Politics of Abandonment: The Biopolitics of National Sacrifice Zones

Abstract

Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben each identified a radical transformation of political subjectivity in the modern world stemming from a blurring of the traditional distinction between humanity's biological existence (zoe) and the citizen's qualified, political existence (bios). The form of politics that emerges from this indistinction is referred to as 'biopolitics', with the correlating deployment of political power and technologies being referred to as 'biopower'. Each thinker presents us with material spaces that represent a localisation or outworking of various forms of biopolitics. The relationship between space and biopolitics in the works of these theorists will be deployed throughout this study to interrogate the relationship between the modern nation state and areas of environmental, economic and social degradation referred to as 'sacrifice zones'. The thesis begins with an historical account of the term 'sacrifice zone', discussing several examples of spaces that are referred to using this term. An overview is then given of the biopolitical frameworks and theorists that are utilised throughout the thesis. Hannah Arendt's understanding of the connection between the politicisation of zoe and the development of the waste economy is then discussed in order to interrogate electronic waste dumps as biopolitical spaces. Giorgio Agamben's work Homo Sacer is then used to consider areas of economic and social abandonment. The study concludes by offering an alternative reading of the inclusion of bodily life into politics where the presentations of bodies in the public sphere can become the grounds of political resistance rather than simply subjugation.