In her book Capricious Borders: Minority, Population, and Counter-conduct between Greece and Turkey, published earlier this year, Olga Demetriou examines the mechanisms through which particular groups of people are turned into “minorities.” At the center of these processes she identifies naming, genealogy and state care, as key modes of governmentality. Discussing a recent incident of biopolitical policing, the author shows here how “state care” continues to have more relevance as a repressive rather than an empowering mechanism in the minoritization context.

 

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In Greece, the “management of population” (in the sense of a Foucauldian biopolitics of demography, spatial order, classification, and knowledge production) has long been racialized.

 

This racialism has fluctuated through different political conjunctures yielding differing policies of birth rate monitoring and incentivization. Last month “care” emerged as a tool of biopolitical policing in a discussion that went well beyond the bounds of Greece, after authorities arrested a couple raising a child who was “not their own.” The couple was Roma, the child at first assumed not, and much of the racialized presentation of the incident turned on the stereotypical discourse about “Gypsies stealing children.”

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