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One of the reasons that political thinkers turned to Foucault after the fall of the Soviet Union and the death of actually existing socialism is that his emphasis on power breaks from Marxism’s myopic focus on the economy to the exclusion of all other domains. Power works through religion, education, politics, and every possible field, in addition to the economy. The turn to an analysis of power looks at economy in terms of the role that it plays in subjecting people to coercive control, just as the state or the religious institution does. While the shift in focus from economy to power broadens the site of inquiry, it does nothing to further penetrate into how capitalism and the state work in relation to each other. This remains a blind spot that the theory of biopower inherits from Marxism, although it inverts the relation.

The turn from economy to power leaves Foucault and the other theorists of biopower especially ill-equipped to analyze the structures of the capitalist social order. Capitalism does not rule through its deployment of power but through inserting itself into subjects’ desire, which is a term that Foucault explicitly rejects. (11) By focusing on power, Foucault misses what drives subjects to commit themselves to capitalist society. It is not the power that capitalism has over them but the way that it entices their desire. Capitalism doesn’t issue threats or commands but rather entices with the promise of an unlimited satisfaction that the commodity will provide. One invests oneself in capitalism for the promise of a future satisfaction that will never come. The impossibility of the future that capitalism holds out before us doesn’t detract from its appeal but augments it. We strive for what we cannot attain and never cease striving because the fail is the fuel for our desire. While the capitalist economy occasionally imposes its power on people, this is an entirely secondary operation. It rules through the logic of desire, not the discourse of power. As long as Foucault and Agamben analyze the working of power, they will miss what keeps capitalism going, including the relationship that develops between capitalism and the state.

Indeed, our claim is that in Foucault there does seem to be an unresolved tension between, on the one hand, an idea of biopolitics as representing a radical break with old forms of sovereign power and, on the other, an idea of it as coextensive to it; as constituting part of the articulation of sovereignty. This is clearly made evident by his discussion of Nazism but also, as Esposito rightly notes, by the fact that Foucault uses both the term “replace” and “complement” to explain the workings of biopower in relation to sovereignty, sometimes in the same sentence. Thus, for instance, Foucault says, […] one of the greatest transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth century was precisely that, I wouldn’t [sic] say exactly that sovereignty’s old right – to take life or let live – was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right […]. This is the right, or rather precisely the opposite right. It is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die [or biopower].93 What this shows is that Foucault’s analytics maintains a level of ambiguity with respect to the question of the relation between biopower and sovereign power. While providing vital theoretical tools to analyse contemporary securitisation and racialising practices and creating useful lines of enquiry, Foucault’s notion of state racism appears, if not exactly to contradict, to at least create problems for his understanding of biopower, while bringing attention to the difficulties of moving away from sovereignty’s old right. By bringing the question of sovereignty to the forefront, the example of Nazism implicitly challenges one of Foucault’s methodological starting points: the idea that there is no sovereign; thus, putting into question his (main) understanding of biopolitics as unrelated to sovereign power. This is a point that Agamben makes explicit when he says that even though Foucault’s analysis has shown how these two faces of power work, it has failed to elucidate the points at which sovereign power (political techniques) and modern techniques of power (technologies of self) converge.94 Agamben’s notion of sovereignty as biopolitical, whereby the decision on the exception is a decision about life and more precisely about the threshold between life and death, can be seen as an attempt to readdress the problem of sovereignty in terms of what is for him an implicit thought in Foucault. Through his notion of (bio)sovereignty, Agamben attempts to account for mechanisms of state power that, although arguably more prevalent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, continue, in different forms, to permeate contemporary societies. 95 According to Agamben, the production of a specifically biopolitical body is ultimately dependent on the sovereign’s capacity to exclude through inclusion what he calls “bare life” or politically unqualified “life” from the juridico-political order. From this perspective, biopolitics is not only absolutely coextensive with sovereign power but biopolitics is both historically and conceptually the original activity of sovereignty. In other words, according to Agamben, sovereignty is founded on biopolitics. Thus, from his perspective Foucault is right in arguing that “when life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power, politics turns into biopolitics and that this signals the decisive event of modernity.”96 However, Agamben expresses puzzlement toward Foucault’s suggestion that life only becomes a political object in early modern Europe and, consequently, to conceptualize biopolitics as an exclusively modern phenomenon. Instead, what Agamben intends to show is that from the earliest treaties of political theory, particularly in Aristotle’s notion of man as “a political animal,” a notion of sovereignty as power over life or biopower is implicit. To this extent, bare life is the condition of modern politics (i.e., essential to its constitution). In Agamben’s words, “bare life is the original activity of sovereign power,”97 even as it is a condition that is necessarily negative or negated; one that only appears as such when the topology (or the hidden logic/location) on which it