°bio-sovereignty
Part IV of Anne Caldwell’s “Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity” (Theory and Event, 7:2, 2004) :
The complexity of the relationship between bio-sovereignty and humanity is most evident in the issue of humanitarian interventions. If such interventions limit nation-state sovereignty, they serve as a ground for bio-sovereignty.
Every potential case for intervention — whether or not it is acted upon — raises as a question the status of life, and calls for a sovereign decision on life. The post-sovereign world of bio-politics described by Foucault now takes on a new meaning. Foucault argued that in modernity, man’s politics placed his existence in question. If, as Agamben argues, sovereignty maintains its power by deciding on the status of life, then a world in which politics places life in question by retaining the power to decide its fate, is not post-sovereign. It is the open expression of the sovereign ban or exception.
Human rights, from this perspective, is the discourse of life in a state of permanent crisis. Moreover, human rights and sovereignty share the same referent: an indeterminate and precarious bare life. Agamben therefore asserts humanitarian organizations, “despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight” (1998: 133).12 Humanitarianism, speaking for the very life sovereignty grounds itself in, provides the justification for the “exceptional” measures of sovereign powers. Today’s “moral interventions,” exemplified in the work of NGO’s who categorize and call attention to human rights violations, prefigure “the state of exception from below” (Negri and Hardt 2000; 36). This complex situation, in which humanitarianism and sovereignty work together, should not be taken as a condemnation of humanitarianism. It is rather a sign of the failures of a tradition which requires humanitarianism while reducing its effectiveness.
The apparently emancipatory, law bound discourse of human rights thereby finds itself implicated in very old paradigms of domination. The relation is similar to the way that early modern discourses of rights proved complicit with novel forms of surveillance and regulation. The language of human rights does not stand outside the crises such rights are invoked to counter; it does not stand outside the sovereign powers that produce life as endangered. Neither natural nor exceptional, humanitarian crises belong to a “structure of permanent emergency” which has become “objectified in institutional arrangements” (Edkins 2000a: 146).
Arendt’s account of the fate of those caught in such institutional arrangement remains decisive. As she observes, “contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings — the kind that are put in concentration camps by foes and in internment camps by their friends” (1978: 56). Such permanent “ad hoc” arrangements indicate the extent to which states of exception are increasingly interwoven with law. Nothing has become more “normal” than the creation of internment camps for refugees and displaced persons. Those arrangements have the desired effect of placing camp inhabitants outside the framework of international law and domestic law so as to avoid obligations of asylum and legal rights to refugees (Hyndman 2000: xxv).
The shift from standing law to exception evident in the treatment of refugees also appears in humanitarian military interventions. Those interventions increasingly take place as exceptions to both domestic and international law, exposing “the allied face of human war” (Dillon and Reid 2000: 5). The American led NATO intervention into Kosovo, for example, was carried out as an exception to the U.S. Constitution, the NATO Charter and the UN.13 The new American doctrine of pre-emptive strikes has made the decision on the exception official policy. Indeed, new forms of post-Cold War warfare are having the general effect of internationalizing the exception. Modern wars typically occurred between two or more legally equal sovereigns. Contemporary conflicts are more akin to police actions. They take the form of a “diffuse and continuous” violence seeking to guarantee order rather than control territory (Guehenno 1995:119). One of the clearest signs of this change in conflict is the growing difficulty in distinguishing between civil and international wars, and between intranational and international wars (Meron 2000: 261; Kaldor 1998: 102). Modern distinctions “between ‘war’ and peace’, ‘internal’ and ‘external’ . . . associated with the autonomy of the nation-state, seem to be breaking down” (Kaldor 1998:91). As a result, interventions into what might once have appeared independent nation-states no longer involve “independent juridical territories.” They appear rather as “actions within a unified world,” aimed “at maintaining an internal order” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 35, 38). The effect is to place the rights of humanity in “the hands of the international community police” (Ranciere 1999: 127).14
These dynamics of interventions are one sign that global bio-sovereignty is supplanting nation-state sovereignty. That shift is not always easy to recognize. Humanitarian interventions, for example, often make use of the language of the nation-state. They can easily appear as repetitions of modern nation state sovereignty. This is why Soguk, a scholar critical of the nation state order, argues interventions perpetuate that order. As he argues, interventions, particularly around refugee crises, produce “the specific territorially bound and territorially activated hierarchy of citizen/nation/state on which the very ontology of the state system continues to rest” (1999: 188). Humanitarianism, treating refugees as “aberrant citizens” (p. 194) to be returned to their appropriate nation, seems to reinforce modern territorial sovereignty. Nevertheless, such actions exceed the order of the nation-states. Refugees, as we have seen, embody not only nation-state citizenship, but a human or international status. The moment one sovereign power acts to protect those who belong to other states, or those who have been so severely abandoned by their own states as to have no other category of belonging than humanity, sovereignty reinforces an international definition of life, rights and belonging. In that moment, sovereignty undermines the very identifications and connections of the citizen/nation/state order. A sovereignty ruling over such groups is no longer liberal and national, but bio-political and global.
We should not be surprised then that contemporary sovereignty is ceasing to make use of modern methods of legitimation. Max Weber, influencing generations of scholars, once insisted the distinctive feature of modern democracy was its rule through law. That focus on law is being replaced by Schmitt’s definition of a power legitimated on the basis of its capacity to decide. This incorporation of extra-legal and contingent decisions into an order of law is the phenomena Benjamin noted decades ago. In “The Critique of Violence,” he pointed out that the space of the exception in modern democracies was being filled out by the police. The police have the power to suspend law when necessary, and create it ad hoc when necessary (Benjamin 1978: 287). Benjamin’s own account treated the expansion of the police within the domestic politics of sovereignty — and condemned it as such. As bio-sovereignty increasingly operates in an international mode, the police actions of domestic sovereignty are becoming internationalized, further undermining the limited forms of rule that regulate international relations.15 Sovereignty is coming to operate internationally in the same manner it was always capable of operating domestically: outside the boundaries of law, and ruling directly over life.
The role of the exception and the presence of bare life appear in the capriciousness of international humanitarian interventions. As the great powers intervene in Bosnia or Kosovo or stand aside, as in the early war in Bosnia, in Rwanda, or in the long running war between Turkey and its Kurds; as they debate whether to classify massacres as “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide” depending on the level of obligation they wish to take on; as they bomb populations formed of both the “innocent” and the “guilty,” the life addressed appears — from the standpoint of sovereign power — as indifferent life whose status is determined by the sovereign decision. Caught in the ban of a sovereign law tracing out new relations beyond old borders, bare life is abandoned by the law without being removed from it, ruled by it without being saved by it, consigned to a state of exception become the rule. These variations in interventions are not simply hypocrisy. They are the modus operandi of a form of sovereign power that has always grounded itself in the capture and valuation of life. […]
