Commissioned Book Review: Kandida Purnell, Rethinking the Body in Global Politics Bodies, Body Politics, and the Body Politic in a Time of Pandemic

Dr Kandida Purnell is an international political sociologist with a teaching experience in English, Scottish and UK Systems, and currently working as an Assistant Professor in International Relations at Richmond, The American International University in London. Her research into the field of international relations addresses the local–global body politics and takes an interdisciplinary, methodologically innovative, feminist and decolonial approach that draws and builds up the contemporary international, social and political theory by exploring embodiment and society. Kandida Purnell’s excellent and unique analysis has been spotted in times of pandemic with situating body in international relations in these crisis times.

The concept of bodies and embodiment has been within the discipline of International relations. Through the historical and factual perspective, the author describes bodies as performative, lively and ontologically insecure and always in a path for the process of nation-building; the book is a noteworthy compilation of Human bodies and collective bodies politic.

The chapters provide a step-by-step guide to rethinking the body through the notion intended to offer to approach global politics through the lens of bodies, bodies in general and their precarious, excessive, ontologically insecure, and emotional facets; body politic refers the necropolitics defining contemporary local-global patterns body politics of the unwell (rather than dead) metaphor, the body politic focussing on the performative materialisation of the outdated and unwell human body at its source through a close study of the diagnosis, hospitalisation, and recovery and conflicted bodies are the visual-emotional politics and landscape engendered and embodied through the spring and summer of 2020’s first wave of COVID-19, paying attention to social-political construction of atmospheric walls and mechanisms, including angles of arrival, the containment of grief, numbing by numbers, and the pressuring of particular body parts. The empirical analysis portrays the contemporary international relations debates on British and American Politics and international relations with broader and interdisciplinary theoretical literature on bodies and politics.

The first chapter elaborates on the bodies how they affect feelings, emotions and the role of necropolitics, bio-politics and visual politics. Bodies are contested sites of local and global politics and play a vital role in the international political system.

Regarding the human body, the author illuminates that every-body is a contested site for local–global politics. In the chapter, there have been discourses of a body being subjected to violence, and how gender and racial classification makes some bodies more vulnerable to marginalization.

The second chapter of the book discusses body politics which refers to the fact that bodies owe political decisions; they are not outside the political system, but a part of it and a contested unit. In these testing times of pandemic, bodies were seen determining the law and order, especially in the parliament, governmental buildings and international levels.

They revealed various techniques for management skills such as vaccination strategies to following pandemic protocols and various safeguard techniques required for the smooth functioning of human beings and society in these crisis times of pandemic.

The third chapter of the book reflects the body politic in times of coronavirus pandemic, in the context of international relations where there was war, peace and direct political violence; the empirical facts of international relations highlighted that the bodies being affected or diminished and being entangled in the framework of global political structures.

The chapter portrays bodies are materialised into organs, gender, race, religion and several categories are vulnerable in challenging times and how the machinery of government internationally determines their lives by strict regulations or many other these bodies encounter under the political control and becomes the body politic.

Biopolitics means the way the government regulates population through bio-power, using life and body as weapons as we witnessed in pandemic, right to kill, punish, right to power, policies, rules, suggesting people to protect people’s lives better, Necropolitics refers how the government values the people or the political calculation of human life and death, fear of death and some bodies were reduced to conflicted lives or nothing, could be easily killed in pandemic or some lives were more important than others. Both biopolitics and necropolitics depend upon socially and politically constructed biologically defined dividing practices within which processes of bodily evaluation and valuation determine life and death.

The body politic is a rhetorical device to make the political communities enlightened and intelligible as a particular kind of human being. In this way alone, the thinking and practice of global politics are already profoundly embodied, with the international system populated by bodies politic and littered with body parts.

The concept of necropolitics is based on the assertion that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides to a larger degree in the power and capacity of the state to dictate who may live or be dead exercised through necro power.

This political ideology is dominant in today’s conventional framework of pandemics and its extraordinary ways of necropolitical assumptions and moments how well the pandemic has reshaped the crisis and international relations with various geopolitical frameworks with establishing the nexus between body and politics and the covid-19.

Necropolitics refers how the government values the people or the political calculation of human life and death. So in these times of pandemic US soldiers and nurses became a valuable resource and their importance was relevant as their lives were more important than others and recognised by the government.

The discussion highlights the role of bodies guiding and governing the political relations globally in catering for pandemic issues. Rethinking the body in global politics on and during the covid-19 lockdown has been absolutely thought-provoking, enlightening and a very novel explanation.

However, the book is highly enriched with different aspects, structures and theories of the body politic and internal relations which can be a great use for researchers, policymakers and students of political science and international relations and other social sciences which can also be an important element for the process of nation-building in pandemic times. Although the strength of the book lies in its diverse and interdisciplinary aspects being a very innovative work, there are certain other empirical aspects like ethnographic data which was not feasible because of the pandemic shortcomings, but if that could have been included the book would have been more practical and visionary.

Nupur Pattanaik
(Central University of Odisha, India)