Biopower and Biopolitics

Foucault develops the classic theory of sovereignty that Hobbes (1985, 1998, 1999) and Schmitt (2005, 2007) characterized as having within it the possibility that the state decides when to take away life or put someone to death (Debrix & Barder, 2009). In so doing, Foucault highlights how sovereign power was enacted by monarchs over their servants: the right of life and death (i.e., the “right to kill”) (Foucault, 2003, p. 240).

In Society Must Be Defended (2003), Foucault shows how during the 18th and 19th centuries, techniques of power were acted upon the body of the individual through alignment, separation, serialization, and surveillance. This technique of power addressed to bodies directly (individual subjects) coexists with a power exercised over “the living man … man-as-species.”

Thus it is possible to identify biopower as another form of power that coexists with sovereign power since the 19th century is a power to “‘make’ live and ‘let’ die” (Foucault, 2003, p. 241). This technology of power aims to make a positive influence on life through purposeful mechanisms such as control and regulation (Foucault, 1978).

Both sovereign power and biopower are exercised through different strategies that focus on particular targets. Human bodies were objects of control through disciplinary mechanisms (anatomo-politics) alongside other mechanisms focusing on biological processes such as propagation, birth, mortality, level of health, life expectancy, and longevity. Thus, a population itself was intervened on through sexuality, reproduction, disease, and deviancy (Foucault, 1978). In that sense, population is placed between discipline and biopolitics, as it can be “observed and surveyed and possibly remedied or treated” (Legg, 2005, p. 142).

Biopower then is a technology of power concerned with the global mass as a biological, political, and scientific problem (Foucault, 2003) immersed in power relations wherein the population becomes a new target to be administered to, intervened on, and controlled through different schemes called governmentalities (laissez-faire, social welfare, neoliberal, and neoconservative as such).

Therefore, more sophisticated forms of surveillance were conducted, such as hierarchies and inspections (Foucault, 2003, pp. 240–242), under the heading of biopower—a new objective with a new rationality aimed to increase forces, not destroy them (Oksala, 2013, p. 321).

So far, some of the insights already mentioned have helped to establish the relationship between biopower and biopolitics; however, it is worthwhile to first disentangle the highly interconnected concepts. Hannah (2011) brings in Rabinow and Rose’s work (2006) to clarify what is meant and what lies behind biopower and biopolitics. While biopower is a discursive-practical “field comprised of more or less rationalized attempts to intervene upon the vital characteristics of human existence,” biopolitics “embrace[s] all the specific strategies and contestations over problematizations of collective human vitality, morbidity and mortality; over the forms of knowledge, regimes of authority and practices of intervention that are desirable, legitimate and efficacious” (Rabinow & Rose, 2006, pp. 196–197).

Thus while biopower refers to a general description of forms of power whose aim consists of supporting life (Hannah, 2011), biopolitics instead focuses on the specific strategies, science, and technologies developed to manage a population—and to legitimize and securitize (Foucault, 2008) through methods (birth rates, infant mortality, longevity) of diagnosis, as a way to deal with it (Legg, 2005). As biopolitics implies, all subsequent operations aimed primarily at dividing, categorizing, and acting upon a population in order to securitize the nation (Nadesan, 2008), with some scholars acknowledging the possibility of both local and global biopolitics being nourished by a biophilosophical discourse (Dillon & Reid, 2001).

Foucault calls our attention to the nature of the phenomena that can be observed through a biopolitical lens, being collective ones that can have either economic or political effects. These phenomena are equally random and unpredictable when observed individually, but constants are possible to establish once they are tackled collectively. In order to do so, biopolitics introduces mechanisms such as forecasts, statistical estimates, and measures so as to maintain an equilibrium (Foucault, 2003).

Mainly after 9/11 (Grove, 2010) biopolitics expresses itself through more sophisticated mechanisms such as digital and molecular controls (Dillon & Reid, 2001) or security and risk management (Lobo-Guerrero, 2007). Yet regardless of the complexity of mechanisms, it is possible to shift from the micropolitical level (disciplinary institutions) to the biopolitical one (Ewald, 1990).

