Kevin Grove

Biopolitics, biopower, and the return of sovereignty

In this paper we want to open up for discussion what counts as ‘biopolitics’—a term frequently used by critics and devotees alike to describe the organization of political power and authority in a world after Bretton Woods, the Cold War, and 9/11. We do so on two fronts. On the one hand, we contrast Foucault on war and the normalizing society, Agamben on thanatopolitics, and Hardt and Negri on biopotenza. Our goal here is to draw attention to multiple competing definitions of biopolitics, and in so doing problematize the term as a catchall category to describe either the ‘nonsovereign’ or the ‘postsovereign’ operation of power. On the other hand, while refusing some baseline definition of what counts as biopolitics, we develop our own specifically geographical criticisms of Agamben and Hardt and Negri on the topic of biopolitics. Following Sparkes recent interrogation of postfoundational thought on account of its oftentimes buried metaphysics of geopresence, we submit that Agamben as well as Hardt and Negri deploy biopolitics in both metaphysical and metageographical ways. We contrast this with Foucaults inductive, genealogical, and time-specific and place-specific use of the concept.

Insuring “Our Common Future?” Dangerous Climate Change and the Biopolitics of Environmental Security

Dire warnings on the “dangers” of climate change are reinvigorating past debates over environmental security. However, one strain of this debate is exceeding the state-based logics of security found in more conventional environmental security approaches. The UNFCCCs goal of avoiding “dangerous climate change” that, inter alia, threatens sustainable development has inspired volumes of research on climate change mitigation and adaptation, and has increasingly become incorporated into World Bank and UN development programmes. However, much of this research has yet to examine the cultural and political effects of framing climate change through the loaded language of security. As a result, there has been little critical analysis of the emergence of a variety of disaster risk management and insurance-based adaptation strategies that attempt to offer security against the effects of dangerous climate change. This article articulates the insights of critical environmental security studies with recent research on biopolitical security and post-structural critiques of development to unpack the biopolitical and geopolitical assumptions that animate discourses on dangerous climate change and disasters. My argument here is twofold. First, I suggest that risk management and catastrophe insurance have political effects: these biopolitical technologies sustain the global social and political order that the history of Western-led “development” has produced. Second, along these lines, dangerous climate change discourses extend the project of earlier environmental security discourses, specifically, the attempt to secure Western ways of life against the effects of environmental change. In securing “sustainable development,” discourses on dangerous climate change combine biopolitical technologies of risk management with geopolitical technologies of security to sustain the exclusion and containment of underdeveloped populations, and the mobility of the global elite, that characterise contemporary practices of development.

Agency, Affect, and the Immunological Politics of Disaster Resilience

Resilience has become a foundational component within disaster management policy frameworks concerned with building ‘cultures of safety’ among vulnerable populations. These attempts at social engineering are justified through a discourse of agency and empowerment, in which resilience programming is said to enable marginalized groups to become self-sufficient and manage their own vulnerabilities. This paper seeks to destabilize this political imaginary through a critical analysis of participatory disaster resilience programming in Jamaica. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Jamaicas national disaster management agency, I argue that resilience operates through an affective economy of fear, hope, and confidence that enacts an immunitary biopolitics. The object of this biopolitics is excess adaptive capacity that results from affective relations between participants and their socioecological milieu. Participatory techniques such as transect walks, focus groups, and education programs attempt to encode and manipulate these affective relations in order to construct an artificial and depoliticized form of adaptive capacity that does not threaten neoliberal order. Recognizing the immunological logic at the heart of disaster resilience opens up new ethical and political imperatives in disaster management that value adaptive capacity as the vital force of new socioecological futures, rather than as an object of governmental intervention and control.

On resilience politics: from transformation to subversion

A pervasive sense of uncertainty permeates individual and collective life today. The political economic, cultural, infrastructural, and environmental changes, neoliberal development ushers in,manufacture insecurity at scales stretching from themolecular to the global. Sensationalist media reporting on natural disasters, terrorist attacks and virulent disease strains, to name but a few, fan the flames of unease. Responses to this new reality have been largely reactionary, involving, inter alia, invasive new surveillance procedures and the securitisation of migrants from the global South. However, a beacon of hope on the left has been the emergence of resilience theory in ecological thinking, and its subsequent dissemination throughout a wide array of policy domains, including disaster management, sustainable development programming, and civil defence and homeland security. Because resilience theory is founded on holistic and topological modes of thought that undermine positivist and empiricist assumptions, advocates often interpret resilience as a radical alternative that introduces critical modes of thought into governance processes. However, research from a variety of critical perspectives has begun unpacking how resilience is increasingly marshalled to defend the existing neoliberal order. Good intentions notwithstanding, the effect of resilience initiatives is often to defend and strengthen the political economic status quo against uncertainty and surprise.

