When pathogens determine the territory: Toward a concept of non-human borders

Abstract

This article conceptualizes how infectious microbes create real borders that are not dependent on human meaning making or identity. By territorializing interfaces between contagion and ecology, infectious agents engage in bordering practices by determining where citizens can move around safely, and thereby challenge the bordering practices and biosecurity efforts of nation-states. Based on empirical examples of microbial borders, evidence from the natural sciences, interviews with public health practitioners, and theoretical support from ethnographic encounters with Amazonian ontologies, the conceptualization links the geopolitics of microbial bordering to biodiversity loss and deforestation, and suggests that microbial bordering should prompt acknowledgment of the role humans play in ecological patterns that far exceed human control and meaning making. The concept of microbial borders is relevant to global health and security efforts in general, expands the theoretical agenda for critical border studies, and contributes to the fields of global health security and New Materialism in International Relations by highlighting that international relations include our relations with non-humans, and that how we choose to cohabitate with them has large implications for human security.

Nature and the international: towards a materialist understanding of societal multiplicity

“…Some extend rights and properties normally considered only to apply to humans to animals (e.g. wolves) and other organisms (microbes) on the basis of either their similarity to humans in terms of creating borders or territories (Du Plessis, 2018;Youatt, 2014) or mutual vulnerability between humans and those life-forms (Kavalski & Zolkos, 2016). Audra Mitchell advances the idea of 'worlds' as the objects of struggles over security, encompassing animal, geographical, technical, cultural as well as human elements (2014).…”

“…Complexity theory challenges the 'traditional IR' assumption of there being one single reality, we are told, suggesting instead 'multiple realities' (Kavalski, 2007, p. 446), but then the existence of a multiplicity of societal entities becomes a difficult notion to sustain. Other post-humanist efforts to alert International Relations to dynamics beyond human entities, to microbes or packs of wolves for example, highlight usefully that borders and territories, and interaction between groups, are not processes unique to humans (Du Plessis, 2018;Youatt, 2014). Some similar dynamics may even play out between distinct groups of nonhumans (and between them and human groups), but this surely presupposes a theory of the consequences of multiplicity.…”

Riding the Shi: From Infection Barriers to the Microbial City

“…Rather, as Hinchliffe et al (2016) have argued, disease emerges from the complex entanglement between the immune system of a host and the microbial milieu in and outside of the host. Various scholars have noted how, much like Hong Kong in the face of SARS, global public health programs adopt an antimicrobial stance to the control and/or elimination of infectious diseases, however, which might prove to be counterproductive in securing human life (Macphail 2014;Methot and Alizon 2014;Fishel 2015Fishel , 2017White 2015;Hinchliffe et al 2016;du Plessis 2017;Lorimer 2017, 545).…”

“…Hinchliffe 2007;Coole and Frost 2010;Dolphijn and Tuin 2012), which takes seriously the efficacy and ecology of human bodies and nonhuman bodies such as the virus and other microbes, invites us to examine how the human-microbe relationship can be rethought in politics. While a number of theorists have begun to conceptualize a new materialist politics and ethics within modern political theory (Bennett 2010;Connolly 2013;Mitchell 2014), others have looked to indigenous cosmologies, which take into account the world we share with other kinds of beings, to formulate a postanthropocentric politics (Kohn 2013;Tsing 2015;du Plessis 2017). The Daoist cosmology underlying Chinese medicine and Chinese strategic thought and practices provides a first step to think in distinctly Chinese ethical terms about how public health strategies in Hong Kong and beyond can begin to direct a human-microbial ecology to the advantage of protecting all life.…”

“…Like other modern infection control mechanisms, the story of infection barriers in Hong Kong is one of setting the human and the virus against each other, as the victim versus the menace. This biomedical polarization, in which an external pathogen threatens the healthy human body, persistently runs through the contemporary dominant mode of thinking about public health and infectious disease governance (Macphail 2002(Macphail , 2014Fishel 2015;White 2015;du Plessis 2017), which is rooted in the currently accepted germ theory of disease. It renders a city like Hong Kong pervasively "on alert"-albeit with Chinese characteristics, as will be shown below.…”