Ontological Hierarchies and Biopolitical Borders: State Investment in Nonhuman Animal Rights

Abstract

The growing alliances forming between State power and animal rights activists are creating a situation in which nonhuman animals are made to occupy a particularly ambivalent position within global politics. One where they remain resources to be raised, slaughtered, and consumed in some contexts, yet who are simultaneously posited (by States and activists alike) as important enough to justify the utilization of carceral, military, and immigration enforcement mechanisms for their protection in others. To explore this phenomenon, this article engages with specific sites where the confluence of animal protection activism, strategies of dehumanization, alliance with State power, and interspecies biopolitical practices converge. Through these sites, I seek to demonstrate how the alliance between State power and the animal rights movement acts to rewrite norms concerning belonging to national communities, global communities, or humanity itself. It is my contention that attentiveness to the interspecies nature of these practices demonstrates how nonhuman animals, their protection, and their killing are increasingly utilized to create, justify, and uphold a wider matrix of interspecies violence and control where practices of protection and killing are made increasingly difficult to disentangle or distinguish from one another.