"profits, predation, and the ‘bioeconomy’ of border controls'" with Dr Ruben Andersson

Past Event

Date
 16 June 2016, 2:00pm - 3:00pm

Location
 Manor Road Building
University of Oxford, Manor Road, Oxford, OX1 3UQ

This lecture is organised by the International Migration Institute, an Oxford Martin School Institute and Border Criminologies and COMPAS

Speaker: Dr Ruben Andersson, Postdoctoral research fellow, Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, LSE

Summary: This talk starts with an observation made by many migrants and refugees stuck at Europe’s borders: that reception and detention facilities have become a money-spinner and a racket. ‘This place is a business,’ one migrant at a large Sicilian reception centre told journalists in 2015. ‘We are the business. The commodity. They keep us here and make money from us.’ Similar comments were voiced by migrants and former migrants during my own research along the Spanish-African borders - as one deportee leader put it, ‘there is lots of money in illegal migration.’ In conversation with the extensive literature on the biopolitics (and necropolitics) of borders.

Dr Andersson will approach this business as a ‘bioeconomy’ in order to highlight how punitive controls facilitate specific forms of profiteering and predation. Beyond the production of ‘cheap’ (deportable) labour and the political usefulness of selective exclusion often highlighted by the literature, the bioeconomy perspective that he tentatively develops here is rather concerned with the extraction of financial and other ‘value’ from the very vitality of ‘life itself’ (Rose 2007). In migrant detention/retention we see perhaps the crudest example of a bioeconomy at work, as people’s lived time is instrumentalised in various ways - whether as a means of deterrence for police or as a straightforward business of beds occupied and kickbacks paid. In drawing on Sassen’s (2014) recent work on ‘expulsions,’ the paper concludes by asking whether migrants are canaries in the coalmine of an increasingly prevalent mode of predatory extraction profiteering from life itself.

About the speaker

Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science working on migration, borders, and security. He is a postdoctoral research fellow at LSE’s Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, Department of International Development, and an associated researcher at Stockholm University’s Department of Anthropology.