Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War (original) (raw)

Millennium 42 face and, 'gives to the power to inflict legal punishment a context in which it appears to be free of all excess and violence'. 5 Second, we draw attention, as Foucault consistently does, to the ways in which global biopolitics operates as a strategic game in which the principle of war is assimilated into the very weft and warp of the socio-economic and cultural networks of biopolitical relations. Here Foucault reverses the old Clausewitzean adage concerning the relation between politics and war. Biopolitics is the pursuit of war by other means. We are also concerned, however, to note how the conceptualisation and practice of war itself changes via the very process of its assimilation into, and dialogical relation with, the heart of biopolitical order; and we concentrate on that point in this essay. There is, in addition, a further way in which we seek to extend Foucault's project.