is based (i.e., the topology of exception or “inclusive exclusion”) is fully displaced.98 Consequently, for Agamben, no notion of biopolitics or biopower99 can do away with the question of sovereignty. Specifically, it cannot ignore what he calls ‘the paradox of sovereignty’, whose topology (or hidden logic), in line with Schmitt, he identifies in “the state of exception.”100 By deciding on the exception the State, which is “thus granted autonomous – and hence decisive – status,”101 substantiates sovereignty and real as opposed to ideal law. 102 Agamben’s own conceptualisation has been much discussed103 and is certainly not without its own problems and not just in terms of the question of racism, which, as we have discussed above, remains unspecified. According to Lazzarato, for example, it is Agamben’s notion of biopolitics that oscillates continuously between two alternatives. Lazzarato argues that for both Agamben and Foucault, the introduction of zoê into the sphere of the polis is the decisive event of modernity; it marks a radical transformation of the political and philosophical categories of classical thought. Yet, he suggests, Agamben is very ambiguous on whether the “impossibility of distinguishing between zoê and bios, between man as a living being and man as a political subject” is “the product of the action of sovereign power or the result of the action of new forces over which power has ‘no control.’’ 104 This is interesting. The same charge made by Agamben toward Foucault is here repeated by Lazzarato against Agamben. It is as if almost, if not all, attempts to find a resolution to the problem of whether to consider biopower as substitutive for or a complement to sovereign power tend either to reproduce this same ambiguity or to underplay the theoretical difficulties that arise from keeping them separate. Lazzarato himself could be seen as underplaying Foucault’s own ambiguities as analysed here but there are other such examples. In “Impossible dialogue on bio‐power,“ Ojakangas argues against Agamben’s reading and suggests that “neither the modern state nor the Third Reich – in which the monstrosity of the modern state is crystallized – are the syntheses of the sovereign power and bio‐power, but, rather, the institutional loci of their irreconcilable tension.”105 But what does this mean? Does it mean that Foucault was mistaken when he himself referred to their absolute coextensivity? In a reply to his critics, Ojakangas acknowledges that they can be and have been “historically intermingled in many ways […].”106 However, this insight is played down in an attempt to smooth over real points of intersection between biopower and sovereign power and in so doing, render Foucault’s analytics of power more coherent. What this misses, however, is that the tensions in Foucault’s work are not necessarily ascribable to him as a writer. As Negri says, “Foucault’s attention focused are [sic] perfectly continuous and coherent – coherent in the sense that they form a unitary and continuous theoretical production.”107 The tensions in his work in relation to his notion of biopower are not the result of a shift in focus but real – that is to say real in the sense of reflecting real conditions of history. Returning to Agamben, moreover, it is fair to say that, in line with Schmitt, his own understanding tends to reflect a decisionist or essentialist model of the state that seems oblivious to its bureaucratic differentiation, group strategies, class fractions, political parties, etc. and to how these might also rely on disciplinary, bio-political and⁄or securitisation mechanisms. Even his analysis of the movement as the truly political element is still within an essentialist framework where, as we have seen, in line with Schmitt, the state and the movement become one and the same. This is because what interests Agamben is not to provide a sociology or theory of the state as “a ‘transactional reality’ [réalité de transaction], that is to say a dynamic ensemble of relations and syntheses.”108 His intention is rather to expose, and provide a critique of, the hidden logic governing the state (of exception) in its production of spaces of exception or camps.109 By camp, Agamben means a space or anti-space of modernity – Agamben’s primary examples are yesterday’s Nazi camps and today’s refugee camps – in which people can be killed and inhumanely treated. The camp corresponds to the suspension of law where a zone of anomie is created, which Agamben claims not to be unrelated to the juridical order but where normal laws do not apply. However, in focusing on hidden logics, Agamben misses important aspects which from a Foucauldian perspective are not immaterial. For example, Foucault alerts us that the population “escapes the sovereign’s voluntarist and direct action in the form of the law” and is also “driven by its own specific phenomena and processes,” where the movement or movements could come to represent a more dynamic and autonomous force here.110 Furthermore, and contrary to both Schmitt and Agamben, for Foucault the state is not reducible to state sovereignty. Foucault understands the state as “the effect, the profile, the mobile shape of incessant transactions which modify, or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift sources of finance, modes of investment, decision-making centres, forms and types of control, relationships between local powers, the central authority, and so on.”111 In other words, Foucault sees the state not as an essence but as constructed through the interplay of “multiple governmentalities.”112 Thus, a Foucauldian analysis must take this into account when exploring the power of the state. It must consider that there are different levels of decision making and legitimation and a ”diversity of forces and groups,” which in turn have an impact on the specific configuration that a given state takes at a specific time. In this reading the state does not monopolize all decisions on the exception. As argued by Fleur Johns, proceeding from Schmitt’s open characterisation of the exception and in line with Foucault’s emphasis on the diffusion of power, “it is possible to conceive as both political and exceptional a much broader range of decisions, approached by or among a much broader range of agents, aggregations or arrogations, than those which Schmitt entertained as such.”113

