Environmental crises and migration. The biopolitics of a future.

Abstract

After the Enlightenment of the 18th century and the subsequent rapid industrialization processes, the evolution of sciences and technologies was enormous. Modernity brought changes in different spheres of the social and political life of the citizens as well as to the human-environment relationship. After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, modernity processes in the Soviet Union followed the same path and engendered more or less the same destructions in the aforementioned relationships. The nuclear accident of Chernobyl, that led to the permanent migration of populations and affected negatively the whole planet contributed to the subsequent collapse of Soviet Union. As recent attention has focused on environment and migration, this study contributes to later approaches by problematizing migration and environmental disasters as a biopolitical phenomenon using as case study the Chernobyl accident. Biopolitics issues include radiation and migration risks. Since radiation cannot be seen or felt, problems related to the so-called radiation exposure safety level become political issues involving the scientific, social and political construction of invisible reality, the definition of its meanings for human health and the subsequent management of the migrating populations. The purpose of this thesis is to present how biopolitics works within the frame of environmental crisis migration through the Chernobyl disaster.