Thus it is clear that, currently, disciplines and biopolitics coexist and operate differently with its respective techniques. While disciplinary techniques train individual bodies to “manipulate the body” through surveillance and training, biopolitical techniques instead use mechanisms—they deal with a multiple body, with life itself. So, as a technology, biopolitics is not concerned with individual bodies; rather, it is about “the population as a political problem,” and about controlling random events in order to get to an equilibrium point where the power of regularization (make life, let die) emerges (Foucault, 2003). Therefore, through disciplinary techniques and methods the capabilities and utilities of bodies are enhanced more from an economic perspective, while the political docility of individual bodies is assured; biopower, meanwhile, regulates and governs the entire population (Smart, 2002).

The Foulcaldian conception of biopower covers technologies of power that refer to “the management of, and control over, the life of the population,” and coexists with older forms of power (sovereign, pastoral, disciplinary) reaching into and articulating all kinds of social life in order to maximize the population’s capacity and make it useful for market capitalization (Nadesan, 2008). In other words, the regulatory power of biopolitics does not exclude a disciplinary technology, but rather both of them operate under different logics; biopolitics aims to control, intervene, and optimize the population itself (Collier, 2011). However, trying to draw the boundaries between sovereign power and biopower tightly is not only problematic, but denies the fact that both forms of power coexist with governmentality, too (Dean, 2007).

Biopolitical Production

How individuals are produced by and subordinated to discourses? Furthermore, if such production of subjectivities is brought into an IR discussion, which theoretical outcome from biopower has influenced most significantly the discipline?

So far it is possible to grasp that Foucault’s lack of differentiation between biopower and biopolitics (Castro-Gómez, 2010) corresponds in some way with Hardt and Negri’s (2000) statement that Foucault fails to explain the real dynamics of biopolitical production in a biopolitical society. The ultimate reason for Foucault not developing the concept and study of biopolitics further was his death (Agamben, 1998, p. 4); Guattari and Rolnik’s (2006) work does, though, help us to better comprehend how societies are produced in a mechanical way. Here, human nature is shaped and consumed while immersed in a “capitalist culture”; in other words, they explain how the micro-physics of power are assembled. Thus, along with such an understanding, Foucault also offers highly productive methods of inquiry into the (un)making of modern subjectivity (Pasha, 2010).

In an attempt to shed light on biopolitical power production at the macro level, Hardt and Negri (2000) show how IOs such as, the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, and the GATT interconnect with transnational corporations (TNCs)—thereby elaborating a complex fabric within the biopolitical world through the power of capital. Such highly interdependent networking between these international actors facilitates the ways in which territories and populations are articulated, and determines where TNCs distribute labor power, allocate resources, and organize the economic centers of global production.

So far, what Foucault (Foucault, 2008) tentatively brings to attention regarding the political perspective of neoliberalism and state power can be seen to focus on competition, enterprise, and production. Hardt and Negri re-create this when they recall that monetary and financial dynamics allow for the production of individuals subordinated to the discourses led by those institutions. Such a cyclical and never-ending dynamic is clearer when the production of language and communication is taken into account as part of the communication industries (Hardt & Negri, 2000). In this case, the media organizations existing as TNCs in alliance with locals are the key private actors.

Thus, Empire, as a concept, allows IR scholars to critically rethink the means that are used to exercise power, with it being a power to intervene that rests on its moral dimensions. This is enacted through the moral interventions practiced by non-state actors such as NGOs at the global, regional, and local levels of action (among others, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Mèdecins sans Frontières). These actors become, then, very active players within “the biopolitical context of the constitution of Empire” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, pp. 35, 36).

Biopower itself is conceptualized and used within different academic contexts. For example, Hardt and Negri approach defense and security issues in their seminal work Multitude (2004). Conceptually different from social subjects, people, masses, and the working class, Multitude refers to a multiplicity of innumerable internal differences never capable of being reduced to a single identity—as they are composed of different cultures, races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, forms of labor, ways of living, and so on. They acknowledge both global war, and its regulative legal capacity; and imperial war, and its task of shaping the global political environment, as forms of biopower in the productive sense, as both have a regulating function that consolidates the existing order of Empire. Thus this concept denotes that traditional state boundaries are no longer needed, as its rule encompasses the whole of humankind without the need for temporal boundaries (territory)—instead operating in the social world (population) and regulating all social life in its entirety (Hardt & Negri, 2000). In that sense, Empire represents a form of power that regulates social life (biopower)—one whose main concern is “the production and reproduction of life itself” (Hardt & Negri, 2000).

