Policing The Refugee Crisis: Neoliberalism between biopolitics and

Necropolitics

1) Point of entry

The title of my intervention, as many of you might realize, has as a key point of
reference the 1978 “classical” work (40 years precisely) by Stuart Hall and others: Policing
the Crisis. Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. I believe this text has many things to say to
our present political conjuncture. It might be very useful to think with this work what is
at stake in the “so-called refuge crisis” and the political responses that are emerging as
different ways, precisely, to Policing the crisis. I don’t have time here to deepen why I
believe this book could be an important tool to think with the present European
conjuncture. But let me tell you that there are, at least, two different reasons, which
could be defined as: a) genealogical; b) methodological. Genealogical, because Policing the
Crisis takes as its point of departure some key questions that have become, I would say,
“structural conditions” to think with of contemporary Europe. The book, I remember,
examines the emergence of race and Law and Order society as “the new way” (to take
the phrase form Dardot and Laval’s book) chosen by dominant classes to Policing the crisis
opened by social conflicts which were expressing the end of what they called “the
exhaustion of post-war consensus in Britain”. Regarding from today, Hall and others
were showing here, through a very suggestive media-culture-analysis, that the emergence
of neoliberalism as a new “way or reason of the world” (to say it again with Dardot,
Laval) was closely linked, first of all, to an “authoritarian” and highly “repressive” or
“punitive” law enforcement by the State, but also to a racial reordering of society, which,
despite its newness, had its roots not only in British/European colonial history, but
mainly in post-war post-colonial mass migration movements to the UK. As Stuart Hall
puts it, the crisis of the 70s – especially with the emergence of “powellism” – “signals
the formation of an official racist policy at the heart of British political culture” (Hall,
Racism and Reaction 1978, p. 30). Empire and colonialism, hence, were striking back
(1982), but now, different from the past, from within the very British national soil. But
Policing the Crisis shows something still more relevant, given what we are living today in
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Europe: according to its main thesis, one of the best ways to govern and signify social
conflicts opened by the 1973 economic stagnation/decline and hence by the crisis of
Fordist-Capital accumulation, has been the production of “moral panics” based on the
compression of crime, migration, race and dissent into only one “social threat”.
According to Hall, this kind of “moral panic” becomes the ideological form of racism,
because: “it deals with social fears and anxieties, linked to economic instability, not by
addressing the real problems and conditions which underlie them, but projecting and
displacing them onto on identified social group” (Ivi, 33). And at the same time, this
close association of crime and black was bringing into light the fact that race was a
constitutive feature of Englishness (“The European question”, as Nicholas De Genova
puts it, whiteness). In sum, Policing the Crisis’ shows in a very compelling way for us the
way in which the crisis of 70s in Britain was a “crisis of hegemony”, in the sense that
ruling classes could no longer lead by consent, they had to maintain authority/power
more directly through coercion, leading by force. More precisely, they were offering or
negotiating a specific hegemony with some social groups at the expense of force,
coercion and violence to others. Policing the Crisis narrates in an incipient way something
that is going to be very clear in years to come: the emergence of the Law and Order
(neoliberal) society at the beginning of the ’70 was giving shape to a decisive fracturing -
racial fracturing – of the social arena. It divided the social arena into what can be defined
– to use here Partha Chatterjee’s terms – “civil society” and “politics society”. Policing the
Crisis shows how neoliberalism – just from the beginning - works through the
racialization or hierarchisation of social spheres and citizenship. It is precisely from this
point of view that I suggest here to interrogate Policing the Crisis as a genealogical text.
Yet, it could also be taken as methodological text as well: in the sense that it allows
us to read the present by very powerful Gramscian key concepts - conjuncture, crisis of
hegemony, historical blocks, won of consent, etc. – and hence to tackle the crisis from a
more dynamic political point of view than those that have become “dominant
explanations”. The other main source of my argument here is Achille Mbembe’s concept
of necropolitics, as it is outlined in Necropolitics (2003) and Critique of the Black Reason
(2013). But I will come back later to this.

