biopower
nounEtymology From bio- + power, calque of French biopouvoir, coined by Michel Foucault.
1
Political science, Social sciences The sum of the various techniques used by modern nation-states to control not individual subjects but their entire populations, as contrasted with traditional modes of power based on the threat of death from a sovereign.
- The third type of power, biopower, emerges from the eighteenth century onward, and is directed toward populations rather than individual bodies.2015, Joe Painter, “Power”, in John Agnew, Virginie Mamadouh, Anna J. Secor, Joanne Sharp, editors, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography, Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 147:
2
Bioenergy.
- Related terms
- biopolitics, necropower