Corporate biopower is another scenario wherein new forms of (economic) management are developed so as to cope with the challenges of the global food system, to get to an equilibrium of that mass, and to keep the biopolitical machine running. As Nally (2011) shows, the acceleration in the use of biotechnologies followed by the interest of industrialized states in enforcing intellectual property rights on agricultural products—according to the mandate of IOs such the WTO—denotes a protagonist role being played by the transnational business community, leading states, and the global rulers. Likewise, such corporate biopower coexists with IO agendas (WTO, IMF, WB) that theoretically focus on enhancing and optimizing the living conditions of the “global poor” (Di Muzio, 2008). But behind such an objective lies a neoliberal development discourse that has the global poor as its target population (Di Muzio, 2008, p. 313). Herein food and aid practices of famine relief lead to methods that discipline and reproduce relations of power, as long as preventing famine centralizes expert knowledge and funding in IOs or research institutes and their subsequent (re)production of practices (Edkins, 2000).

The emergence of biopolitical mechanisms of security such as insurance and risk management reflects another scenario wherein a critical security lens analyzes the cultural and political effects, the institutional discourses of the WB and UN, and the possible tragic scenarios generated by the Global South and experienced by the Global North. Especially since the attacks of 9/11 these scenarios have set alarm bells ringing on the global security map (Grove, 2010). Likewise since the attacks of March 11, 2004 (Madrid) and July 7, 2005 (London), Westerners have been living within a state of terror that is crucial both to maintaining and replacing political institutions, and to implementing measures and policies. As such, a generalized biopolitics of fear is administered by the modern state by biopolitical agents/agencies of fear production (police, military, immigration, customs officers, and airport security officers) at the national and international levels. Yet Rygiel (2008) shows how biopower is performed internationally through biometrics measures introduced after 9/11 by the United States and the United Kingdom, being promoted through IOs such as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the International Migration Organization (IMO) (Berman, 2007)—thus deepening a disciplinary regime (Rygiel, 2008). More recently, some mechanisms of biopolitical security have emerged to deal with the problematic issue of kidnap risk, where populations are created in the process of insuring and wherein socioeconomic aspects are considered to classify an individual who might be abducted (Lobo-Guerrero, 2007).

It is evident that the dynamics of the 20th and 21st centuries have facilitated the understanding of biopower and its two basic forms of exercising power over life: one individually on the human body through techniques and disciplines designed to optimize capacities (anatomo-politics), and the other one on the population as a whole (biopolitics). The latter is inflected so as to manage and regulate demographic characteristics (Smart, 2002). Yet, to what extent has biopolitical reasoning about the production of subjectivities influenced IR thinking? An even more challenging question to answer would be this: How has the biopolitical approach drawn IR scholars into discussions regarding resistance?

Individuals As Outcome of Discourses and Resistance Discussions in IR

Again, much of the influence of Foucault on IR theorists who specifically work on biopower has been very narrow in scope so far, as many scholars have been particularly influenced by governmentality (Joseph, 2010b; Lipschutz, 2005; Vrasti, 2013; Weidner, 2009; Zanotti, 2013). Yet IR scholars’ discussions about productive power allow us to deal with the “discursive production of the subjects, the fixing of meanings, and the terms of action, of world politics” (Barnett & Duvall, 2005, p. 21). Similarly, with global governance issues some questions rise: How are subjects produced? And, to what extent do IOs support such production?

Barnett and Finnemore (2005) show in a straightforward way how IOs are “produced,” and furthermore how and why states are interested in subjectivities produced domestically—as social tasks have to be performed by highly trained people, which the state bureaucracy can have a lack of. In such a case, IOs offer expert knowledge through technical cooperation—so as to help locals to overcome challenging situations and to meet the organization’s own requirements. An example might be the IMF financial assistance that is given in exchange for an efficient and convincing economic program implemented to tackle balance-of-payments problems, with the aforementioned institution approving of this program as the right way to proceed.