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Given these premises, I’ll take as a starting point to my argument the identification of a
particular “geography of the present European crisis”. Between the many “geographies
of the crisis” that Europe (EU) is giving us back through its clashes with different
territories and populations, there is one that deserves attention. This particular
geography becomes visible through its thickening in some specific “nodal points”.
Identifying the material constitution of this geography might be a good starting point for
what I propose as a postcolonial analysis of the present European conjuncture; a
conjuncture over-determined, from one side, by the official (Ordo-liberal) narrative of
the “refugee crisis” and from the other by the violent self-affirmation of neo-nationalist
discourses as two different – but also intertwined modes – to policing the crisis of the
European border regime. These two different but intertwined modes of “policing the
crisis” have one important point (nodal point) in common: they are offering an
increasing racialization of politics, of social and gender questions, of institutional policies
and migration discourses as the best way to interpelate the political space opened by the
crisis or this regime. No doubt, hence, that the refugee crisis marks a watershed against
the recent political past; we are at the forefront of a new historical conjuncture. A new
historical conjuncture expressing what might be called – echoing Hall’s Policing the Crisis
– “the crisis or exhaustion of the Schengen-Maastricht ordo-liberal Hegemony”. We
could locate the beginning of the end of this hegemony with the 2008 financial crisis.
The result is, as I will show, the emergence of two different but intertwined racist
options not merely to Policing the Crisis, but the Refugee crisis, since the crisis has been
signified by the narrative of the refugee crisis and migration. To understand this “crisis
of hegemony”, and responses to Policing this crisis mainly by racist political articulations,
we should not focus only on the rise of these far-right neo-nationalist movements, but
we need to put back Europe into its historical post-colonial dimension as well as in its
more recent material constitution, the so-called “Maastricht-Schengen” consensus.
Particularly in the role of racism as a dispositive of hierarchization of citizenship.

2) A geography of the (European) Crisis

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 The contours of the geography of the crisis I am proposing here are written down
by names and places: Lesvos, Calais, Ventimiglia, Lampedusa, Paris, Molenbeek
(Belgium), Nice, but also Brexit, Syria, Turkey and Libya. I believe there is an important
historical matter at work beneath this “imaginary geography”. This geography
interpellates us a “geography of war”: war against migrants and asylum seekers and to
their desire of mobility and welfare; but also, and usually forgotten, war against “post-
migrants” or postcolonial Europeans, that is against European sons of decades of a racist
state management of European territories and populations. This specific geography is
showing a Europe gripped into what can be called a “manichean securitarian delirium”
(retrieving Fanon’s famous expression); trains arrested at the borders (think about the
images of 2015 summer); repression, violent hunting and mass deportation of migrants
and refugees allocated in different “ autonomous jungles” (Calais, Ventimiglia, more
recently Maximilien Park in Bruxelles); proliferation of hotspots (we have 4 in Italy);
proliferation of Walls (Orban in Hungry, but also Others); increasing interruption of
internal free circulation (temporary suspension of Schengen); request to the NATO of
military patrolling and surveillance in the Mediterranean against “illegalized” migration;
permanent legalized “state of emergency” in France; different kind of illiberal and
repressive securitarian anti-terrorist laws; global loans to build and institutionalize new
refugee detention centres in Turkey, Libya, Egypt, Niger and Chad (“migration
compact”); increasing institutional exploitation of refugees and asylum seekers as cheap
or post-modern “servile labour” (through the neoliberal asylum rights regime, based on
the concession of temporary residence permits which makes refugees extremely
dependent on the labour market, refugeezation of migrant workforce). This is something very
new, I mean the way by which the whole system of “hospitality” and “asylum rights” is
becoming a business, an important tool of “extractive capitalism” or also “accumulation
by dispossession” (Harvey).
It is by virtue of this conjuncture that we are increasingly told in the public sphere of
a “decomposition of Europe”; of a definitive “exhaustion of the EU political project,
undermined by the aggressive and regressive turn of Nation-States”. I want to suggest
another way to tackle this present European breakdown: this Europe in fragments, this