Security beyond resilience

This review article reads across David Chandler’s Resilience, Brad Evans and Julian Reid’s Resilient Life and Elizabeth Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment to explore the possibilities for critical thought on security beyond resilience. Read together, these works suggest that resilience approaches offer a topological form of security that interiorizes the outside’s de-territorializing potential – a movement that might be countered by a radical atmospherics of security that enables socio-ecological difference to persist as difference. At stake is the relation between critique and potentiality: while topological security turns critique into a stabilizing force, atmospheric security refuses the demands for socio-ecological difference to make itself legible as either proper adaptation or improper maladaptation. An atmospherics of security orients politics and ethics around both the durative and anticipatory temporal registers of potentiality.

Security and the Politics of Resilience: An Aesthetic Response

Last year’s Politics Special Issue on Security and the Politics of Resilience contains an important set of articles that excavate the development and deployment of resilience in a range of contexts. The articles open up resilience to some critique while offering in-depth analysis of how resilience is animating different policy communities, from peace building to cybersecurity. There are important empirical qualifications of resilience throughout the articles which puts most meta-political critique into some relief given the way it can breeze over important differences and detail. Furthermore, the dissonances established within some of the articles is perhaps more subtle or nuanced than we have seen before. For example, the interview with Helen Braithwaite OBE (Brassett and Vaughan-Williams, 2013) highlights some of the debate internal to civil contingencies planning, while articles such as Coaffee (2013) and Rogers (2013) provide more affirmative critique.

Introduction: resilience and the Anthropocene: the stakes of ‘renaturalising’ politics

Abstract The Anthropocene marks a new geological epoch in which human activity (and specifically Western production and consumption practices) has become a geological force. It also profoundly destabilises the grounds of Western political philosophy. Visions of a dynamic earth system wholly indifferent to human survival liquefy modernity’s division between nature and politics. Critical thought has only begun to scratch the surface of the Anthropocene’s renaturalisation of politics. This special issue of Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses explores the politics of resilience within the wider cultural and political moment of the Anthropocene. It is within the field of resilience thinking that the implications of the Anthropocene for forms of governance are beginning to be sketched out and experimental practices are undertaken. Foregrounding the Anthropocene imaginary’s renaturalisation of politics enables us to consider the political possibilities of resilience from a different angle, one that is irreducible to neoliberal post-political rule.

Assemblage, transversality and participation in the neoliberal university:

This paper develops a novel approach to what we call ‘participation as assemblage’ by drawing upon Félix Guattari’s foundational work on assemblage theory. We develop and ground our concerns by taking the reader through the details of a participatory development case study that we have been involved in from the Caribbean since the 1990s. Through unfolding this long story, we explain how we have historically engaged different participatory literatures and today find Guattari’s work on transversality and ethico-aesthetics salient as a way into thinking through our central interest in participation as assemblage. Here both our case study and Guattari’s originating work on assemblage are further grounded by working through some salient relationships between experimental approaches to participatory development and the contemporary neoliberal university.

The Neutral State: A Genealogy of Ecosystem Service Payments in Costa Rica

Using the case of Costa Rica, this paper examines how ‘carbon’ became an identifiable problem for that state. Specifically, we consider the prominent role that payments for ecosystem services (PES) have come to play in Costa Rica’s current efforts to become ‘carbon neutral’. We trace how, during the turbulent period of the 1980s, rationalities of financialization and security arose in this country that allowed for PES to emerge as an economic and political mechanism. Our central thesis is that this period initiated a governmental project of securing a viable future for the nation’s resources through the process of linking them to global financial markets and international flows of trade. This project of achieving resource security through economic circulation introduced new financial logics into forest management, as well as new modes of calculating the value and extent of the forest. We show how these ways of framing resources ultimately found expression in the nation’s PES program that is now central to the state’s goal of remaking the nation’s territory as a climatically neutral space. We argue that such financialized practices further reinforce the territorial space of Costa Rica through the encoding of carbon within it. The result is that, today, the nation’s carbon flows have become territorialized as part of the nation’s atmosphere, biomass, people and economy. The significance of this argument is that carbon’s territorialization did not begin with a concern for the climate, nor did it occur through diffusion of global climate policy to Costa Rica. Instead, carbon’s rise can be traced to locally specific ways of coping with the problem of resource security.