Spaces of abandonment: Genealogies, lives and critical horizons

Abstract

Publisher's copyright statement:Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractAbandonment has a long presence in Western cultural, philosophical and legal canon, though most contemporary critical debates focus on its sovereign and juridico-political functions. This article considers the concept of abandonment through its more nuanced and multidimensional appearances: at once a political technology and a material economy, a juridical category and a sphere of intimacy. Following the longer conceptual history of abandonment, from its Greco-Roman sources to the present, the article sheds light on abandonment as a systemic political technology, its evolution and significance in different social and political contexts. Drawing on notions of abandonment that remain outside Western intellectual corpus-primarily in early Jewish jurisprudence-this article seeks a more nuanced and expansive understanding of this concept. Closely reading a case documenting the fatal abandonment of one Palestinian man in 2008, the article highlights a myriad of agents, materialities, relations and infrastructures that join in the production and perpetuation of the abandoned present.

Abandonment, Agency, Control: Migrants’ Camps in Ventimiglia

“…In order to fill this gap and further the debate, this paper looks at the concept of abandonment (Hyndman and Mountz 2007; Leshem 2017), which refers to the tactical non‐presence of the state (Gill 2010) as a means of controlling and excluding migrants. In the EU context, abandonment can be associated with different actions by subtraction .…”

“…The fourth section explores migrants’ agency both in the Red Cross Camp and in makeshift camps, by revealing the complex and nuanced relationship between “agency” and its constraints. Finally, the concluding section synthesises the key findings and states the political imperative to develop further analysis on abandonment seen as a political technology (Leshem 2017) that is increasingly present in EU migration and border governance.…”

“…In order to unpack the changes in makeshift camps and the relationship between them and migrants’ agency I use the concept of “ active abandonment ”, understood as the withdrawal of the state’s responsibility to provide migrants with minimum levels of safety and support. Following Leshem (2017), abandonment is a complex political technology that has become ever more present in the governance of migration. By looking at the issues at stake through the lens of “ active abandonment ” and by using a diachronic perspective, the paper offers an original contribution to the debate on migration regimes and migrants’ agency (Squire 2017; Strange et al.…”

Contained and abandoned in the “humane” border: Black migrants’ immobility and survival in Moroccan urban space

“…The sorting between valuable and disposable is accomplished and naturalized through racism (Foucault, 2003). Today, racialized bodies are still exposed to the fast violence of the “murderous state” (Mbembe, 2003), and many more are abandoned to the slow violence of exhaustion, destitution, continual surveillance, paternalist policies, and formal and informal incarceration (Clarno, 2017; Coddington, 2019; Gilmore, 2007; Gordon, 2008; Leshem, 2017).…”

Space, abandonment, closure, and performance: Writing about the relationship between law and war

“…Here the notion of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the law is rendered complex, mobile and mutable, reflecting work that has sought to trace the considerable ambiguities when identifying the boundaries of juridical order. It strikes us that integrating work on abandonment would have helped develop these points, scholarship that has sought to explore the situated and transient elements of the suspension of legal protections, both empirically and conceptually (see Leshem, 2017). In contrast to the concept of ‘exclusion’ – one that is regularly cited when reflecting on the enactment of sovereign power, Pratt (2005: 1054, cited in Leshem, 2017: 624) views abandonment as an ‘active, relational process’ one in which those abandoned ‘remain in a relationship with sovereign power.’…”