But what doesn’t make sense in Agamben’s critique is his insistence that economics now trumps all politics. The state’s response to the pandemic does not reflect the displacement that he fears but rather indicates a moment where politics gains traction over the economy. Agamben’s analysis is revelatory insofar as it gets the situation precisely backwards. The state’s political interventions occur in spite of the damage that they do to the capitalist economy. The pandemic prompts a political decision that interrupts capital’s dominance. But Agamben fails to see this because he doesn’t separate theoretically the workings of the state from those of capital, which is the defining error of the theory of biopower. At various points, Agamben rails against social distancing, lockdowns, and even mask mandates. All of the means that states use to fight against the explosion of the pandemic receive his scorn, and none receive his endorsement. If Agamben had his way, the vulnerable would simply be left to die, but at least they would die outside the paradigm of biopower. (21) As Agamben sees it, the responses represent the choice of preserving bare life over sustaining a form of life, which renders them complicit with the contemporary dominance of biopower. (22) Opting for survival over a livable form of life leaves us with a world in which no one can live. Or, as Agamben puts it in one of his short texts on the pandemic, “Bare life – and the danger of losing it – is not something that unites people, but blinds and separates them. Other human beings … are now seen solely as possible spreaders of the plague whom one must avoid at all costs and from whom one needs to keep oneself at a distance of at least a meter.” (23) Agamben attacks the distancing used to stop the spread of the disease. As he sees it, social distancing is the worst type of oxymoron: distance entails the annihilation of sociality. Social and distance have nothing to do with each other. But here we can begin to see the error that runs through Agamben’s critique of the response to the pandemic and that ultimately undermines the theory of biopower. Both Foucault and Agamben exhibit a blindness to the role that mediation plays in social relations, a mediation that works through distance. By keeping a distance from each other, we do not act antisocially. Instead, we uphold the social bond insofar as we utilize forms of mediation. Sociality occurs when I exchange letters, have a conversation, or engage in a discussion. All of these forms of sociality rely on the mediation of language, which connects us to each other by separating us. The mediation of language provides the basis for the social bond, but it does so at the cost of actual proximity. When I relate to the other through words, these words enact a barrier between us, but this barrier is an enabling one. This mediation creates the bond through distance and enable the bond to exist through the separation that subjects have from each other. Social distance makes sociability possible through the creation of an interstitial space that mediates between the various subjects. I can interact with the other because the mediation of the public world gives me breathing space where the other is not over-present. In contrast to familial relations that involve proximity, the social bond holds us together through distance. Far from being an oxymoron, social distance represents the only possible form of sociality. The move from proximity to distance is the move from the closed connection of the family to the open bond of the society. Instead of recognizing distance as the sine qua non of sociality, Agamben ties our social being to proximity, which is why he recoils from the term social distance. The inability to recognize the necessity of mediation is also operative in Agamben’s critique of the state. He fails to see that the state is not just a sovereign authority. It represents the ultimate end point of mediation, providing a terrain on which subjects can engage with each other without simply colliding. (24) The state form signifies the connection that holds the society together. While the state can certainly act oppressively, its formal status as the signifier of the social bond does not inherently entail any oppressive expression of power. It is precisely the formal status of the state and of all mediation that Agamben misses in his critique of social distancing. The theory of biopower fails to recognize that the power of the state is not just oppressive but also constitutive of modern subjectivity. Agamben’s critique doesn’t stop with social distancing. From the very beginning of the pandemic, Agamben speaks out against the various lockdowns used to try to stem its spread. In “The Invention of an Epidemic,” he writes, “in a perverse vicious circle, the limitations of freedom imposed by governments are accepted in the name of a desire for safety that was created by the same governments that are now intervening to satisfy it.” (25) It is clear that Agamben is not wrong to fear that calls for safety often serve as the cover for mechanisms of oppressive interventions. But just because safety can function ideologically doesn’t mean that it necessarily does, as Agamben assumes. Agamben fails to distinguish between a state protecting citizens from a natural disaster and a state arming itself against an external enemy. The protection of citizens against a natural disaster brings out the formal function of the state, the state as a site of mediation, whereas foreign wars require the evocation of the state’s national content, the nation as a site of identification. The inability to see this distinction inevitably leads the thinker astray. In order to gin up enthusiasm for foreign wars, the state must call for nationalist pride, which foments the logic of us versus them and mobilizes an investment in the state as an oppressive force. In order to be the site of nationalist pride, the state must not just be a form. It must have a substantial content, and this content is always ideological. This is what is missing when the state acts as a pure form in response to a natural disaster. Rather than serving as a source of nationalist pride, the lockdowns spur a universalizing connection that the state form signifies. No one feels exceptional in a lockdown, which is why right-wing protesters inveigh against the state when it orders lockdowns but not when the