Biopolitics

The problematic of biopolitics has become increasingly important in the study of political science. Inspired by the pioneering research of Michel Foucault and subsequent studies in a variety of theoretical schools since the 1970s, political scientists have started addressing the rationalities of power that go beyond traditional sovereign-territorial logics and rather take the vital processes of the population as their object. One of the main puzzles of the studies of biopolitics has been the relation between the positive and productive orientation of biopower and the negative power of exclusion and annihilation, which Foucault associated with sovereign power. The conversion of biopolitics into ‘thanatopolitics’ that annihilates the very life it was intended to protect was noted already in Foucault’s History of Sexuality I, but its full implications have been elaborated in the more recent works of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and other authors who emphasize the inextricable link between biopolitics and its apparent opposite. This paradox makes biopolitics the site where the fundamental questions of political theory pertaining e.g. to power, legitimacy and community, intersect with empirical inquiries into the governance of reproduction, health promotion, pandemics, torture, euthanasia and other issues. The Section will follow four previous Sections on Biopolitics that we convened at ECPR General Conferences since 2016 (Prague, Oslo, Hamburg, Wroclaw). All these Sections were well-attended and made possible the formation of new research contacts and networks. The Section at the 14th ECPR General Conference in Innsbruck seeks to further develop these networks, bringing together scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds in order to address various aspects of biopolitics both theoretically and empirically in a variety of contexts. The Section will comprise five Panels with five Papers each. The outline of the Panels below indicates the overall logic of the Section, yet the Section Chairs are open to additional Panel proposals that may replace the ones listed below. Two Panels are reserved for theoretically oriented Papers, dealing with the new perspectives on Foucault’s political thought and post-Foucauldian theories of biopolitics, particularly in contemporary Italian political theory. The remaining Panels address the same relation in three key contexts of biopolitical governance: political economy, particularly the forms of life promoted by neoliberal governmental rationalities; gender politics, particularly the deployment of gender as an instrument of governance, and, finally, the relation between biopolitical governmental rationality and the politics of internal and external security. Tentative Panels 1. New Perspectives on Foucault’s Theory of Biopolitics 2. Biopolitics after Foucault: Contemporary Theoretical Developments 3. Biopolitics and Economy 4. Biopower and Gender 5. Biopolitics and Security Section Chairs’ Bio Sergei Prozorov is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He is the author of eight monographs, the most recent being Democratic Biopolitics (Edinburgh University Press, February 2019). He has also published numerous articles on political theory and global politics in Political Theory, Political Studies, Security Dialogue, Theory, Culture and Society, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Political Geography and other international journals. He is the coeditor of the Routledge Handbook of Biopolitics (2016). Mika Ojakangas is Professor of Political Thought at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He is the author of six books and over 80 articles, including On the Greek Origins of Biopolitics (Routledge, 2016) and The Voice of Conscience (Bloomsbury, 2013).