Ranabir Samaddar

Ranabir Samaddar is Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies at the Calcutta Research Group in Kolkata, India, and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). He belongs to the critical school of thinking and is widely regarded as one of the foremost theorists in migration and forced migration studies. 
His research focusses in addition on the topics of labour, their technological restructuring and changing regimes of controlling labour, urbanization, nationalism, postcolonial statehood, borders, and political struggles. Across these fields, his work has challenged established interpretations of nationalism, the nation-state, and migration, contributing to new directions in critical postcolonial thought. He has also played a pioneering role in developing peace studies programmes in South Asia and has worked extensively on questions of justice, rights, conflict, and the theory and practice of dialogue. 
Through this interdisciplinary body of work, Samaddar has contributed significantly to debates on migration, political subjectivity, labour, and the postcolonial condition.

Crossroads of Geopolitics and Biopolitics in Early Twenty-First Century

Geopolitics revolves around space. Biopolitics revolves around the body. How do they intersect in our age? Clausewitz said that war is a continuation of politics by other means. Imperialist wars are thus violent extensions of imperial geopolitics. War epitomizes a given set of politics; also, war is a clash of significant interests, often of financial monopolies vying for colonial and neocolonial spoils. Thus, the scramble for territories symbolized by wars results from the expansion of capitalism into less developed areas, from the export of capital into more and more new areas. In this way, imperialism gives rise to territorial rivalries, and this is a sign of the concentration of capital in the hands of cartels and financial oligarchies. Uneven development, as is inherent in the nature of highly advanced nations exploiting backward colonies, is therefore accentuated. The overall result is militarism becoming the dominant instrument for the suppression of less developed areas by metropolitan capital linked to a thriving armaments industry.
In this understanding of geopolitics, the internal tension and imbalance of various parts constituting geopolitics are naturalized. It is thus simplistic to conceptualize global politics as being only about war; it is about the dynamics of global territorial configurations, hence about related geographies, populations, resources, particularly scarce resources, the mobility of capital, especially finance capital, and the contentious role of nations in these dynamics. Geopolitics makes a world system possible, and, at the same time, breaks the system with its spatial contradictions. These contradictions lie at the centre of a process of the dividing, re-dividing, and partitioning of nations. The production of new spaces is the inevitable result of this process of bordering and re-bordering. Today, of course, we are witnessing developments having new geopolitical consequences. The enmeshing of cognitive, financial, corporeal, and geographical borders is one such consequence. Borders and the corresponding infrastructure for negotiating these borders in order to facilitate mobility are features of twenty-first century geopolitics, which includes geoeconomics.
The new conditions of globalization are specific in many ways. We can refer here to new features such as the domination of speculative capital, technological revolutions, the logistical reorientation of economies, the return of primitive accumulation, and the undeniable presence of the South. The South symbolizes the informal economy, the production of rare earths, global urbanization, populist politics, and, above all, massive population mobility, which is marked by gender, race, religion, and other fault lines. The presence of masses of mobile bodies from and within the global South has injected fluidity into the geopolitical situation and disrupts any kind of geopolitical stability. It is a global situation of biopolitics from below intervening in geopolitical processes.
The significance of the presence of the South is thus immense. Migrants including illegal migrant labour, refugees, stateless persons, trafficked individuals, women’s labour, and the general mobile workforce in the service and entertainment sectors, mixed flows of people in the wake of ecological, epidemiological, and developmental disasters, the presence of shadowy cities on a massive scale as integral parts of the world’s great cities, and the foregrounding of care and protection as the cardinal values of a legitimate public power – these are some of the elements of the biopolitics from below across the entire arc of the global South. They are now leaving their imprint on the formal scenario of geopolitics in the form of a new “politics of life”.
Geopolitics and biopolitics are parallel but intersecting realities that impact global patterns of power. The new “politics of life” indicates the collapse of old political patterns. The word collapse in this context thus gestures not to any desire for a return to orthodoxy, but to the genuinely unprecedented character of what is happening today.

PhD in Political Science, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India
MA in Political Science, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India
BA in Political Science, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India

Professor Emeritus of the Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata, India

Biopolitics from Below: Crisis, Conjuncture, Rupture. Amsterdam: Central European University Press, 2025.
The Postcolonial Age of Migration. London: Routledge, 2020.
Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
The Emergence of the Political Subject. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2009.
The Politics of Dialogue: Living Under the Geopolitical Histories of War and Peace. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.
The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.