When pathogens determine the territory: Toward a concept of non-human borders
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066117710998 |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| Author | Gitte du Plessis |
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066117710998
European Journal of
International Relations
2018, Vol. 24(2) 391 –413
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066117710998
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E
JR
I
When pathogens determine
the territory: Toward a
concept of non-human
borders
Gitte du Plessis
University of Oulu, Finland
Abstract
This article conceptualizes how infectious microbes create real borders that are
not dependent on human meaning making or identity. By territorializing interfaces
between contagion and ecology, infectious agents engage in bordering practices
by determining where citizens can move around safely, and thereby challenge the
bordering practices and biosecurity efforts of nation-states. Based on empirical
examples of microbial borders, evidence from the natural sciences, interviews with
public health practitioners, and theoretical support from ethnographic encounters
with Amazonian ontologies, the conceptualization links the geopolitics of microbial
bordering to biodiversity loss and deforestation, and suggests that microbial bordering
should prompt acknowledgment of the role humans play in ecological patterns that
far exceed human control and meaning making. The concept of microbial borders is
relevant to global health and security efforts in general, expands the theoretical agenda
for critical border studies, and contributes to the fields of global health security and
New Materialism in International Relations by highlighting that international relations
include our relations with non-humans, and that how we choose to cohabitate with
them has large implications for human security.
Keywords
Critical border studies, critical security studies, ecology, geopolitics, global health
security, New Materialism
Corresponding author:
Gitte du Plessis, Department of Geography, University of Oulu, PO Box 400, Oulu 90571, Linnanmaa,
Finland.
Email: gitte.duplessis@oulu.fi
710998EJT0010.1177/1354066117710998European Journal of International RelationsDu Plessis
research-article2017
Article
392 European Journal of International Relations 24(2)
Introduction
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] issued an unprecedented travel warning
Monday, advising pregnant women and their partners not to travel to a small community just
north of downtown Miami, where Zika is actively circulating. This is the first time the CDC has
warned people not to travel to an American neighborhood for fear of catching an infectious
disease. (LaMotte, 2016)
This article conceptualizes how infectious microbes make real borders that are not
dependent on human meaning making or identity, while also not being detached from
these. Pathogens engage in bordering practices that matter to human beings, and thereby
relate to human communities such that microbial bordering challenges nation-states and
their bordering practices. By challenging a nation-state’s ability to regulate where its citi-
zens can move around safely, infectious agents challenge state sovereignty by territorial-
izing interfaces between contagion and ecology.1
There is good reason for looking into microbial bordering. Across the globe, a com-
plex assemblage of socio-economic, environmental, and ecological factors, including
anthropogenic activities of continued resource extraction, environmental depletion, and
the globalized movement of goods and people, is driving an intensification of emerging
and re-emerging infectious diseases. A significant part of the re-emerging diseases are
drug-resistant strains, as sterile hospitals and antibiotic overuse in humans and animals
have put selective pressures on pathogens to harbor resistance to human tools of killing
them (Jones et al., 2008). These trends suggest that Western modes of disease control and
prevention are failing. A new strategy is needed, and a view of microbes as objects, and
of humans as in control of their environments, misses the point.
This article argues that responding to the threats of infectious diseases requires atten-
tion to how microbes territorialize spaces. Such microbial cartography is based on eco-
logical factors for which separations between nature and culture do not make sense.
Acknowledging non-human beings such as pathogenic microbes as having real political
leverage helps to establish a new, more realistic, playing field for security politics. It is
important to note that microbes are distinct political actors precisely because they are in
relation with everything else.
In its attempt to come to terms with contemporary cartographies of threat posed by
infectious diseases, the concept of microbial borders presented here builds on literature
in critical border studies, global health security, critical security studies, postcolonial
theory, and New Materialism in International Relations (IR), as well as literature from
outside the field of IR, namely, anthropological theory, environmental politics, epidemi-
ology, medical entomology, and geography. The empirical basis for the article is aug-
mented by personal interviews with epidemiologists and public health practitioners
carried out in May and June of 2016.
The article begins with a definition of a microbial border, before it briefly positions
itself within the IR subfields mentioned earlier. Following this is a series of empirical
examples that support a conceptualization of non-human bordering, namely, descriptions
of bordering by tuberculosis bacteria in London, Papua New Guinea, and Arkansas, and
by Zika virus in Florida. Finally, the article turns to a discussion of how best to govern
such microbial bordering. To get at this, evidence from epidemiology and geography is
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