HLTH 320: Biopolitics: The Governance of Life and Death

The term “biopolitics” carries multiple, sometimes competing, meanings in political science. When the term was first used in the United States in the late 1970s, it referred to an emerging subdiscipline that incorporated the theories and data of the life sciences into the study of political behavior and public policy. But by the mid-1990s, biopolitics was adopted by postmodernist scholars at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting who followed Foucault's work in examining the power of the state on individuals. Michel Foucault first used the term biopolitics in the 1970s to denote social and political power over life. Since then, two groups of political scientists have been using this term in very different ways. This paper examines the parallel developments of the term “biopolitics,” how two subdisciplines gained (and one lost) control of the term, and what the future holds for its meaning in political science.

The opening years of the 21st century have witnessed the rise of ‘global health’ as the preferred label for attempts to govern the health of the global population. In this article, I locate the epistemological origins of global health in the introduction of the Disability Adjusted Life Year (DALY) metric in the World Bank’s Investing in Health report. I argue that the DALY metric accomplishes an economization of life by disaggregating lifetimes into component units of time and reassembling life as a revenue stream to be maximized through practices of self-investment in one’s own health – configured here as human capital. Life is reimagined as time and the individual as a neoliberal homo oeconomicus: as an entrepreneur of the self. I argue that the DALY metric is best conceived as a biopolitical technology of power that underpins the contemporary neoliberal global health regime.

COVID-19 and the subsequent global response have had a profound impact on the public health, economic health, and political health in nearly every country. This article examines the biopolitics of power and pandemics in war. Three case studies are presented: the Spanish influenza outbreak of 1918-1920 and responses to the COVID-19 outbreak in both Syria and in eastern Ukraine. The pandemic's impact has been particularly acute in active warzones, undermining the ability of governments and organizations to enforce public health recommendations, provide for the care of patients, secure supplies, and transmit information.

Pandemics are by definition public health threats so significant that they demand a coordinated global response that fundamentally alters the human, social, and economic dynamics of everyday life through heavily regulated restrictions of the movement of people, products, and capital. The primary goal of such interventions is to minimize the potential for the transmission of the pathogen within and across communities. Public spaces, transit areas, and the ordinariness of everyday life are fundamentally recalibrated so that the pathways of pathogen transmission are disrupted. Yet, it is in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in which ‘struggling to breathe’ is a key symptom, that the world has witnessed widespread protests against the killing of George Floyd, who like Eric Garner was suffocated to death as part of systematic violence perpetrated against African-American men by the US policing system