Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence

Abstract

Edkins, J. and Pin-Fat, V. (2005). Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence. Millennium - Journal of International Studies. 34(1), pp.1-24 RAE2008This article seeks to explore the question, most starkly posed by Giorgio Agamben, of whether sovereign power can be challenged. By deploying readings of Agamben and Foucault that complement and illuminate each other, we propose that although sovereign power remains globally predominant, it is best considered not as a form of power relation but as a relation of violence. By exploring sovereign power in this way, we argue, alongside Agamben, that challenges to it are available in two modes: first, a refusal to draw lines between forms of life; and, secondly, an assumption of bare life. The availability of these forms of challenge is illustrated by examining practices of lip sewing amongst refugees. In the end, the refusal to draw lines and the assumption of bare life seek to reinstate properly political power relations with their accompanying freedoms and potentialities.Peer reviewe

International Migration: Transit space - creative space?

“…It focuses on political agency and migrants' capacity to subvert and therefore transform their context, drawing on experience and action in order to challenge sovereign power and citizenship, understood in the narrow sense of the territorial nation-state (McNevin, 2013). This intellectual engagement with international migration, and in particular with illegal migration, is, in part, a reaction to much of the literature of international relations, which is focused on control producing the securitised subject and its abjection and often draws on Giorgio Agamben as inspiration for analysis (Edkins and Pin-Fat, 2005;Hyndman and Mountz, 2008;Andrijasevic, 2010;Rygiel, 2011). Mobility in the 'autonomy of migration' school of thought is conceptualised as preceding control.…”

Visibilities and the Politics of Space: Refugee Activism in Berlin

“…Recent scholarship on refugees has attended to their agency and the notion of substantive citizenship within protests (Moulin and Nyers 2007;Edkins and Pin-Fat 2005;Owens 2009;Pugliese 2002;Rygiel 2011;Shindo 2009;Walters 2002Walters , 2008Nyers 2003;Lowry and Nyers 2003, Wright 2003. Thus, a body of scholarship has largely contested Giorgio Agamben's argument that refugees can be seen as the ultimate 'biopolitical' subjects: those who can be regulated and governed at the level of population in a permanent 'state of exception' and that they are reduced to 'bare life': humans as animals in nature without political freedom (Owen 2009).…”

Inside the tent: Community and government in refugee camps

“…It is perhaps no surprise then that the work of Giorgio Agamben (1995; has provided such inspiration to scholars theorising the refugee camp as a space of sovereign power and exception producing bare forms of life that rule out political community (amongst others, see Edkins and Pin Fat, 2005;Gregory, 2007: 130-135;Hanafi and Long, 2010;Hyndman and Mountz, 2007;Orford 2007;Perera, 2002). The most extreme forms of this interpretation conceptualise camps as 'non-places' or 'abstract spaces' which 'fail to integrate other places, meanings, traditions' (Diken and Laustsen, 2005: 86;Diken, 2004 Edkins (2000;2003), are more circumspect in generalising though she traces the 'form of the camp' through its Nazi incarnation, to famine camps in Africa and refugee camps in Kosovo.…”

“…'Studies of real-world refugee camps cannot be reduced to a formulaic reading of spaces of exception filled with silenced, disempowered homines sacri' (Ramadan, 2013: 68). While Ramadan argues that this picture may work better for Western asylum detention centres (Orford, 2007;Perera, 2002;Edkins and Pin-Fat, 2005) than camps in Africa and the Middle East, it cannot account for the diverse spatialities of irregular migration and the various forces (economic, social, political, and so on) that produce camps (Agier, 2011: 39-59;Isin and Rygiel, 2007;Milner, 2011). In this sense, Agambenian exceptionalism has been criticised for being fundamentally depoliticizing and erasing socio-political struggles (Huysmans, 2008: 175), thereby replicating rather than challenging orientalist mappings (Rygiel, 2012: 808) and forming a political dead-end (Walters 2008: 193).…”