Governing potential: Biopolitical incorporation and the German ‘open-door’ refugee and migration policy

Abstract

Many scholars of International Political Sociology have turned to biopolitics in their attempts to understand the ‘European migration/refugee crisis’ which has unfolded in and around the Mediterranean Sea in the last several years. This article makes an intervention into this debate by suggesting a new means of understanding the biopolitics of migration and refugee management, based on a detailed consideration of the role of potentiality in biopolitical governance. After first discussing current understandings of potentiality within biopolitical literatures, and the analyses of migration and refugee governance they suggest, the article engages in a reading of Agamben’s recent work The Use of Bodies in order to develop a new understanding of life’s potential within biopolitical logics as potential towards the ‘correct use’ of bodies. This allows for a focus on biopolitical practices of incorporation and inclusion which goes beyond analyses of the acts of securitisation, exclusion or abandonment that only partially characterise reactions to the movement of people across the Mediterranean Sea. This understanding is then employed to provide fresh insights into the defining response to the ‘European migration/refugee crisis’: the ‘open-door’ migration and refugee policy pursued by the German government under Chancellor Angela Merkel from the summer of 2015 onwards