state declares war. This distinction is one that should preoccupy our thinking much more than it does. Finally, Agamben’s critique also extends to the mask mandate. It seems as if the mask mandate would have nothing to do with the biopolitics. It is a measure designed to allow for more of the freedom of movement during the pandemic, which is what Agamben claims that he wants. But nonetheless, he includes a critique of masks in his diatribe against the measures taken to stem the effects of the pandemic. In an essay entitled “When the House Burns,” he writes, “The face is the most human thing; the human has a face and not simply a muzzle or a snout because we dwell in the open, because in our faces we expose ourselves and communicate. This is why the face is the place of politics. Our impolitical time does not want to see its own face; keeps it at a distance, masks and covers it. There must be no more faces, only numbers and figures. Even the tyrant is faceless.” (26) Covering the face, for Agamben, represents a betrayal of politics for the sake of tyranny. (27) Agamben’s attempt to link the exposed face to humanity misses the role that masks play in the constitution of subjectivity. One becomes a subject through putting on a mask, not through exposing one’s face. The subject emerges through its ability to lie, to present a fiction that separates the subject from its environment. Without the mask, without the obfuscation that distances subjectivity from those around it, there is no space for the subject’s freedom. While the mask can allow one to act maliciously, it also provides a realm invisible to any prying eyes. Like social distancing, the mask plays a constitutive role in the formation of a public world. If no one wore a mask and simply revealed a private self in every public interaction, no public interaction would be possible. The public world exists because I withhold my private views, which is what the film comedy Liar Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997) shows. The great achievement of this film is that it exposes the impossibility of public existence without a mask. (28) The film’s hero, Fletcher Reede (Jim Carrey) must spend an entire day incapable of lying, thanks to a curse levelling by a son exasperated with his deceitful father. Forced to live without a mask and constantly reveal what he’s thinking, Reede is simply incapable of interacting with anyone. He reveals his judgments on the appearance of his coworkers and his views of the incompetence of those around him. When a woman asks him how he likes her new dress, he looks at her unusual haircut and responds, “Whatever takes the focus off your head.” He then insults an overweight man and remarks on the existence of a pimple on another’s face. Such disturbances continue in every interaction he has. As a result, no one can tolerate his presence. He lives unmasked, and no one can bear to be around him. The film illustrates that life without a mask condemns us to privacy overwhelming and swallowing up the public world. The alignment of the mask with the public world is essential to its political valence. The mask is not the evanescence of politics, as Agamben would have it. It is the genesis of politics because it establishes the distance from the private world in which political struggle can take place. The public world is a world of masks, not a world where we bare our private selves. The political terrain is not that of competing private interests – this is the conservative vision – but instead that of the struggle to enact a form of universality. This is a struggle that can only take place in public among those masking their private selves. Agamben’s hostility to the mask is the extension of his hostility to any form of mediation, but it is mediation that is the ground of politics. The tyrant, contra Agamben, isn’t faceless. The tyrant, as Donald Trump shows, is the one who refuses to cover his face, who insists that his face must remain visible. Tyrants plaster their faces all over their domain in order to show not their political position but an image that resides beyond the political and that constitutes the basis of their rule. (29) Trump refuses to wear a mask because he refuses to engage in political struggle. He demands allegiance to his private self rather than political struggle taking place in public. Like Agamben, Trump does not care for how the mask interferes with the social bond. He explicitly invokes this when describing his own refusal to wear one. On April 3, 2020, he says, “I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens – I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself. I just, I just don’t.” (30) As Trump laments the aesthetic damage that a mask does, he makes an objection related to that of Agamben. But in Trump’s case, the mask represents a political position that he wants to remain aloof from. To be masked is to be thrust into a public world of political contestation. Although Trump has different reasons for attacking to the various responses to the pandemic, he nonetheless echoes Agamben’s critique. He comes out against social distancing, lockdowns, and mask mandates because he sees all these measures as irresponsible disruptions of economic freedom. When various parts of the United States locked down to stop the spread of the disease, he tweeted, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.” (31) Trump is not a theorist of biopower, but he does share with such theorists a belief that the state response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been itself another disaster. Trump and Agamben are not politically aligned. But their proximity on the response to the pandemic should give us pause when thinking about the theory of biopower. No one is simply guilty by association, but Agamben’s response to the pandemic mirrors Trump’s too precisely not to garner attention. Trump’s resistance to the measures that other countries used to effectively combat the spread of Covid-19 led to thousands of needless deaths in the United States. Refusing any exercise of state power out of a fear of expanding the reach of biopower amounts to implicitly taking up Trump’s attitude and contributing to the ravages of the disease. But even more significantly, it entails missing the role that the state form or the state as a form can play in combatting the ravages of contemporary capitalism.

