Dr Patrick Pinkerton

Overview

Dr Patrick Pinkerton joined City University as a Visiting Lecturer in January 2015. In September 2015 he was also appointed as an Honorary Research Fellow. In this capacity, Patrick has established a Migration and Development Research Group which will allow academic staff and research students working on economic migration, forced displacement, refugee and asylum issues and the politics of development and security to make connections with practitioners and develop their research agendas in these fields.

Recent publications

Pinkerton, P. (2016). Deconstructing Dayton: Ethnic Politics and the Legacy of War in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10(4), pp. 548–565. doi:10.1080/17502977.2016.1208992.

Recent conference papers

‘Integration or circulation? The impact of the migration-development nexus on migrants in the UK’: paper presented to the 41st BISA Annual International Conference, 15th-17th June 2016, Edinburgh.

‘The Biopolitics of the Migration-Development Nexus’: paper presented to the Warwick Symposium on Migration, Post-Coloniality, and the Question of Europe, 9th July 2015.

My research is divided into two strands. The first applies Jacques Derrida’s work on deconstruction and temporality to post-conflict societies, and seeks to develop a deconstructive ethos that can be utilised to productively engage with the legacies of violence in such situations. My work on this area has produced two articles, one published in the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding on the dominance of ethno-nationalist politics in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, and one published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations on the politics of memorialisation in Northern Ireland.

The second strand of my research is based around what I call the ‘biopolitics of potentiality’. This theoretical perspective emerged from my doctoral research, which conceptualised the international interventions and post-war administration in Bosnia and Herzegovina as driven by a biopolitical concern to incorporate the Bosnian population into European and global governance structures. I have more recently shifted my attention to the biopolitics of the migration-development nexus, which I argue operates as a biopolitical mechanism to manage the conduct of migrants by constituting them as key actors within a global system of development.