Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War

Abstract

Intimately allied with the globalisation of capital, but not entirely to be conflated with it, has emerged a new and diverse ensemble of power known as global liberal governance. This term of art refers to a varied and complex regime of power, whose founding principle lies in the administration and production of life, rather than in threatening death. Global liberal governance is substantially comprised of techniques that examine the detailed properties and dynamics of populations so that they can be better managed with respect to their many needs and life chances. In this great plural and complex enterprise, global liberal governance marks a considerable intensification and extension, via liberal forms of power, of what Michel Foucault called the ‘great economy of power’ whose principles of formation were sought from the eighteenth century onwards, once ‘the problem of the accumulation and useful administration of men first emerged’. Foucault called this kind of power—the kind of power/knowledge that seeks to foster and promote life rather than the juridical sovereign kind of power that threatens death— biopower, and its politics biopolitics. This paper forms part of our continuing exploration of the diverse character of global liberal governance as a form of global biopolitics. We are concerned, like Foucault, to draw attention to the peculiar ways in which biopower deploys force and violence, not least because biopower hides its violent