The Introduction sets the scene for the book thematically, historically, empirically and methodologically. It draws attention to the ambivalent and processual nature of French mobility to London and to the geographic and demographic heterogeneity of the community. It provides a brief overview of past and present French contributions to life in the British capital and argues that this cultural legacy affords the diaspora a select status which conceals its inherent complexity. The Introduction establishes that this ‘messy middle ground’ forms the focus of the book. Using a series of language- and residence-based maps, it supports the contention that the London-French community extends beyond the South Kensington elite. Research participants are shown to be from myriad areas of France and beyond, to inhabit a range of neighbourhoods in London and to hold a diverse range of professions. The Introduction argues that they are in a perpetual state of paradox, simultaneously rejecting France/French ‘mentalities’ and London-French community belonging yet reasserting their Frenchness through shared homemaking practices. Due to this twofold reproduction of premigration practices and embracing of local habits, the migrants’ integration into/of the local culture and consequent habitus transformation are deemed only ever partial. The Introduction also considers matters of reflexivity, methods and ethics. It establishes the rationale behind the blended ethnographic approach, the insider–outsider positioning of the author and the mixed methods deployed. Finally, it provides a structural and thematic overview of the book as a whole, summarising the key aspects of each chapter.

The Introduction provides the main premise that connects the various chapters – that as fertility rates decline worldwide, the fervour to control fertility, and fertile bodies, does not dissipate; what evolves is the preferred mode of control. The preface introduces connections between the debates around eugenics, Malthusianism and selective reproduction. It provides an overview of the book by outlining the various chapter contributions as well as highlighting the interdisciplinarity of the volume. The final section connects these debates to the Covid-19 pandemic and the crisis of reproductive health and justice.

In his seminal work of 2018, Fatal Misconception, Mathew Connelly surmises that the global campaign for population control is a neo-colonial attempt to control the world. What are these neo-colonial projects that attempt to control the world? What shape do these projects take in an era where population control has become a taboo phrase in policy making? This chapter draws on the concept of birth projects to demonstrate that as fertility rates decline worldwide, the fervour to control birthing bodies, especially of poor and Black women in the global south, does not dissipate. The twentieth-century top-down population control projects, embedded in state propaganda and policies, were easily identifiable because of their starkness and brutality. What we have today are birth projects that are diffuse and couched in the frame of individual choice, which absolve the state of its responsibility. These neo-eugenic birth projects are based on a subtle form of eugenics that depoliticises issues and justifies systemic inequalities by couching them in the frame of choice. The chapter compares the history and presence of population control policies in South Africa and India to two other modes of delimiting the fertility of a certain demography – obstetric violence and repro-genetic technologies – to argue that forced contraceptive, limiting (legal) access to contraceptive, exposing women to violence during pregnancy and birthing, and the inherent stratifications of new repro-genetic technologies, although seemingly contrasting, belong to the same neo-eugenic continuum.

This chapter situates current migrant passages at the French–Italian Alpine border into a global history of runaways. Building on archival research and oral history, it retraces the history of mountain rescue on the Alps from the point of view of the accidental encounters between rescuers and migrants in the past. It interrogates how the memory of those encounters and of past movements fighting for social justice have informed current mobilisations in support of migrants in transit. The chapter argues that mobile infrastructures of solidarity at the border reveal transversal alliances that partly unsettle the migrant/citizen divide.

This chapter considers the challenging relationship between contemporary ‘rights-based’ ethical concepts and the more consequentialist ‘just war’ ethics that dominate government policy. The just war tradition evolves constantly. Only analysis of the Second World War has enabled ethicists to explain concepts such as ‘double effect’, ‘supreme emergency’ and ‘dirty hands’ in the terms which are understood today and fundamental to modern conflict. However, many contemporary philosophers consider ethics not in terms of balancing national security with the use of force, but regard individual rights as unassailable, transcending the consequentialism of realist politics, and aspire to normatise international relations. To provide context, two short case studies into ways governments have handled other complex technological and ethically challenging areas are considered: human embryology and fertilisation (the 1982 Warnock Inquiry), and genetic modification of crops (the 2003 public consultation). Whilst experts routinely consider the relationship between likelihood and consequence, such balanced views are not simple for the media to present, and ‘risk’ and ‘expert advice’ can prompt distorted scrutiny of complex ethical issues. While anti-nuclear opposition can afford selective, absolutist positions, governments must adopt consequentialist morality to provide for national defence, which is difficult to portray in public, particularly through modern media.