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Europe in ruins, cannot be considered an “exceptional product” of a mere “sovereign”
or “anti-migration nationalist” turn, but a more predictable expression of one of its
darker “constitutive sides”, born out with the very birth of the EU as a political and
economic transnational project. It should not be approached then as something
completely “alien” to the logic of the European post-war order. I suggest to think this
“Europe” as the “constitutive reverse” of that long and contradictory process lasted 25
years (centred on Maastricht and Schengen) and which has put on the ground the
present neoliberal material constitution. Hence, more than conceptualize this present
conjuncture as a moment marked by the “crisis of Europe”, I suggest that what we are
witnessing is always (the same) Europe (but) in a moment of crisis. “Europe in a
moment of a crisis” then and not the “crisis of Europe”. It is hence not a question of a
good and transnational ordo-liberal Europe against a more state centred or nationalist
one, but something more complex; since what we have here, at the moment, are two
faces of neoliberalism: “progressive” and “regressive” neoliberalism (Nancy Fraser).
Regarding the question of migration, Trumpist or Brexit (sovereign) drives, for example,
are not coming from outside the neoliberal order of discourse. Racist and sovereign
claims have their roots inside unbalances and inequalities generated by decades of
extreme neoliberalism. Referring to EU, to speak only now of a “decline of the
European project” – as if “this” institutional Europe (born out erasing or removing its
colonial heritage) can be something radically different from what we are facing today
(non-racist, non-neoliberal, etc.) – means to remain prisoner of one of its more powerful
dispositive: its discursive institution as a signifier of “progress” and “civilization”. What
need to interrogate more deeply what can be called “the European question”. So the
question is: Is it possible to decolonize the idea of Europe, as it was shaped by colonial
and postcolonial history?

3. Neoliberalism and racism

It is from this starting points that I’ll propose the concept of “necropolitics”, coined
by Achille Mbembe (2003), to interrogate the “state” of the present European Union

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and of the European conjuncture as well. Mbembe’s concept of Necropolitics appears here
as a choice induced by a specific political urgency: insofar as Europe is more and more
gripped into neoliberal economic depression, racist violence and racist discourses are
becoming powerful dispositives to policing the crisis (Hall 1978). It suffice here to focus
not only on present aggressive forms of “popular racism” emerging in almost every
European society today, or on the increasing consent of openly “racist” political parties
and coalitions, fostering anti-immigration or anti-Islamic political agendas (last examples
Kurz in Austria, Babis in Czech Republic, Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany, now
the so-called yellow-green alliance in Italy), but we need to focus also on “institutional”
and “democratic” racism fostered by the emergent EU regime of migration
management. One of the central features of the UE policing of the “refugee crisis” is the
emergence of an institutional racism based on the combination or fusion of two
different technologies, not merely of policing migration, but mainly for the racist
production of territories and populations: “securitarian/repressive”, and “humanitarian”.
I believe it is still important to put into question the humanitarian side of the EU border
regime – despite the present attack from racist far-right movements to this kind of
policies. This emphasis on racism as an institutional technology for the production or
management of territories and populations seems necessary to get out from debate on
migration (and racism) usually trapped into the borders of the dominant order of
discourse, that is almost exclusively focused on the violence of material borders, of
massive death in the sea and in the inadequacies of the “humanitarian business”. But
also to get out from a false alternative: Merkel or Orban-Salvini. We need to relaunch
the European question on new basis. And to do it, I believe, we need to rethink
antiracism as a tool of political re-composition, just to tackle in a more effective way the
present conjuncture.
If economic depression, as we were saying, is triggering a new “politicization” of
racism, theoretical and political antiracist practices, even the more radical, appear to be,
from my point of view, undermined by an evident “impasse”. We got here a paradoxical
political lack: while racism is appearing always more as a dispositive at the core of
neoliberal processes of citizenship hierarchisation, antiracism often becomes a mere

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“accessory” or “ancillary” element (Fanon, 1956, p. 49) of a political agenda centred on
other specific arguments and struggles: struggles against austerity, debt, precarity,
borders, financial violence, commodification of the commons, and so on. Antiracism
not only arrives always at the end, but it is usually confined to a kind of “basement” of
politics, to a marginal space destined to gain any temporary centrality only in front of the
cyclical re-emergence of explicit forms or discourses of racist violence or aggressions.
Recalling the “necropolitical” dimension of neoliberalism as a technology of not
merely government but of the production of territories and populations could be a good
starting point to get out from this “impasse”. But what does Mbembe intend by
necropolitcs? Very Briefly, for Mbembe modernity was at the origin of multiple concepts
of sovereignty. Necropolitcs must be thought of as one of the products of the
encountering of western modern sovereignty with colonial populations: more
specifically, necropolitics, as a dispositive of dominance and production of territories
and population is the result of the intertwining of “sovereignty” with “race”. For
Mbembe, “there are some figures of modern sovereignty whose ultimate end was not
and is not (as we may think) the creation of a political community, but the generalized
instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies
and populations; and such figures of modern sovereignty “are far from a piece of
prodigious insanity, but they were and are moved by western civilizational logic and
ratio”. Necropower, therefore, refers to the exercise of power in colonial spaces wherein,
keeping this definition in mind, an important part of the population has the status of
mere living-death people (zombies in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth). What matters
here is that in colonial contexts (and I’d say also in post-colonial ones) necropolitics
materialises as system of government centred not only in the production of life
(Foucault), but also on the production of terror, violence, murder and (social or
physical) death of a part the population as the minimal condition of the whole social
productivity (Lazzarato). We should think hence of necropolitics as the “constitutive
reverse” of Western colonial liberal (and biopolitical) technologies of government. In
Lacanian terms, we could say that Necropolitics must be thought of as the Real of
Western capitalist modernity.

