Citation

Tedmanson D, Wadiwel D. Cult. Organ. 2010; 16(1): 7.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/14759550903558037

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This paper explores the Australian government's 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) intervention into Indigenous communities, conceptualizing it as a form of neoptolemus or 'new war'. The paper argues that not only violence but also sexuality is central to the modalities of power in neo-colonial domination. Using Foucault's notions of 'biopolitics' and the discourses of war from Hobbes to Mbembe, we explore the management, surveillance, and administration of violence, sexuality, and sovereign 'pleasure' in the NTER to conceptualize the intervention as a novel form of racialized combat. These new configurations of race/pleasure war reinforce the elements of biopower and population management that have remained foundationally connected to sovereignty within the Western tradition. Governmentality and the bureaucratic and organizational regimes of control enacted through the NTER are correlated with the prurient, sexualized, and intensely moralizing public discourse about Indigenous Australians. The NTER intervention into Indigenous communities is analyzed from a critical perspective. We identify the political economy of neo-colonial power, the ways in which 'race power' is embedded in both organizational and discursive environments, and the links between violence, pleasure, and the state. We analyze how violence, pleasure, and sovereign power intersected to discursively produce a punitive response by the sovereign state to serious issues of abusive behaviors and sexual transgression(s) as 'new war' on Indigenous peoples. The paper concludes by conceptualizing 'new' links between administrative knowledge, governance, power, sex, race, and violence and argues for the importance of understanding these assemblages of power to the field of organization studies.