The Necropolitical Production and Management of Forced Migration

(Hardback)

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Description

Using examples from the United StatesMexico border, Central America, and South America, this book argues that forced migration is not a spontaneous phenomenon, but rather a product of necropolitical strategies designed to depopulate resource rich countries or regions. Estevez merges necropolitical analysis with postcolonial migration and offers a new framework to study the set of policies, laws, institutions, and political discourses producing a profit in a legal context in which habitat devastation is legal, but mobility is a crime. Violence, deprivation of food or water, environmental contamination, and rights exclusion are some of the tactics used in extractivist capitalism. Private and state actors alike, use necropower, both its first and third world versions, to make people, living and dead, a commodity.

Reviews

Bold and insightful, this book provides a rich conceptual framework by which to study forced migration. Drawing on postcolonial scholarship and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), Estvez examines in impressive detail the necropolitical production and management of forced migration across Mexico, Latin American and the US. She highlights the importance of analysing the colonality of asylum in relation to processes of forced depopulation and lucrative death, to make a powerful argument about the structural and legal violence that constitutes forced migrants as disposable subjects. Ambitious in scope yet sensitive to lived experiences, this is a must read for scholars of migration as well as for critical thinkers at large.

Author Bio

Ariadna Estvez is tenured research professor of international relations at the Centre for Research on North America at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.