How may we then understand the suspicion to anything common, shared, and universal that genealogy is closely linked to and that we find in IR scholarship informed by genealogy? To be able to assume a critical distance from genealogy as a form of critique, it is important to realize that the genealogical ontology of violence is but one option, no more and no less grounded than ontologies which refuse violence as foundational. In this penultimate section, I unravel the Nietzschean backdrop to Foucault’s genealogy and briefly contrast the genealogical ontology of violence with one which refuses violence as foundational by turning to the work of John Milbank. Paul Ricoeur (1970) once referred to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the “masters of suspicion.” Instead of taking surface phenomena such as discourse, culture, or subjective experience at face value, the “masters of suspicion” sought an underlying phenomenon which would in turn situate and explain this discourse, culture, or experience. For Marx, the ideas, values, and culture of a society would of course ultimately be “conditioned” by the economic base, and at the end of the day shown to be working toward perpetuating the interests of a particular class. For Freud, various types of behavioral neurosis could be explained by reference to an underlying repressed unconscious, which the psychoanalyst would help “bring to the surface,” and make the patient aware of, in the process of psychoanalysis. Nietzsche, however, became for Foucault in his genealogical phase, as Milbank (2006) puts it, “the only true master of suspicion” (2006: 278). Nietzsche’s suspicion, which Foucault takes over and expands on, lies in that all truth claims can be unmasked and exposed as nothing but manifestations of underlying wills to power. Foucault rejects the metaphoric of surface/depth, since the clash of wills to power goes on in the everyday activities of life. There is no deep structure “beyond” or “behind” this clash. However, in another sense, there is still a surface/depth binary at work, which harks back to Foucault’s Nietzschean understanding of a primordial clash in the “non-place” of emergence of forces. As Foucault puts it in a Zarathustra-like pronouncement, commenting on his affinities with the other French neo-Nietzscheans Deleuze, Lyotard, and Guattari, “I would say that we try to bring to light what has remained until now the most hidden, the most occulted, the most deeply invested experience in the history of our culture—power relations.” The “hidden truth” which Foucault (2003 [1973]) wants to “bring to light” is precisely that power relations “permeate the whole fabric of our existence” (2003 [1973]: 17). The genealogist thus cultivates a particular interpretive disposition to the world, well summed up by Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983): [h]aving destroyed ideal significations and original truths, [the genealogist] looks for the play of wills. Subjection, domination, and combat are found everywhere he looks. Whenever he hears [they hear] talk of meaning and value, of virtue and goodness, he looks [they look] for strategies of domination. (1983: 109) “The political question,” as Foucault (2003 [1973]) puts it, before asserting “the importance of Nietzsche,” is not about “error, illusion, alienated consciousness, or ideology; it is truth itself” (2003 [1973]: 75). But a number of problems with this view of politics as conflict always tending to violence and domination as foundational to the human condition immediately present themselves. When all gestures to what is common have been exposed as expressions of partial wills to power, and when the ethos of baseless suspicion has been unleashed and revealed all ideals, values, laws, and norms, as partial and biased, does that mean that human life has become more truthful, as arriving at the realization of the “reality” of this ontologized state of primordial clashes? On Foucault’s own ontology, “Nietzsche’s hypothesis” would itself have to be unmasked as yet another contender among many to capture the final truth about the human condition, and shown to mask a partial will to power (Milbank, 2006: 282; Oksala, 2012: 27). If one deploys the genealogical suspicion onto the genealogical disposition itself, it is revealed as but one option among others. Reading the genealogical ethos as expressing a distinctive (anti)theological core, one may, with Milbank (2006), ask whether the Nietzschean suspicion that Foucault takes over “is the final and truly non-metaphysical mode of secular reason, or else itself embodies an ontology of power and conflict which is simply another mythos” (2006: 2). One may also follow Milbank in his suggestion that secular discourse of which he reads post-Nietzschean genealogy as a radical exponent of emerged out of an active rejection of some of Christianity’s core teachings. Foucault (2003 [1975–1976]) articulates this rejection when he refers to genealogy as the very opposite of those traditional analyses that try to find beneath the apparent or superficial confusion, beneath the visible brutality and passions, a basic rationality which is both permanent and related, by its very essence, to the just and the good. (2003 [1975–1976]: 269) However, in classical Thomist Christianity, difference does not have to be suppressed, reduced, or subsumed in any kind of dialectical movement. Thus, in contrast to Foucault’s genealogy, “[p]eace no longer depends upon the reduction to the self-identical, but is the sociality of harmonious difference. Violence, by contrast, is always a secondary willed intrusion upon this possible infinite order” (Milbank, 2006: 6). Once one realizes that the ontology of violence is no more than one possible mythos, one can put forward “an alternative mythos, equally unfounded, but nonetheless embodying an ‘ontology of peace’, which conceives differences as analogically related, rather than equivocally at variance” (Milbank, 2006: 279). On the one hand, the reading that Milbank proposes affirms what we find in genealogy, namely “the reduction of substance to transition.” On the other hand, such a reading “questions the transcendental reading of transition as conflict” (Milbank, 2006: 298). So while Milbank retains a differential ontology, he questions whether the elements would have to relate to one another arbitrarily and violently. Milbank puts the crux of the issue thus, The question of the possibility of living together in mutual agreement, and the question of whether there can be a charitable act, […] turn out to be conjointly the question of whether there can be an “analogy” or a “common measure” between differences which does not reduce differences to mere instances of a common essence or genus. In other words a likeness that only maintains itself through the differences, and not despite nor in addition to them. (Milbank, 2006: 290) The point is not necessarily that IR scholarship should embrace Milbank’s alternative vision, but rather to make clear that the genealogical rendition is but one option, no more and no less grounded than ontologies which refuse violence as foundational. Conclusion