Power play in an interconnected world
Essay option 2
Word count: 1291 words
Write an essay in which you explore shifts in the manifestation of power (e.g. empowerment/
disempowerment, marginalization) in a world characterized by interconnectedness and mobility.
Interconnectedness is of great importance in our modern era and many would even go out to say that it
can function as a sufficient measure for the degree of success of a state (Eriksen 2007). An isolated
state can no longer provide security, material, civil rights and personal freedom for its citizens and
people who don’t take part in the network society, don’t have a mobile phone and don’t have any
friends outside of their own local context are rarely successfully in modern society (Eriksen 2007).
Both Inda and Rosaldo consider the intensification of this global interconnectedness, which suggests a
world full of continuing interaction and exchange, movement, mixture and linkages, to be at the core
of modern globalization (Lecture 1, 28 April). The intensification of interconnectedness partly consists
in the increased mobility of persons, money and goods (Eriksen 2007), which in turn creates increased
flexibility and fluidity of cultural economic systems, political structures and social networks (Lecture
7, 15 june). In a context of neoliberalism this might result in a lengthening of the distance between
citizen and state or ‘flexible citizenship’, as Sassen might say, but also tends to make us neoliberal
subjects by states and corporations, because it molds us into the being that these structures demand
(Lecture 3, 19 May). To get a better understanding of this agency-structure dialectic within a context
of interconnectedness and mobility, I will explore two shifts in the manifestation of power in these
domains through a lens of migratory flows and the internet.
Fresh Fruit (Holmes 2013) delivers a striking illustration of the consequences of neoliberal processes
and biopolitics within this context, because Holmes (2013) depicts how a sovereign state is able to
exercise power over the bodies of citizens in another state through neoliberal practices. First off,
Holmes (2013) depicts how free trade agreements tend to ruin local economies and force farm owners
and workers to emigrate for wage labor. Secondly, he illustrates how these farmers and workers, once
emigrated, end up in a state of exception where they are exploited and subjected to a system of brutal
labor that systematically produces harm to their bodies (Holmes 2013). This system relies heavily on
political, social and legal mechanisms that suppose that migrants should be without citizenship rights
and have limited power in the state of employment (Holmes 2013). In addition, it successfully
survives and reproduces, because of the inability of migrants to influence the institutions that
subordinate them (Holmes 2013), which in turn leads to exclusion and the normalization of inequality
as natural and unavoidable. Interethnic relations and state policy are formed by these sentiments,
mechanisms and practices, which in turn define the prosaic of the state (Painter 2016); the everyday
Essay option 2
Word count: 1291 words
Write an essay in which you explore shifts in the manifestation of power (e.g. empowerment/
disempowerment, marginalization) in a world characterized by interconnectedness and mobility.
Interconnectedness is of great importance in our modern era and many would even go out to say that it
can function as a sufficient measure for the degree of success of a state (Eriksen 2007). An isolated
state can no longer provide security, material, civil rights and personal freedom for its citizens and
people who don’t take part in the network society, don’t have a mobile phone and don’t have any
friends outside of their own local context are rarely successfully in modern society (Eriksen 2007).
Both Inda and Rosaldo consider the intensification of this global interconnectedness, which suggests a
world full of continuing interaction and exchange, movement, mixture and linkages, to be at the core
of modern globalization (Lecture 1, 28 April). The intensification of interconnectedness partly consists
in the increased mobility of persons, money and goods (Eriksen 2007), which in turn creates increased
flexibility and fluidity of cultural economic systems, political structures and social networks (Lecture
7, 15 june). In a context of neoliberalism this might result in a lengthening of the distance between
citizen and state or ‘flexible citizenship’, as Sassen might say, but also tends to make us neoliberal
subjects by states and corporations, because it molds us into the being that these structures demand
(Lecture 3, 19 May). To get a better understanding of this agency-structure dialectic within a context
of interconnectedness and mobility, I will explore two shifts in the manifestation of power in these
domains through a lens of migratory flows and the internet.
Fresh Fruit (Holmes 2013) delivers a striking illustration of the consequences of neoliberal processes
and biopolitics within this context, because Holmes (2013) depicts how a sovereign state is able to
exercise power over the bodies of citizens in another state through neoliberal practices. First off,
Holmes (2013) depicts how free trade agreements tend to ruin local economies and force farm owners
and workers to emigrate for wage labor. Secondly, he illustrates how these farmers and workers, once
emigrated, end up in a state of exception where they are exploited and subjected to a system of brutal
labor that systematically produces harm to their bodies (Holmes 2013). This system relies heavily on
political, social and legal mechanisms that suppose that migrants should be without citizenship rights
and have limited power in the state of employment (Holmes 2013). In addition, it successfully
survives and reproduces, because of the inability of migrants to influence the institutions that
subordinate them (Holmes 2013), which in turn leads to exclusion and the normalization of inequality
as natural and unavoidable. Interethnic relations and state policy are formed by these sentiments,
mechanisms and practices, which in turn define the prosaic of the state (Painter 2016); the everyday
