Sandro Mezzadra Julian Reid Ranabir Samaddar Editors The Biopolitics of Development Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present The Biopolitics of Development Sandro Mezzadra (cid:129) Julian Reid Ranabir Samaddar Editors The Biopolitics of Development Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present Editors Sandro Mezzadra Julian Reid D epartment of Politics, Institutions and History Professor of International Relations University of Bologna University of Lapland Bologna, Italy Lapland, Finland Ranabir Samaddar Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group Kolkata, West Bengal , India ISBN 978-81-322-1595-0 ISBN 978-81-322-1596-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-1596-7 Springer New Delhi Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London Library of Congress Control Number: 2013954789 © Springer India 2013 T his work is subject to copyright. 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Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Acknowledgements W e would all like to thank the Finnish Academy for funding the Biopolitics of Development research project at the University of Lapland, which made possible the organization of workshops in Kolkata and Bologna, and at which all of the papers gathered in this volume were presented and developed. We thank the participants of both of these events for their contributions and encouragement, especially those of the Calcutta Research Group. We would also like to thank Madhurilata Basu for her invaluable editorial assistance on the book. v Contents 1 Introduction: Reading Foucault in the Postcolonial Present .................. 1 Sandro Mezzadra, Julian Reid, and Ranabir Samaddar 2 Foucault and His ‘Other’: Subjectivation and Displacement .................... 15 Judith Revel 3 Michel Foucault and Our Postcolonial Time ......................................... 25 Ranabir Samaddar 4 Biopolitics and Urban Governmentality in Mumbai ............................ 45 Manish K. Jha, P.K. Shajahan, and Mouleshri Vyas 5 Where Is the Human in Human-Centred Approaches to Development? A Critique of Amartya Sen’s ‘Development as Freedom’ ....................................................................... 67 David Chandler 6 Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Peace-Building in a Permanent State of Adaptation ........................................................ 87 Suvi Alt 7 Interrogating the Neoliberal Biopolitics of the Sustainable Development-Resilience Nexus ................................................................ 107 Julian Reid 8 Lines of Siege: The Contested Government of Nature ......................... 123 Paulo Tavares 9 Politics of Truth and Pious Economies .................................................... 165 Michael Dillon Bibliography .................................................................................................... 191 vii Chapter 1 Introduction: Reading Foucault in the Postcolonial Present Sandro Mezzadra , Julian Reid , and Ranabir Samaddar This book emerges from a fundamental discontent that the three of us share with the politics of Foucault-inspired scholarship. Foucault’s works have had a massive infl uence on postcolonial literatures, particularly in political theory, literary criticism and historiography, in recent years, and many of the authors of this book have themselves made signifi cant contributions to that infl uence. But while Foucault’s thought has been inspirational for the interrogation of colonial biopolitics, as well as governmental rationalities concerned with development in the postcolonial era, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of the forms of political subjectivity that such regimes of power incite. Instead they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, often describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities and provoking disenchantment with the political itself. Worse, they have been the target of a morose criticism for their apparent inabilities to have addressed spaces outside the Western world (Chaps. 2 and 3 ). And worse still, they have been used to displace our understanding and recognition of the brutality and exploitative nature of colonial and every other form of biopolitics: the war, killing and multiple forms of violence without which it would not have been possible (Chap. 3 ). N urturing this discontent with current Foucauldian scholarship, we came up with the plan for two consecutive symposia, the fi rst in Calcutta in 2010 and the second in Bologna in 2011, where we would collectively and in collaboration with others S. Mezzadra (*) University of Bologna , Bologna , Italy e-mail: [email protected] J. Reid University of Lapland , Lapland , Finland e-mail: [email protected] R. Samaddar Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group , Kolkata , India e-mail: [email protected] S. Mezzadra et al. (eds.), The Biopolitics of Development: Reading Michel Foucault 1 in the Postcolonial Present, DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-1596-7_1, © Springer India 2013 2 S. Mezzadra et al. excavate the importance of Foucault’s work for our capacities to recognize how this degraded view of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the discourses and practices of ‘development’, and with particular attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. As such, this book, the outcome of those symposia, is dedicated to exploring how we can use his ideas to recover the vital capacity to think and act politically in a time when fundamentally human capacities to think, to know and to act purposively in the world are being pathologized as expressions of the hubris and ‘underdevelopment’ of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that human life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such dramatic effect? The immediacy of these themes ought to be obvious to anyone actually living in the South. It is not by accident that, as Ranabir Samaddar explains in his individual contribution to this volume (Chap. 3 ), Foucault’s thought was powerful and infl uential in India long before it achieved comparable influence and power within much of Europe. And for those who know and have experienced the governmental and biopolitical techniques that have long since shaped the exercise of power in India, this is not surprising. As Manish K. Jha, P. K. Shajahan and Mouleshri Vyas dem- onstrate in Chap. 4 , concepts of biopolitics and governmentality are immensely helpful for understanding the manners by which the Indian government and affl uent Indian elites ensure their security from the Indian urban poor especially. Biopolitical claims to ‘improve the living condition of the poor’ function paradoxically to legitimate the demolition of slum settlements, the very spaces of habitat that many of the Indian urban poor call ‘home’, displacing them for infrastructural develop- ment projects or other urban renewal programmes that serve the neoliberal economy (see Chap. 4 ) . An international development apparatus of non-governmental organizations defi ned by humanitarian goals has proved indispensible for the task of convincing slum dwellers as to the ‘benefi ts’ of resettlement. In many ways, the neoliberalization of the Indian state is far in advance of its development in Europe and other parts of the so-considered Western world. But within the Western acad- emy, these realities remain heavily under-addressed. I n thinking about what it means to read Michel Foucault here in the postcolonial present, this book tackles some signifi cant questions and problems – not simply that of how to explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have, nor that of how we might better equip them with the means to suborn postcolonial peoples more fully, but that of how such peoples, in their subjection to governance, can and do resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance that seek to remove them of those very capacities for resis- tance, subversion, fl ight and defi ance. As Jha, Shajahan and Vyas argue, the squatter is in many ways an exemplar in this regard; their hard work and ambition in creating homes out of radically insecure spaces, the love they show for their communities, their pride in creation and the fortitude demonstrated in their struggles with the government are lessons to all. T he question of how to understand the historical and contemporary function of development doctrine in the propagation and expansion of liberal regimes of governance is, by now, well rehearsed within critical and postcolonial literatures