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 There are two other aspects of the dynamics of necropower which from my point of
view are very interesting and useful to complicate, so to say, our schemes or ways of
approaching the present conjuncture in Europe. In the first place, drawing on Fanon
and Arendt, Mbembe recall us that necropolitics, projecting the discourse of race on
societies, it is not only segmenting them, but it divides, separates, hierarchizes humanity; it
is producing, hence, spheres, segments or territories of “reciprocal exclusivity”.
Necropolitcs and biopolitics are therefore at the base of the material constitution of
striated or dual societies, spaces and territories. The role of necropolitics is to interrupt
free circulation between spheres and subjects in society, and thus, incidentally also
between the different niches of the labour market. It is precisely in this sense that it has
an active role in the hierarchization of citizenship. Finally, the necropolitical dimension
of power tends to constantly enrol bodies into a “moral economic machine”
(Thompson, Gilroy) hinged on massacre; war, violence, repression, incarceration,
surveillance, punishment, segmentation, are its main tools. It is for this, Mbembe
concludes drawing on Gilroy’s work in The Black Atlantic, that in contexts dominated by
necropower – and here he has in mind the plantation, urban colonial ghettoes, the
Apartheid’s South Africa, Palestine today, refuge camps (but we could add many more:
hotspots, migrant detention centres, illegalized migrants, urban post-colonial ghettoes,
etc.) – death might be conceived as a liberation from terror, slavery, racism, non-sense
lives. Summarizing, in contexts like these the desire of death appears as direct or indirect
product, so to say, of material conditions of suffering, pain, exploitation, de-
subjectivation processes, experienced daily by racialized subjects. Racism is not only
“racism”, it means, as a social phenomena, not only exclusion, or to be discriminated or
not to find good jobs or merely war between poor groups (natives and migrants)
induced from above, from National-States and Capital (Wallerstein). This is a “white”
simplifying perception of the effects of racism (White Marxism). Racism has profound
ontological effects on racialized subjects. Racism in contemporary European societies
should be thought of, combining Mauss, Fanon and Abdelmalek Sayad approaches, as a
“total social fact”. As Fanon suggestively describes it, the experience of racism, when it
works as the pillar of a “whole way of life”, is very close to that of a “social death”

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(Patterson 1982, Slavery and Social Death). It is pertaining to recall here Ruth Gilmore’s
definition of racism: “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal
production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, in
the context of diverse but yet interconnected geographies” (Golden Gulag, Prison, Surplus,
Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California, 2011). I believe this is very suggestive to think
about our “geography of the European crisis”. It may be useful to understand European
postcolonial fractures, which from my point of view are at the roots of Charlie Hebdo,
Bataclan, and other mass violence episodes in Europe. We need to take seriously
necropolitcs as an important part of the “moral political economy” of Western
modernity and neoliberalism.

4. Neoliberalism’s interdependency of freedom and death

The theoretical stake, then, is to consider “necropolitics” as the “constitutive

reverse” of modern sovereignty, but also of liberal and neoliberal (and also Ordo-liberal)
technologies of government, and not only as a mere supplement or exception. I suggest
to think the hierarchisation processes at the core of the present neoliberal logic of
capitalist accumulation from this double dispositive of government (biopolitics-
necropolitics), where the “life” put to work, the production of freedom, security, laissez-
faire, competition and self-entrepreneurship of one part of the population is not only
intricately tied-up to, but depends on the segregation, terror, police repression and
surveillance, inferiorization, servile exploitation, incarceration and finally social and
physical death of another one. From this point of view, racism, police and institutional
racist violence, securitarism, militarization of territories and borders, the development of
the so-called “penal state or punitive neoliberal state” (Gilmore 2011), urban (cultural
and social) segregration are not mere residual or “sovereign limits” of neoliberal
governmentalities, but dispositives at their the core. After all, Foucault himself had
underlined in Society must be defended the interdependence of “biopolitics” and “tanato-
politics”.

