This project explores the social and geographical implications of governmental practices targeting the body as the site of threat and resilience in risk society. Post 9/11, and in the context of escalating climatic, technological and economic risk, a catastrophist biopolitics has been in the making, forecasting the future as hazardous and volatile. Its anticipatory logic focuses on pre-emptive and aggressive intervention, often against the bodies held to threaten, and for the bodies considered capable of facing off risk. A new form of bio-militarism packaged as the road to peace is emerging.
This project interprets the return of xenophobia and intolerance in Europe in this light. It explores the socio-technical and discursive armoury of the new biopolitics and its resulting social and spatial exclusions, and it considers the counter-currents of cosmopolitan engagement and inclusion – everyday and governmental – that confront risk and hazard in more diplomatic and more careful ways.
Publications
- Amin A. (2012) Land of Strangers, Polity, Cambridge (discussed in Identities, 20, 1 (2013) by Iain Chambers, Suzanne Hall, Greg Noble, Eduardo Mendieta, John Solomos and Amanda Wise)
- Amin A (2010) ‘Remainders of race’, Theory, Culture and Society, 27, 1, 1-23
- Amin A (2013) ‘Surviving the future’, Society and Space, 31: 140-56