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Anticipating Endangerment: The Biopolitics Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman Mar 2017

Anticipating Endangerment: The Biopolitics Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

The last two decades have witnessed an explosion of national and global lists of threatened and endangered species. This article draws on interviews with prominent list managers and observations of their assessments to explore the scientific practices of list-making in the context of species conservation. Delving into the complex calculations of risk and threat that take place in the process of ranking nonhuman species based on their probability of extinction, the article explores the threatened species list as a biopolitical technology of catastrophe governance. My focus on two prominent lists — the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and NatureServe’s …


Hyperlegality And Heightened Surveillance: The Case Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman Jul 2015

Hyperlegality And Heightened Surveillance: The Case Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

My contribution to the Debate "Thinking about Law and Surveillance" focuses on the project of governing nonhuman species through care, briefly pointing to how law and surveillance are interwoven in this context and to how conservation's biopolitical regimes are increasingly becoming more abstract, standardized, calculable, and algorithmic in scope. I argue that conservation’s focus on governing through care lends itself to heightened modes of surveillance and to hyperlegality - namely, to the intensified inspection and regulation of both governed and governing actors. I start with some preliminary explanations about my atypical use of the terms surveillance, law, and biopolitics.


Governing The Wild: Databases, Algorithms, And Population Models As Biopolitics, Irus Braverman Mar 2014

Governing The Wild: Databases, Algorithms, And Population Models As Biopolitics, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

This essay draws on interviews with conservation biologists to reflect on two interrelated aspects of the in situ – ex situ divide and its increasing integration: database systems and population management models. Specifically, I highlight those databases and software programs used by zoos in ex situ conservation settings, and the parallel, traditionally distinct, in situ databases and risk assessment models. I then explore the evolving technologies that integrate wild-captive databases and population models and, in particular, emerging metapopulation and meta-model approaches to small population management. My central argument is that, while still viewed by many as separate, the in situ …