This article has examined genealogy as a form of critique in IR. The first part of the article demonstrated that Foucault’s genealogy was an important component in the work of the first generation of post-structuralist IR as well as in contemporary scholarship informed by frameworks of governmentality and biopolitics. It was shown that when genealogy is understood as critique, violence risks being inscribed as foundational to global political life. However, despite the fact that it is virtually impossible to understand the meaning of “critical” in this work without a grasp of genealogy, the assumptions of genealogy have been insufficiently engaged. To rectify this, the second part of the article critically examined the philosophical underpinnings of genealogy. Through a close reading of three core texts where Foucault grapples with genealogy, it was shown that genealogy relies on an ontology of forces, which are postulated as arbitrarily and violently related. Genealogy therefore tends to inscribe violence as foundational to social relations. It was further noted that genealogically informed critique brings a peculiar form of suspicion to all that is presented as common, shared, and universal. This suspicion was traced back to Nietzsche and characterized as “baseless,” which again reflects a set of particular ontological commitments idiosyncratic to genealogy. These commitments, which inscribe violence as foundational, were finally contrasted to an ontology which follows the genealogical understanding of emergent forces, but refuses the assumption of them as arbitrarily and violently related. Finally, what are the implications for empirical Foucauldian work for the argument I have pursued in the article? In empirical work informed by governmentality and biopolitics, IR scholars often examine the encounter between Western and non-Western countries. The problem to which I ultimately want to draw attention is not that such scholarship is often critical of military intervention undertaken by Western powers. On the contrary, it is important to bring out and critically scrutinize the paternalistic and indeed hierarchical renditions that no doubt are common in, for instance, the liberal peace project (e.g. Richmond, 2011). The problem is rather that the genealogical ethos risks turning into a global interpretive disposition, with which all global interactions by whatever means are made a priori suspect. Instead of seeking to engage in a careful empirical consideration of the merits of forms of intervention in each case, the generalized genealogical suspicion disables [shuts down] any other understanding of global political life than a ceaseless unfolding drama of clashing wills to dominate and conquer. Since the liberal project is exposed as just a particular will to power, it must inscribe a relation of violent hierarchy to non-Western localities, as opposed to an understanding of similar and harmoniously overlapping subjectivities already existing in those places. On such a pre-methodological genealogical disposition, intervention becomes suspicious in whatever form it may take. Whether it is in the form of peacekeeping troops or rule of law advisors assisting local actors in security sector reform, any involvement can only be read as a manifestation of “the West’s” ongoing will to colonize and impose its will on others.

Public Opinion and the Iraq Syndrome One popular explanation for the American public’s palpable unwillingness to countenance military involvement in the Syrian civil war in 2013 was that the country was slumping into a deep isolationist mood, and there was concern about a new isolationism or a growing isolationism or a new non-interventionist fad.23 In contrast to those envisioning a new isolationism, some commentators, including such unlikely soulmates as Andrew Bacevich, Robert Kagan, John Mearsheimer, Rachel Maddow, Gregory Daddis, and Vladimir Putin, have variously maintained that we have seen the rise of a new American militarism in the last decades or that Americans congenitally hail from Mars.24 But both perspectives are flawed. The American people have not become isolationist: they have not come seriously to yearn for full withdrawal from the world. However, they have long had a deep and abiding wariness about costly and frustrating military engagements. And the militarism perspective, it seems to me, extrapolates far too much from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These ventures – the 9/11 wars – have proved to be aberrations from usual patterns, not portents of the future. Although they demonstrate that Americans remain willing to strike back hard if attacked, they do not indicate a change in the public’s reticence about becoming militarily involved in other kinds of missions – or errands. Instructive is an examination of the long-term trends in a set of poll questions designed to tap “isolationism.” Three versions are mapped in Figure 8.1. 25 They document something of a rise in wariness about military intervention after the Vietnam War and then, thereafter, a fair amount of steadiness punctured by spike-like ups and downs in response to events including 9/11 and its ensuing wars. In the wake of the disastrous military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, “isolationism” as measured by these poll questions has gone back to about where it was in the aftermath of Vietnam. The poll question with the longest pedigree has been asked at least since 1945: “Do you think it will be best for the future of this country if we take an active part in world affairs, or if we stayed out of world affairs?” The question seems to have been fabricated to generate an “internationalist” response. In 1945, after all, the United States possessed something like half the wealth in the world and scarcely had much of an option about “taking an active part in world affairs,” as it was so blandly and unthreateningly presented. The authors of the poll question got the number they probably wanted: so queried, only 19 percent of poll respondents in 1945 picked the “stay out” or “isolationist” option. As can be seen in the figure, however, high levels of “isolationism” can be generated if the question is reformulated by asking respondents whether they agree or disagree that “We shouldn’t think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our own national problems and building up our strength and prosperity here at home.” In that rendering, the option of staying out of world affairs is only implied, and measured “isolationism” consistently registers 30 or 40 percentage points higher. In the years following 1945, the “stay out” percentage rose a bit to around 25 percent, but it had descended to 16 percent in 1965 in the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and as the war in Vietnam began. The experience of that war pushed it much higher – to 31 to 36 percent as part of what has been called the “Vietnam Syndrome.” The percentage has stayed at around that level ever since except for some spike-like jolts upward or downward. There was a downward dip during the Gulf War of 1991, at the end of which, as noted in Chapter 