Demographic Panics and the Violence of Soft Authoritarianism

Vortragende: Prof. Dr. Shalini Randeria (Wien, Genf, Bremen)

Respondenten: Prof. Dr. Michael Flitner und Prof. Dr. Klaus Schlichte (Bremen)

The lecture will address the politics of demographic panics which we are currently observing across the globe and which are entangled with geo-political interests and the increasing strength of ethno-national identities. Imaginations of the purity of the nation coupled with perceptions of differential fertility rates fuel pro-natalist discourses and policies especially in Eastern Europe, which is also witnessing a strong anti-feminist backlash. The same mix of factors, however, lead to selective anti-natalism for the poor and for religious minorities in India, for example, where a model of economic development based on neo-Malthusian premises continues to animate a state-driven population control program. The links between soft authoritarianism and the demographic imagination in different regions of the world will be explored to delineate the intimate ties between body politics and the body politic. Contemporary dynamics of the governance of reproduction in a world imagined as simultaneously under-populated and over-populated will be considered against the background of the global history of (post)-colonial population control.