The Politics of Death and Asylum Discourse

Abstract

In 2006, Mexico’s then-president Felipe Calderón declared war on drug trafficking. The human toll included the loss of over 95,000 lives, the forced disappearance of more than 27,000 people, and the displacement of 2 percent of the Mexican population. This article offers an explanation of how persecution and exile are specific effects of the governmentalization of the Mexican state. This governmentalization includes the shared use, by criminals and authorities, of techniques for dominating the population and controlling the conduct of citizens through the practices of death, that is, by necropolitics. The article goes on to discuss how the objectives, rationality, and governmentalization of the state serve to dislocate concepts of the legal discourse of asylum in such a way that its truth politics exclude Mexican asylum seekers, thereby constituting American migration biopolitics from the periphery.

The caravanas de migrantes making their way north: problematising the biopolitics of mobilities in Mexico

“…The most well known of these are the Caravanas de Madres Centroamericanas de Migrantes Desaparecidos (CMCMD) 1 which have taken place 15 times (Nodal Dec. 4, 2019;Web Radio Migrantes-Español 2018, Oct. 16). Other, less well-known 'Caravanas' are the ones organised by the Asociación de Migrantes Retornados con Discapacidad 2 which took place in 2014and 2016(Martínez Hernández-Mejía 2018. Most of these CMs did not have the purpose of getting to Mexico's northern border.…”

“…Necropower and necropolitics are used particularly in the context of post-colonial states in the Global South (Mbembe 2003). Given the high levels of state-and cartel-related violence in Mexico, his ideas are increasingly used to analyse the current situation in the country (Valencia 2010;Estévez 2014). The crudeness and level of violence perpetrated by the drug cartels are behind this interest in necropolitics.…”

“…The idea that biopolitics can be exercised by non-state actors is not new. It is generally assumed that these non-state actors' biopolitical practices are in concordance with the state's overall objectives (Estévez 2014). However, some academics have stretched the concept of biopolitics by introducing the idea that non-state actors can pursue a biopolitics that contrasts with or contradicts that of the state.…”

Bordering and Identity-Making in Europe After the 2015 Refugee Crisis

“…Obviously, a drastically increased amount of people living in the territories of European countries without a clear legal status, either citizenship or formal residence rights, is largely perceived as a strong challenge to nation states and their sovereignties (Czajka 2014). Yet under a closer scrutiny the highly medialized clashes between "domestic selves" and "alien others" betray a type of borderlines that go rather through human bodies than through lands (Goh 2014;Estevez 2014;Muller 2004). According to Giorgio Agamben, the very phenomenon of the refugee questions the taken-for-granted contours of the existing political communities and the very foundation of the nation-state-based territoriality (Agamben 1995).…”

Sheltering difference: (un)doing the migrant/volunteer divide through sheltering practices in Mexico and the Netherlands

“…This study is based on long-standing ethnographic engagements with two shelter organizations being embedded in very different geo-political settings: southern Mexico and the Netherlands. The shelter organization in Mexico called Casa para Todes (House for Everyone) 1 , is embedded in a violent landscape of undocumented migration (Vogt, 2013 ; Estévez, 2014 ) historically shaped by the United States migration policy. In general, shelters in Mexico work as important stepping stones for people's trajectories, and they form a networked infrastructure for people on the move (e.g., Marchand, 2020 ; Wurtz, 2020 ).…”