Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: This essay takes a critical stance on the category of demographic engineering. I regard demographic engineering as naturalizing the connection between population, territory and security eschewing both the modern edge of the concept of population and its power effect. My argument is that the connection between security and population that is underlying demographic engineering is not a ‘natural’ behavior of ‘populations’ but an artefact of demographic knowledge that can be traced back to interwar Europe when the population/security nexus was reformulated in the light of ‘race suicide,’ ‘depopulation’ and the making of racial Jews. Demographic engineering is a loaded category that obfuscates how demographic knowledge constitutes populations to make them available to political intervention it calls for as a necessity.
DOI: 10.4000/ejts.4848
Author: Sandrine Bertaux
Institution: Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1918764403