Thus, Barnett and Finnemore’s (2005) work on IOs’ expert authority makes sense within current discussions regarding the interplay between neoliberal policy and what Foucault calls “the enterprise” and “the formative power” of society (2008, p. 148). Yet IOs aim to serve a social purpose in an impartial and technocratic way, through impersonal and neutral means, but without exercising power. Instead they serve others: states (Barnett & Finnemore, 2005). The way in which these organisms behave reflects how biopower is affected despite there being no specific actor to blame for any ensuing negative outcomes. Instead IOs “contribute to the social constitution of the world and thus play an important role in shaping subjectivities” in the process, exhibiting productive power (Barnett & Finnemore, 2005, p. 175).

Likewise, Adler and Bernstein’s (2005) work on knowledge in power explains how epistemic communities use scientific knowledge to make state leaders aware of the need to cooperate in facing up to critical and common issues. More importantly, though, they focus on a far-reaching effect, which consists of the (re)production and transformation of identities and interests. Adler and Bernstein (2005) state—paraphrasing Foucault—that power is also productive, as it defines the order of global things. Therein such productive capacity is often followed by the founding of the formal and informal institutions necessary for global governance, which, at the same time, rests on material capabilities and knowledge. Thus, the authors highlight the incidence of knowledge in productive power and the way epistemes that nourish global governance are not just reducible to the material power and interests of hegemonic states, but are embedded in institutions and the collective understandings of actors.

So far, the role of IOs as prominent actors in the (re)production of subjects (in the biopolitical sense) is clear. But, as Lipschutz (2005) states, there are zones of contestation, agency, and autonomy where discursive ruptures or discontinuities arise. Subjectivities production and resistance come mostly from the work of post-Foulcaldian political thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2005) and, again, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000, 2004), who have taken a critical position toward the micro-physics of power (Castro-Gómez, 2010; Oksala, 2013), as well as facilitated discussions regarding subjectivities production being a way to respond to both local and transnational needs (Adler & Bernstein, 2005). But the key factor to argue about in such things is the posited triumph of capitalism, achieved through the disciplinary control that biopower and its appropriate technologies have to create docile bodies (Agamben, 1998).

In fact, Hardt and Negri bring globalization into IR discussions, and its related interpretation of localization work, as “a regime of the production of identity and difference … homogenization and heterogenization” (2000, p. 45). This leads to the question already put forward: How are individuals produced? In fact, these thinkers state that current global relations are shaped through the interplay of decolonization, the decentralization of production, and the construction of international relations across the globe—wherein the third mechanism revolves around an ideal global production system sustained through Fordist wage regimes that allow any worker from any part of the world to work anywhere, and furthermore to constitute part of the global productive process (Hardt & Negri, 2000).

The development of neoliberalism, of course, has played a key role in inserting bodies into the economic system. Thus an economic subject emerges and behaves as “entrepreneur of himself” (Foucault, 2008, p. 226) wherein the education system trains entrepreneurs (Martinez, 2010) while taking into account the “new type of individual” that neoliberalism requires: an “enterprise man” (Ball, 2013, p. 132). Precisely, among education and entrepreneurship dynamics, Hardt and Negri (2004) highlight the role of ideas and knowledge as immaterial labor that creates forms of social life that transcend economic matters and that include social, cultural, and political forces. At the same time, the development of neoliberalism has a role in promoting the (re)production of subjectivities for a society that struggles against poverty, strives for democracy, and conforms to liberation resistances.

Resistance is constituted of practices not necessarily against power, but that “exist in the strategic field of power relations” (Foucault, 1978, p. 96). Conduct refers to the ethical sphere of resistance (Davidson, 2011) and can be interpreted in different ways: the activity of conducting, the way in which one conducts oneself, and the way one behaves under the influence of a conduct as the action of conducting (Foucault, 2007, cited by Davidson, 2011). Thus it is important to have in mind that resistance and counter-conduct are not negative phenomena, but express themselves in different fields of action: politics and ethics respectively. The interest here resides firstly in resistance as political practices that target biopolitical production itself. This might consist of refusal, escape, and the dispossession of identities (Prozorov, 2007). Of interest also is counter-conduct, as long as it refers to global politics.

