The ESRC Seminar Series on Contemporary Biopolitics of Security has now concluded. A report on each of the four events can be found by clicking on this link.

The Emerging Securities Unit and the Biopolitics of Security Network wishes to thank all participants for lively discussions and timely contributions to the development of the biopolitics of security as a distinctive area of research.

 

The Biopolitics of Security Network is now being hosted by the Emerging Securities Unit @ Keele, Research Institute for Law, Politics, and Justice, Keele University

 

"... freedom is nothing but the correlative development of apparatuses of security."

(Michel Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population)

What political rationalities and general theories of politics emerge when life rather than sovereign territoriality becomes the referent object of power?

What happens to power relations when power takes life as its referent object? What mechanisms and technologies are deployed by power relations that take life as their field of formation? What mechanisms and micro practices of governmental regulation emerge when the basic biological features of the human species become the object of political strategisation?

But how has the life of populations changed since Foucault first interrogated biopower? What is the status, for example, of population science today? How indeed has our understanding of what it is to be a living thing changed in the wake of the molecular and the digital revolutions?

What new technologies have emerged around the new life sciences and the population science of the 21st century? How have these changed the field of formation of biopolitical power relations? What new political rationalities have they introduced? What new micro practices of power do they employ? How have they re-engineered more traditional biopolitical micro practices of power; such as those employed, for example, by medicine, surveillance, urban planning or insurance?

In Sécurité, Territoire, Population Foucault concludes that biopolitics simply is a dispositif de sécurité. As a dispositif de sécurité biopolitics secures by instantiating a general economy of the contingent throughout all the processes of re-productive circulation which impinge upon species existence as a whole.

How has this dispositif de sécurité been developing throughout the last century in particular? How has the contingent developed? What kind of freedom does the biopolitics of security instantiate and regulate?