Too much population or too little? Which social groups should have children, and which should rather be kept from childbearing? And also: Who should be allowed to cross national borders, who should be given the right to stay, and who should definitely not? These ways of addressing some lives as more and others as less valuable involve highly timely and explosive questions. The hierarchization of lives as foundation for global power relations involves multiple dimensions of structural violence: from the thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean to the socially unequal consequences of the climate crisis, wars and pandemic policies, from class-selective migration management to coercive antinatalist programs in the Global South.

Even if this appears often hardly tangible, at the heart of these political hierarchies of living and dying there is a specter doing its mischief: the specter of population. This specter makes it possible to link together stratified fertility and migration policies in a problematic way. It provides a common ground for powerful agendas of controlling borders and reproductive bodies, based on dangerous imaginaries of an effectively managed national or global demographic future. And it thereby lays the foundations for reproductive racism. The specter of population makes it possible to translate abstract calculations into class-selective and racist strategies of governing. And it links together the management of social groups and individual reproductive bodies. It thus permeates the project of global capitalist statehood itself and shows up within Malthusian narratives. These narratives provide ways of reinterpreting nearly every current crisis as a demographic crisis, ascribing paradoxically poverty, hunger, refugee crises or ecological destruction to those groups and bodies that are most exposed to these harms. By interpreting social and ecological crises as demographic ones, the specter of population thus makes it possible to leave the status quo of systemic social relations of care, inequality, racism and global capitalist destruction untouched.

In the context of demographic rationalities, reproductive racism also comprehends stratified reproductive policies that aim to shape the reproduction of whole national or global populations in an unequal way. Reproductive racism thus addresses both the power relations that define which and whose children should be born und which and whose should better not be, and also those hierarchical strategies that define who should be part of an imagined national or global future, with border and migration policies as important elements.