Governing Global Slums: The Biopolitics of Target 11

Abstract

Recent literature has focused on the ways in which civil society organizations are contributing to practices of global governance in an era of neoliberalism. As UN Habitat has pointed out, what has also coincided with the shift to neoliberalism is the proliferation and growth of global slums. As slums have become an increasingly widespread form of human settlement, a global campaign to improve the life of slum dwellers has emerged under the Millennium Development Goals. In this article, I argue that this project can be conceived of as a biopolitical campaign where nongovernmental and community-based organizations are viewed as a kind of panacea for the problem of slums. This view is misguided given the scale of the problem and the apartheid of life chances that has accompanied neoliberalism. KEYWORDS: Governance, neoliberalism, slums, nongovernmental organizations, community-based organizations, biopolitics.

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