3, the war’s chief author, President George H. W. Bush, grandly concluded a speech by trumpeting, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” Within weeks, however, the “stay out” option had regained its previous attractiveness. There were also interesting spikes suggesting a wariness about military interventions abroad when troops were sent to Bosnia in late 1995 and at the time of the Kosovo conflict in 1999. In these instances, the spikes were upward, even though no American troops were lost in either venture and even though both were deemed successful, at least in their own terms, at the time. In the current century, the “stay out” percentage dropped to 14, its lowest recorded level ever, in the aftermath of 9/11. It rose the next year, and then plunged downward again in 2003 and 2004 – the first two years of the Iraq War. By 2006, however, it had risen to post-Vietnam levels, where it has roughly remained although a related question, asking whether the United States “should mind its own business internationally” while letting “other countries get along as best they can on their own,” did reach new – or almost new – highs in 2013. 26 Given the bland attractiveness of the “take an active part in world affairs” option, it is impressive that around a third or more of the public since Vietnam has generally rejected it to embrace the “stay out” option. However, this should probably be taken to be more nearly an expression of wariness about costly military entanglements than as a serious yearning for full withdrawal from the world, or “isolationism.” There is, for example, no real indication that Americans want to erect steely trade barriers.27 And polls continually show that the public is far more likely to approve foreign ventures if they are approved and supported by allies and international organizations.28 Real isolationism should be made of sterner stuff.29 As Christopher Preble puts it succinctly, “for the most part, Americans want to remain actively engaged in the world without having to be in charge of it.”30 John Mearsheimer argues that the public has become less enthusiastic about acting as the world’s policeman.31 However, it does not seem that it has ever been very enthusiastic: there has always been a deep reluctance to lose American lives or to put them at risk overseas for humanitarian purposes. That perspective is seen most starkly, perhaps, when Americans were asked in 1993 whether they agreed that “Nothing the US could accomplish in Somalia is worth the death of even one more US soldier.” Fully 60 percent expressed agreement.32 This is not such an unusual position for humanitarian ventures. If Red Cross or other workers are killed while carrying out humanitarian missions, their organizations frequently threaten to withdraw no matter how much good they may be doing. Essentially what they are saying is that the saving of lives is not worth the deaths of even a few of their service personnel.33 Thus, civil warfare and vicious regimes have not actually inspired a great deal of alarm except when they seemed to present a direct threat to the United States. As a result, few have inspired military intervention. Rather, the most common official pattern about such situations has been, as suggested earlier in this book several times, vast proclamation followed by half-vast execution. For example, the United States did a great deal of bloviating about the civil war in Bosnia in the early 1990s, but it held off intervention on the ground until hostilities had ceased. Even then, the public was anything but enthusiastic when American peace keeping soldiers were sent in, and enthusiasm did not rise even when it turned out the atmosphere remained “permissive” and the troops were met with little or no hostility.34 Indeed, about the only time the public chose to pay much attention to the war in Bosnia, a venture much publicized and much agonized over by elites and by the media in the 1990s, was when an American airman was shot down behind enemy lines and when American troops were dispatched to the area to police the situation.35 Intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was by bombing alone, and in Somalia, the United States abruptly withdrew when 19 of its troops were killed. The United States, like other developed nations, mostly remained studiously distant from genocide in Cambodia in 1975–79 and Rwanda in 1994 and from catastrophic civil war in Congo after 1997 or in South Sudan after 2013. 36 In many respects the Libyan effort of 2011 was quite a bit like the campaign in Somalia in 1992–93: after some initial success, troops and direct military involvement were pulled back when things began to go awry. The reluctance is most evident in the supportive, but distant, response to rebels in the calamitous Syrian civil war. In general, then, those who suggest there has been a surge of militarism put far too much weight on the temporary successes of the stridently hawkish neoconservative movement in the early part of the George W. Bush administration. In fact, there has never been much support for sending American troops into hostile situations in the last decades – or maybe even century – unless there was a decided provocation. In the 9/11 cases, opinion was impelled not by a propensity toward militarism, but, as with entry into World War II, by an outraged reaction to a direct attack on the United States. Even at that, as seen in Chapter 4, Bush was unable to boost support for going to war with Iraq in his campaign to do so in 2002–3 despite the fact that there was little opposition from the Democratic leadership. Even support for the once-popular, 9/11-induced war in Afghanistan waned. Using the same poll question, initial support for that war was some 15 percentage points higher than it had been at the start of the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, but, like those wars, support gradually declined as American casualties were suffered.37 People, contrary to a large literature, do not seem to be readily manipulable by opinion elites or by the media on such issues. As noted in Chapter 5, the Obama administration dramatically proposed military action in response to chemical weapons use in Syria, and leaders of both parties in Congress rather quickly fell into line. Nonetheless, the public was decidedly unwilling even to support the punitive bombing of Syria – a venture likely to risk few if any American lives – out of concern that it would lead to further involvement in the conflict there.38 Leaders may propose, but that does not mean public opinion will move in concert – that people will necessarily buy the message. And on the occasions when they do, it is probably best to conclude that the message has struck a responsive chord, rather than that the public has been manipulated.39 If George W. Bush was unable to boost support for invasion during the runup to his war in Iraq, neither was his father able to do so, despite strenuous efforts, for going to war against Iraq in Kuwait in the runup to the 1991 Gulf War as discussed in Chapter 3. On the other hand, public concern about international terrorism, as discussed in Chapter 7, has