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 The European policing of the “refugee crisis” could be taken as a privileged
observing point to bring into focus this interdependence of biopolitics and necropolitics in
the present managing of migration, but also of European territories and populations.
The so-called “hostpot approach” to the refugee crisis is one the key expressions of an
emergent form of institutional racism based on securitarian/repressive and humanitarian
technologies of power at the same time. From this point of view, the “narrative of the
refuge crisis” can be approached as the result of the institutionalization of what I want
to call a “new a moral political economy” (Thompson 1991) in the European
management of migration. This new “moral political economy” is well represented by
Angela Merkel’s choices on migration policies: from her initial “we will manage” -
referring to the 2015 refugee crisis - and the German acceptance of 1milion of refugees,
to her request to the EU countries for “new repatriation centres” to accelerate
deportations, or to “migration compacts” with Turkey and African countries for openly
military contrast of migration and for the institution of mass concentration refugee
camps. From one side, hence, the militarization of both internal and external borders,
increasing surveillance and mass deportation; from the other, the humanitarian
management of population overflows.
Yet under the “humanitarian mask”, what we have is an institutional (illegal) system
of mass deportation and vulnerable people completely abandoned (in the Agambenian-
Kafkian-Benjaminian sense) to the violence of Law and to an enforcing order directly
managed by the police and other enforcement agencies like Frontex, Eurojust, etc. The
arbitrariness on which the whole humanitarian governmental apparatus is grounded (the
arbitrariness of definitions about secure and not secure countries, the extreme selectivity
on the concession of asylum rights to refugees, the new EU “hotspot logic”, in which
decisions on legal protection of asylum seekers has been completely delegated to police
or to the Frontex agency) as well as its dependence on an ethics of pain and compassion,
intricately tied-up to specific “spectacularized” events (Merkel and Aylan Picture), are
not but increasing the inequality and vulnerability between different migrant subject and
groups, namely they are not but nurturing further and thus reinforcing the process of
hierarchisation of citizenship. It is in this sense that also the “humanitarian reason”

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(Fassin 2012) constitutes itself through a spectral ambiguity between biopolitcs and
necropolitcs: from one side, those who are given the refugee status are incorporated as
passive and voiceless objects of care and compassion; from the other, those excluded
from this vulnerable portion of humanity are destined to enlarge different “ships of
fools”, to precipitate in a condition of deprived humanity, of non-being or living-death
(to turn to Fanon).
But perhaps the most perverse side of the humanitarian dispositive lies in another of
its new emergent features. In the last years the whole “hospitality system” has become
an important means of “business”, promoted from within by the very extractive and
predatory logics of neoliberal capitalism: the “hospitality system” has been increasingly
characterized by the externalization, privatization and commodification of care and hosting
services. It is from this point of view that I’ve spoken before of the “refugee hospitality
management” as a tool of neoliberal “accumulation by dispossession”. From one side,
the institutional management of different kind of care services to migrants run by
cooperatives, NGO, foundations and other Third sector social companies has become
an impressive machine for the production of rent, capital and surplus value; from the
other side, the institutional apparatus of humanitarian government, fostering a constant
proliferation of different migrant status (there are now many) and subordinating the legal
status of refugees and asylum seekers to their specific bonds to national labour markets
(temporary residence permits, asylum rights in change of unpaid labour, etc.) is
becoming always more directly invested in the production of different forms of “servile
and cheap labour”. At this point it should be clear how the “humanitarian
management” in Europe is contributing in an active way to the hierarchisation of
citizenship as a racist dispositive for the production of territories and populations. So, if
Angela Davis, for example, suggested to think the US neoliberal system as an “industrial-
penitentiary complex”, we could say that the EU neoliberal might be thought of as a
“finance-humanitarian-military complex”. Also in Europe we are witnessing something
like a “mass incarceration” system or society. It is for all this that we need to take
necropolitcs seriously as a central part of the “moral political economy” of Western
modernity and neoliberalism. I believe it is a necessary passage to work on new

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collective and really transversal forms of subjectivations. It is a necessary stance to defend
society as a common space.

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