Foucault’s studies influence resistance theorists mostly (Amoore, 2005, cited by Death, 2010; Barry, 2001; Bleiker, 2004) yet, as Death acknowledges, the idea of counter-conduct might help to develop “an analytics of protest for the study of contentious politics” that focuses on specific practices and rationalities of practice “undermining and challenging dominant forms of global governance” (2010, p. 236). Such protests at major world summits—against international financial institutions (WB, IMF) and the WTO—denaturalize their verticality and hierarchy and, instead, reveal how dominant discourses (re)produce certain “political fields of vision” (Death, 2010, p. 242) and work as producers of knowledge and subjectivities.

The kind of resistance that Hardt and Negri (2004) bring to light exemplifies a struggle against subjection or subjectivization, but does not necessarily exclude other sources of resistance such as domination and exploitation (Knight & Smith, 2008). This is because, as Foucault (1982) states, the mechanisms of subjection cannot be studied outside of their relationship to the others mechanisms, due to the complex relationships that keep them perpetually interconnected.

Although Death (2014) criticizes Foucault’s lack of attention to resistance and dissent, from an empirical perspective, Edkins (2014) alternatively highlights that the thinker’s notion of power not only expresses itself in power relations but depends also on the very possibility of resistance itself. Further, as power is different from domination, then there is freedom—and, as such, resistance or counter-power (Forst, 2007). In any case, new forms of transnational solidarity and resistance have emerged recently due to the domination and exploitation that has derived from the globalization of capitalism. An example of such is the emergence of “a movement of movements” resistant to the neoliberal globalization promoted by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and networked elite groups such as the World Economic Forum (Rupert, 2005). These make visible the limits of governing from a distance, thereby inviting the use of repressive force (Dillon & Reid, 2001). Critics of global relations based on competition and calculus have equally talked up resistance as a phenomenon that works as a counterbalance to capitalist power relations, to put it in Foulcaldian terms (Smart, 2002).

Thus, new struggles arise as political rationalities and techniques of government evolve—particularly so during the course of the new century, therein denoting shifts from territorial control concerns to biopolitical preoccupations. These are related specifically to the condition, welfare, and management of the population (Jaeger, 2007)—where, as Hardt and Negri (2004) remark, people are embedded in systems of economic (re)production in which they perform jobs and produce outcomes currently more immaterial than material, such as ideas, information, and knowledge. And yet, immersed in the biopolitics of fear (Debrix & Barder, 2009), people survive through the social power of consumption, another phase enabled by the expression of biopower. This, Ham (2010) highlights, bringing in Altheide’s research (2004) wherein he shows a relationship between the politics of consumption after 9/11 by Americans that is embedded in that milieu.

In the current state of war (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 68) or of the biopolitics of fear (Debrix & Barder, 2009), modern class wars of liberation are now taking place. Consequently new occurrences of the production of subjectivities are arising with them, wherein it is possible to wonder about resistance schemes and about the role that people play therein as they legitimate the use of violence. In this case, the legitimation process lies not in the sovereignty of the people but rather “in the biopolitical productivity of the multitude” (Hardt & Negri, 2004, pp. 73, 79)—where humanity becomes “the new biopolitical body” (Agamben, 1998, p. 9).

Despite the strong criticisms of Hardt and Negri’s theoretical approach (biopolitics, Multitude, Empire) and its conceptual impossibility—particularly of their argument about the “utopia of ‘biopolitics without sovereignty’” (Prozorov, 2007, p. 143) and the sovereignty of biopower—the authors’ idea of the biopolitical production and resistance mechanisms can reasonably be articulated alongside resistance in traditional emancipatory terms. As such, resistance targets the “biopolitical rationalities of power relations” (Prozorov, 2007, p. 130), thereby highlighting the complexity of world politics (Zanotti, 2013).