This chapter interrogates the utility of the term obstetric violence in the Indian context using ethnographic insights from research conducted between 2015 and 2019 in two geographically distinct areas of India, as well as the scholarship on obstetric violence, disrespect and abuse and respectful maternity care. It argues that the circumstances under which institutional births became widespread in India, the conditions under which rural Indian women give birth, the excessive focus on individual provider responsibility while ignoring the systemic and normative mechanisms that routinise disrespectful and abusive treatment, and poor health that is an outcome of exclusion due to social identities and remoteness in terms of geography, make it difficult to capture these inequities within the conceptual category of obstetric violence. It problematises the role of transnational and global health initiatives (GHIs) that have reduced maternal health to a set of technological fixes instead of using a framework that privilege the social determinants of health and/or strengthen health systems. These GHIs have not been attentive to the quality of care that women receive unless they have causative impacts on reducing infant and maternal mortality. A case study of Shaheed hospital, a worker’s hospital in Chhattisgarh, central India, is used to demonstrate that alternative institutional possibilities may exist, which keep service users at the centre of care. This analysis reveals that a different vocabulary, taxonomy, and imagination is essential for a safe and dignified childbirth experiences in low- and middle-income countries that are rooted in their contextual realities and constraints, rather than importing blueprints that work in the developed countries of the global north, as is currently the case.

This chapter examines the engagement between government and the public over deterrence between the deployment of Trident in 1995 and the 2021 Integrated Review. It suggests that several technical factors influence system choices and decisions, and form most of the public discourse. Engagement on ethical elements; the issue of why Britain needs a nuclear deterrent; and the moral implications of nuclear deterrence and nuclear war (the two are not synonymous) has been avoided by successive governments. Ethical elements are always considered, agonised over, privately and in camera, but not in public nor on the record. To consider the nature of current British and NATO nuclear deterrence theory and strategy clarifies the difference between 1980 – when NATO nuclear deterrence entailed being prepared to fight and win a nuclear war – and 2021 – when NATO nuclear deterrence entails being prepared to use nuclear weapons to deter war – and what that means strategically and ethically. This chapter addresses how nuclear deterrence really works, despite anodyne technical language. No-one considers nuclear war a moral good, but debate should be about deterrence, not war. At present, much public discourse equates nuclear deterrence to nuclear war, and debate often starts from this misunderstanding.

Moving away from Franklin’s original 2016 concept of ‘repronationalism’, this chapter conceptualises repronationalism as bureaucratic programmes aimed at surveilling and controlling human reproduction, especially of already marginalised bodies (namely, Muslims and Christians). After providing a brief historical overview, the chapter analyses Ved Garbh Vihar (VGV), a non-biomedical programme, based on Ayurvedic principles, thriving alongside a biomedical reproductive industry of assisted reproduction and commercial gestational surrogacy since the early 2000s in Gujarat, the Hindutva laboratory of India. VGV is a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS-right-wing, Hindu nationalist, paramilitary volunteer organisation) run biopolitical-ethno-religious-repronational project claiming to produce perfect progeny for the perfect nation. A close reading of English-language print media articles, and Twitter and Facebook pages of VGV reveals an inconsistent narrative with some articles mocking the programme and others endorsing it through detailing success stories of prodigious children born. Most tweets draw upon the mother-as-god and mother-as-nation metaphors valorising biological motherhood. The Facebook posts demonstrate a metaphorical imagination to validate Ayurveda as science, claiming the inherent eugenic ideals within Ayurveda. The chapter concludes that VGV produces not just babies, but reproduces neo-eugenic ideals creating a potential ‘Made in India babies’ industry towards the larger project of Hindutva nation building.

