and intensive social contacts; and business people (and, it has to be added, academics) who travel very long distances in a very short time, meeting very many people.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Safe assemblages: thinking infrastructures beyond circulation in the times of SARS-CoV2

Langenohl

Westermeier

2021

J Int Relat Dev

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The ongoing covid-19 pandemic has prompted discussions, both politically and analytically, that frame its security problematic as an infrastructural dilemma that unfolds between the public health-related need for interrupting the movement of people and calls to keep economic processes of production, distribution and consumption going. Moving beyond this diagnosis, we argue that infrastructural responses to the crisis in the European Union have resulted in the creation and invocation of economic and socio-material assemblages that are expected to steer societies through the crisis, which we term ‘safe assemblages’. In empirical terms, we discuss the cases of the creation of economic emergency funds which we view as economic assemblages that guarantee payment connectivity for struggling businesses, and of the invocation of the ‘home’ as an assemblage that minimises contagion risks while maintaining social connectivity through digital means. In theoretical terms, we suggest expanding current theorisations of the role of circulation in security infrastructures, referring to Foucault, by a consideration of assemblages as a third component that mediates the relationship between circulation and its interruption.

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Section: Theorising Infrastructures Beyond Circulation: Good Circulation Bad Circulation and Safe Assemblagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Theorising Infrastructures Beyond Circulation: Good Circulation Bad Circulation and Safe Assemblagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Safe assemblages: thinking infrastructures beyond circulation in the times of SARS-CoV2

Langenohl

Westermeier

2021

J Int Relat Dev

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“…In recent years, scholars have traced this governmental logic in a large array of more contemporary political practices, including the processing of flight passengers (Adey, 2009), the management of infrastructural flows (Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2016) or the activities of emergency services (O'Grady, 2014). Most important for our purpose, it has been demonstrated that territorial strategies, far from being opposed to liberal rationalities of governing, can become implicated in fashioning circulatory regimes (Brighenti, 2014a;Opitz and Tellmann, 2012;Opitz, 2016). Territories constitute 'places of passage' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 323).…”

Section: Re-territorializing Strategy: Kettling and The Destitution Omentioning

confidence: 99%

Capturing protest in urban environments: The ‘police kettle’ as a territorial strategy

2019

Self Cite

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Kettling has emerged in recent decades as an established, if controversial, tactic of public order policing. Departing from a historical emphasis on dispersal, kettling instead acts to contain protesters within a police cordon for sustained periods of time. In this article, we seek to elaborate upon the spatial and temporal logics of kettling by investigating the conditions of is historical emergence. We argue that 'kettling' has to be understood as a territorial strategy that co-evolved in relation to new forms of disruptive protest. Whereas older techniques of crowd dispersal serve to diffuse a unified collective, 'kettling' aims at capturing the highly volatile and 'swarming' movements characteristic of contemporary choreographies of dissent. Drawing on police manuals, media coverage, accounts from activists and expert interviews, we show how the 'kettle' re-territorializes protest by acting on its spatio-temporal and affective constitution. By fabricating an inner outside of the urban milieu, freezing the time of collective mobilization and inducing debilitating affects such as fear and boredom kettling intervenes into the scene of political subjectification that each congregation of protesting bodies seeks to fashion.

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“…The spatial figure of a closed planetary surface on which the world traffic moves freely correlates with epidemiological accounts of pathogenic pathways (Opitz, 2016). The virologist Stephen S.…”

Section: From Flows To Jumps: the World As Globe And Topologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Simulating the world

Opitz

2016

European Journal of Social Theory

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If the twentieth century was the age of the world picture taken as a photograph of the Whole Earth from outer space, today’s observations of the planet are produced by means of computer simulation. Pandemic models are of paramount sociological interest in this respect, since modelling contagion is closely intertwined with modelling the material connectivities of social life. By envisioning the global dynamics of disease transmission, pandemic simulations enact the relationscapes of a transnational world. This article seeks to analyse such an enactment: It asks how simulation methods can establish a particular relation to the social from within the social. To provide an answer to this question, and adopting Niklas Luhmann’s theory of world society, pandemic simulations are described as modes of global self-observation that can be specified factually, socially, spatially and temporally. They instantiate a ‘doubling of reality’ designed to apprehend the potential future threat of disease transmission along the pathways marked by global infrastructures. They constitute scopic regimes that virtually synthesize a global situation of universal communicability in order to turn the world into an object of political intervention.

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Regulating epidemic space: the nomos of global circulation

Cited by 16 publications

References 70 publications

Safe assemblages: thinking infrastructures beyond circulation in the times of SARS-CoV2

Safe assemblages: thinking infrastructures beyond circulation in the times of SARS-CoV2

Capturing protest in urban environments: The ‘police kettle’ as a territorial strategy

Simulating the world

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