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? The organ transplantation industry of the People's Republic of China (PRC) offers up a compelling case study of contemporary biopolitics, where the party-state has allowed and encouraged its agents to harvest organs from prison populations while profiteering from the transaction. Biopolitics is a unifying term for the state's control and regulation of the vital characteristics of its population (Greenhalgh 2009 ). In the case of China it has been adopted as a lens through which to analyse the one-child policy (Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005 ), the hukou system (Ye
3 The biopolitics of recognition Homonationalist formulations of asylum indicate the possibility that the state is bound to appear to be proactive in creating conditions of fairness for LGBT asylum seekers. This chapter looks at the administrative management of asylum, and argues that there is a contradiction at the heart of the social problem of asylum: asylum discourses are based on a specific regime of justification, that of universalistic human rights, which are consistently negated by a tough practice of exclusion. This contradiction puts the state at risk
social policy. This shift can be usefully be understood as a form of what Michael Foucault has labelled biopolitics, a profound change in the nineteenth century from sovereign power, or the rule of the sword, which rested on the right to take life or to let live, to the state now being invested with a new right to make live and to let die. 2 As David Nally has put it, this did
1 Biopolitics and the technological subject In the last resort, it is always life itself which is the supreme standard to which everything else is referred, and the interests of the individual as well as the interests of mankind are always equated with individual life or the life of the species as though it was a matter of course that life is the highest good
2 Biopolitical technologies in Arendt and Foucault As a category of revolutionary thought, the notion of historical necessity had more to recommend itself than the mere spectacle of the French Revolution … Behind the appearances was a reality, and this reality was biological and not historical, though it appeared now perhaps for the first time in the full light of history
2935 The Biopolitics 12/9/06 11:06 Page 102 6 Biopolitical life: the ‘war against war’ of the multitude I B E R A L societies, while founded upon the challenge of the mastery of war in the name of a commitment to the promotion of peace and the enabling of human life, appear today to have rendered their subjection to the condition of war all but intractable. The mere sustenance of liberal societies now requires their permanent mobilisation for the waging of a war without end against an enemy of Terror which threatens the existence of the logistical way of
1 The biopolitics of corpses of mass violence and genocide Yehonatan Alsheh Introduction For the past four decades, students of biopolitics have been probing why the spectacular growth in the application of technologies and policies that aim at the optimization of human life has been articulated with a parallel proliferation of human death. Various studies have been suggesting many objects or sites that are arguably highly symptomatic of the issue at hand – a privileged epitome of the biopolitical quandary. The most famous of these is the camp that Giorgio
This is a book which aims to overturn existing understandings of the origins and futures of the War on Terror for the purposes of International Relations theory. As the book shows, this is not a war in defence of the integrity of human life against an enemy defined simply by a contradictory will for the destruction of human life as commonly supposed by its liberal advocates. It is a war over the political constitution of life in which the limitations of liberal accounts of humanity are being put to the test if not rejected outright.
International interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, that ultimately brought the war to a standstill, emphasised recovering and identifying the missing as chief among the goals of post-war repair and reconstruction, aiming to unite a heavily divided country. Still, local actors keep,showing that unity is far from achieved and it is not a goal for all those involved. This paper examines the various actors that have taken up the task of locating and identifying the missing in order to examine their incentives as well as any competing agendas for participating in the process. These efforts cannot be understood without examining their impact both at the time and now, and we look at the biopolitics of the process and utilisation of the dead within. Due to the vastness and complexity of this process, instead of a conclusion, additional questions will be opened required for the process to keep moving forward.
This article considers the contexts and processes of forensic identification in 2004 post-tsunami Thailand as examples of identity politics. The presence of international forensic teams as carriers of diverse technical expertise overlapped with bureaucratic procedures put in place by the Thai government. The negotiation of unified forensic protocols and the production of estimates of identified nationals straddle biopolitics and thanatocracy. The immense identification task testified on the one hand to an effort to bring individual bodies back to mourning families and national soils, and on the other hand to determining collective ethnic and national bodies, making sense out of an inexorable and disordered dissolution of corporeal as well as political boundaries. Individual and national identities were the subject of competing efforts to bring order to,the chaos, reaffirming the cogency of the body politic by mapping national boundaries abroad. The overwhelming forensic effort required by the exceptional circumstances also brought forward the socio-economic and ethnic disparities of the victims, whose post-mortem treatment and identification traced an indelible divide between us and them.