Biopolitical Sovereignty and Borderlands

Lately, it has been suggested in several corners of the “border studies” that Giorgio Agamben’s influential description of a new form of sovereignty—what one might call a biopolitical sovereignty—would provide an apt conceptual framework to tackle the ever-evolving nature of contemporary borders. My contention however is that border and borderland studies should approach Agamben’s conceptual framework carefully. For his depiction of a biopolitical sovereignty suffers from a conceptual flaw and could therefore prove misleading as a critical tool of enquiry to apply to borders. The forced pairing of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Carl Schmitt’s state of exception is, I will argue, unsustainable. I will first make that case at a strictly conceptual level. I will then substantiate my claim that Foucault’s and Schmitt’s views on sovereignty have different political implications by presenting two distinct conceptual developments on borders based on their respective work. I’ll show that while Foucauldian political sociology is mostly concerned with a diffuse network of control apparatus that substitute themselves to the physical border, neo-Schmittians rather turn their attention towards coercive materializations of the border. In conclusion, I will contend that, while control apparatus currently operates alongside militarized borders since the beginning of the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe, it is nonetheless wrong to assume that those two border regimes are mutually reinforcing.