The Logic of Sovereignty and the Agency of the Refugee: Recovering the Political from ‘Bare Life’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is a critical discussion of the logic of sovereignty and the production of refugees in the contemporary international system. However I will argue in this paper that Agamben’s discussion of refugees, like many others, reproduces a discourse that forecloses moments of refugee agency and the possibilities for systemic change. Instead, I will attempt to draw out a narrative that emphasizes the importance of refugee agency and the acts that challenge the discourses of pity and exclusion with reference to refugees. By relying on the works of Jacques Rancière, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and others, I hope to illustrate that the agency of the refugee is less divorced from the political projects within sovereign nation-states than these discourses tend to suggest. To accomplish this goal I will focus on three levels of analysis: the abstract, the institutional, and the personal. At the abstract or conceptual level I will argue that the logic of sovereignty forecloses discussion of agency and change. At the institutional level I will explore the manifestations of refugee agency in the movements of the sans-papiers in France and the Non-Status Algerian in Canada. At the personal level I will discuss how agency emerges in the spaces of ‘bare life’ and how sovereignty is inscribed on the refugee body. Through this analysis I hope to explore how the inclusions and exclusions of sovereignty can be challenged by the agency of the refugee.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".