ABSTRACT
This chapter examines whether the different forms of migrant resistance – broadly conceived under the rubrics of dissent, excess, and solidarity – correspond with particular modalities of power, especially those conceptualised by Foucault as sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical power. As analytics, migrant resistances point to different modalities of power that come into play in the governance of migration. They reveal the entanglement between what are commonly perceived to be distinct characteristics of power, often differentiated between a power of life vis-à-vis a power over life. This chapter argues that only when their entanglement is acknowledged, can we begin to explain how a biopolitical (border) regime is able to kill. I seek to show how the biopolitical sorting of migratory populations is indispensably connected to disciplinary orderings as well as necropolitical endings. Although subjected to these interwoven powers, the protagonists of migrant resistance themselves constitutively shape and confuse relations of power, bring their imperatives into friction, and thereby open up new political possibilities.