Despite Foucault referring to biopower and biopolitics indistinctly—that is, without making any further differentiation between them—he recurred to the notion of governmentality rather than biopolitics (Castro-Gómez, 2010) in his later works, particularly during the 1990s (Dean, 2007). Here he defines the former as an ensemble of institutions, procedures, analysis, reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow a complex power to be exercised that has as its target the population at large (Foucault, 2007). Thus governmentality analysis adopts a methodology that takes into account specific practices that go beyond the state as a unit, and which emerge within social fields (the state, the market, and population) where multiple systems of power coexist among networks of control and resistance (Nadesan, 2008).

That broader and more comprehensive definition than the one Foucault gave for biopolitics might explain why many studies have engaged more with governmentality. That equally enriches and focuses discussions with “local conceptual devices” (strategies, technologies, programs, techniques). This is to understand the systems of power that inhabit us without, as Foucault claimed, becoming universals. Under the heading of “The Arts of Government” or “Political Rationality,” he focuses on “the nature and limits of ‘the political’ … , government, and with liberalism” inspiring timely research about “the relations of the ethos of liberalism and its techne” (Barry, Osborne, & Rose, 1997, pp. 4, 6, 7, 10).

Foucault’s toolbox allows IR scholars to recur to governmentality as well as to distinguish disciplinary power, governmentality, its types (liberalism, neoliberalism), and biopolitics itself. This explains IR theorists’ attraction to governmentality, especially when power is exercised through “institutions, practices, procedures, and techniques which act to regulate social conduct” (Joseph, 2010a, p. 224). Herein the population itself is the object and target of government (Vrasti, 2013)—as well as its purpose (Lipschutz, 2005). Thus, the Foulcaldian interpretation allows us to conceive of a sort of global governmentality: “an arrangement of actors and institutions, of rules and rule, through which the architecture of the global articulation of states and capitalism is maintained” (Lipschutz, 2005, pp. 235, 236). Even more challengingly, it permits the study of global politics through the lens of governmentality (Neumann & Sending, 2010)—which can be verified empirically when analyzing phenomena such as governance ratings and rankings made by IOs, NGOs, and private agencies (Löwenheim, 2008).

However, applying Foucault’s notions to the global dimension has been roundly criticized on the basis that scholars should be aware of the limitations of governmentality as a concept (Joseph, 2010a). This, regardless of its use as a heuristic tool, “to explore practices of government and resistance” or as a descriptive one that studies the “convergence of biopolitical, disciplinary, and governmental techniques in global liberalism” (Zanotti, 2013, pp. 289, 291).

As Vrasti (2013) shows, critics cite the fact that the Foulcaldian approach is too microscopic—and thus not useful to IR interests (Selby, 2007). Equally, critics address Foucault’s interest in the ways power is exercised (actions) or his plain refusal to accept sovereign power as a key element that informs hierarchical distinctions (Pasha, 2010). Others scholars make even stronger claims regarding Foucault’s presence in IR due to ontological differences between international and domestic issues, thus marking Foucault’s work as less relevant for the study of international politics (Thomas, 2014).

Additionally some contemporary IR works overstate Foucoultian concepts such as biopower or liberal governmentality, and thereby in the process ignore totalitarian or coercive forms of control existing across the globe (Selby, 2007). For some, the Foulcaldian “trespassing into IR” is a fact—and, as such, Pasha calls for “disciplining Foucault … to ensure that IR remains disciplined” (2010, pp. 213, 214).

Despite the fact that these critics are making reference to those scholars who recur to the Foucoultian tools as a way to explain international or transnational issues, rather than to Foucault’s own work per se (Thomas, 2014), some scholars acknowledge the importance of the preceding criticisms.

These are a warning both about impoverished current analysis that does not differentiate text or discourse—but that is engaged, rather, in empiricist analysis—and about taking into account the fact that Foucault’s works are mostly built out of the domestic environment (Calkivik, 2010). Thus greater specification of “where governmentality can be applied” (Joseph, 2010a, p. 235) is needed, because such studies will help IR scholars to develop more empirically grounded research (Vrasti, 2013).