This chapter explores the contested vocabularies used to name and conceptualise birth violence across a range of geopolitical contexts. Using a transnational feminist approach, it argues that a tendency towards geopolitical bifurcation (rooted in racist and colonial historical legacies) frames the ways in which researchers have approached and conceptualised birth violence in different settings. As a result of this bifurcation, separate literatures and vocabularies have developed, which frame the issue of birth violence in distinctive ways depending on geopolitical zones. The conceptual usefulness of the term ‘obstetric violence’ is thus considered as an alternative, unifying, and transnational vocabulary. However, the limitations of this conceptual lexicon are also discussed, particularly in relation to the ability of the framework to theorise (and address) the multiple modalities of violation that potentially occur during pregnancy, labour and birth.

Two articles in the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights are of particular relevance to the issue of assisted reproductive technology in the global south, and in South Africa especially. Article 8 mentions respect for human vulnerability, while article 10 calls for equality, justice and equity. In this chapter, these two articles will be brought into conversation with the issue of assisted reproductive technologies in the global south, taking the South African context as the point of departure. The articles underscore the necessity for vulnerable groups and individuals to be protected in the application and advancement of scientific knowledge, medical practice and associated technologies, while also emphasising that all human beings should be treated in a just and equitable manner. In the context of South Africa, where the majority of the population are unable to access and afford most forms of assisted reproductive technology, the issues of biopower and misuse of power come particularly to the fore. Especially in forms of biotechnology where donor material is utilised, donors often come from vulnerable groups, while those that benefit are in positions of privilege, where they can both access and afford these treatments. This also raises the issue of intersectionality in the ethical discussion on assisted reproductive technologies in the South African context.

The conclusion summarises the two main analytical angles that characterise an abolitionist perspective on borders: a critique of the confinement continuum and an analysis of the political legacies of past struggles on contemporary mobilisations. It contends that a critique of the contemporary border regime cannot be narrowed to bringing evidence and exposing human rights violations; rather, it involves questioning of the so-called zero-sum rights game that assumes that migrants’ rights are upheld to the detriment of citizens’ rights.

Regulation of populations has been one of the central concerns of nation states since the latter half of the eighteenth century, when disciplinary power over individual bodies shifted to power over populations, in what Foucault termed biopower. Depending on the biopolitical objectives of indiviudal nation states, this resulted in the promotion of pro- and anti-natalist measures as part of a capitalist, racist, and imperialist agenda. Over time, the biopolitical project of eliminating bodies deemed superfluous to the economy moved from ‘making die’ to ‘letting die’. However, this chapter argues that the active promotion of anti-natal technologies, such as long-acting injectable contraceptives, which are inherently hazardous and life-threatening, indicates the reverse, from ‘letting die’ to ‘making die’. Evidence comes from the three-decade long struggle in India against the introduction of injectable contraceptives into its national family planning programme. The chapter analyses the context within which the struggle gained currency and in which it lost out. It examines the truth claims of the medical establishment, the NGO-isation and conflation of diverse ideologies under the rubric of ‘women’s’ groups as strategies deployed to overcome resistance to these technologies of power. In the context of liberal democracy, the removal of certain populations’ rights and their elimination makes the state of exception the new normal. The chapter concludes that, notwithstanding the rhetoric of reproductive choice and women’s empowerment, the discourse demonstrates the class, gender, and caste dimensions (with its underpinning of racism) of the biopolitical intention of ‘making die’, ably aided by transnational capital.

South Africa is the site of a professionalised market for human oocytes in the context of assisted reproductive technology and, as such, is part of the rapidly growing transnational fertility industry. This chapter explores the biopolitical dimension of the South African market for ‘donor eggs’ by putting it into the larger frame of ‘technologically assisted’, global politics of reproduction. Based on an analysis of a rich corpus of ethnographic data, the chapter argues that Foucauldian biopolitics are reshaped as they operate on different levels within this specific economy of egg donation – linking genetics, biocitizenship, and geopolitics. In doing so, the chapter highlights new forms of eugenics that are emerging in the global business around fertility-related services, eugenics that come in the positive frame of choice. It stresses the importance of paying attention to both continuities and changes regarding eugenics as the reproduction of existing hierarchies – even more so against the background of a postcolonial history of racialised population control and reproductive injustices.