Maritime insurance and mobility as biopolitics of security

Abstract

There is nothing natural about mobility regimes. They are the result of complex ensembles of power that involve the control of conducts in the form of moral economies. To analize mobility as a political, social, cultural and economic phenomenon circumscribed to the promotion and protection of forms and styles of life, opens up the possibility to investigate, following the work of Foucault, what can be called a biopolitics of mobility. Mobility, from this perspective, must be approached, not from the abstract, but from concrete practices, discourses and technologies through which people, goods, and services are put in circulation. Such circulation, together with its allied connectivity and complexity, constitute what has been termed the quasi-transcendentals for contemporary liberal life. Building on this theory, the article offers a reading of maritime mobility from the study of insurance discourses and practices. In particular, the role of Lloyd’s of London is analyzed as constituting moral economies of maritime mobility.