Biopolitics

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Biopolitics is a major paradigm in the social sciences and humanities, which begins from the premise that life is central to modern politics. In the early nineteenth century, biopolitics emerged as a specific form of politics with a series of concerns over "life", such as concerns with overpopulation, public hygiene, pseudo-scientific theories such as biological racism, and into state forms of biological domination such as Nazi Germany. More recently, contemporary issues such as combating climate change, preventing the global spread of infectious diseases and pandemics, as well as rethinking the meaning of being human given biomedical advances in such areas as genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, even prosthetics, have pushed life to the forefront of politics. Biopolitics as a concept was developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Across a number of writings and lectures in the 1970s, Foucault examined how life was gradually caught up in a number of apparatuses (dispositifs...

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