not altered much in the two decades since 9/11 even though there have been multiple reasons to have expected an erosion of concern to take place. After Vietnam, there was strong desire – usually called the Vietnam Syndrome – not to do that again. And, in fact, there never were other Vietnams for the United States during the Cold War. The administration was kept by Congress even from rather modest anti-Communist militarized ventures in Africa and, to a lesser extent, in Latin America – though there was bipartisan support for aiding the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan, a venture, however, that did not involve sending American troops. A rather comparable Iraq, or Iraq/Afghan, Syndrome now seems likely.40 Christopher Dandeker parses the situation succinctly: “the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq represent the high-water mark of the Western belief that states can successfully use military force to intervene in the affairs of failed, rogue, or other states to achieve ambitious foreign policy goals.” Further, “the difficulties of achieving success in these interventions, even when ‘success’ is modestly defined, have shaken confidence and belief in the value of intervention among Western political and military elites and publics.” Dandeker also argues that “military interventions will continue,” but they will be different from those in Iraq and Afghanistan and “more like the Libyan example of 2011.”41 As noted above and in Chapter 5, however, the behavior in the Libya venture is not all that new. It is similar to the one in Somalia in 1993 – initial success and then rather abrupt and unsentimental withdrawal as things begin to fall apart. Although support for one tactic, direct military intervention, declined after Vietnam, the general policy of maintaining somewhat lesser exertions in dealing with the perceived Communist threat continued to be supported and a huge military continued to be extravagantly financed although it had little to do. And something like that seems likely in the case of today’s monsters. There will be general support in principle for policies intended to deal with proliferation and international terrorism, but not so much for militarized ventures of invasion and particularly of occupation.42 The US military seems to be on much the same page. In its defense priority statement of January 2012, the Defense Department firmly emphasized (that is, rendered in italics) that “U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct largescale, prolonged stability operations.” Later, when President Donald Trump suggested that “the military option” might be appropriate for dealing with the problems entailed by Venezuela (which had systematically destroyed itself but was occasionally belligerent and defiant), his defense secretary at the time, James Maddis, simply responded, “The Venezuelan crisis is not a military matter.”43 As David Sanger puts it, “America is out of the occupation business.”44 Although there was some backward creep after 2014 in response to the ISIS menace as discussed in Chapter 5, this basic policy perspective does not seem to have changed. Overall, as many military people have come increasingly to appreciate, many problems simply cannot be solved by military means. The public also seems to be increasingly capable of containing the notion that it is the destiny of the United States to lead the world. The American record on this score, actually, is less than stellar. Out of sympathy over 9/11, NATO countries did more or less “follow” the United States into the invasion of Afghanistan. However, over time the “leader” lost its followers as the occupation increasingly became a debacle. And, when the United States tried to get support for its ill-destined invasion of Iraq in 2003, only the British and the Australians signed up to join its tiny “coalition of the willing.” Most countries, including especially France, tried to dissuade the United States from the misguided venture – a true sign of friendship if not of blind followership. As noted earlier, for its prescient advice and its efforts to pacify the chief primate, France’s effrontery was met with humorless derision in the United States Congress when a fat-laced accompaniment to hamburgers was relabeled “freedom fries.” At that, Australia soon left the Iraq misadventure and so, later, did the United Kingdom where outraged parliamentarians from the party of invasion-supporting Prime Minister Tony Blair used the episode to destroy his political career. In the runup to Iraq, the United States, using not only “leadership” but bribery, also tried to get NATO ally Turkey to let it use its territory for bases for the invasion and failed. In an earlier decade, the United States had also tried to entice (aka “lead”) some of its “followers” to help it out in the Vietnam War, with only modest success. Although fully two-thirds of Americans continued to favor greater US involvement in the global economy in 2013, only 46 percent deemed it “very desirable” for the United States to exert strong leadership in world affairs – the lowest level ever registered by the poll question. In the same poll, only 11 percent of Europeans said they felt that way: the dominated, it would appear, do not seem to have gotten the message.45 In a speech at West Point in 2014, President Barack Obama self-importantly contended that “the question we face is not whether America will lead but how we will lead.”46 Perhaps the American (and European) people can be forgiven for worrying about the results. At the same time, the American military – despite its substantial record of failure – continues to receive high approval ratings in public opinion surveys. It’s just that the public does not seem to want it actually to be used very much and then mainly (or only) when it espies a clear threat to the United States. And even where there was substantial public fear about a threat, as with ISIS, the military, anticipating that support even for popular ventures like that might well wane as American battle deaths were suffered, deemed it wise to configure troop deployments in a manner that minimized American casualties. If that happens, public support may not rise, but attention will wane. The ability to use drones and, as in Kosovo, to fight from distances like 40,000 feet fits this perspective. Militarized interventionist internationalism above a very modest level, then, may well be dead – whether the inspiration for such interventions is liberal or neoconservative. However, it may never have actually been alive either – the public has never really bought the notion that American lives should be lost for humanitarian purposes, to spread democracy, or to make the world safe for others. view of politics as conflict always tending to violence and domination as foundational to the human condition immediately present themselves. When all gestures to what is common have been exposed as expressions of partial wills to power, and when the ethos of baseless suspicion has been unleashed and revealed all ideals, values, laws, and norms, as partial and biased, does that mean that human life has become more truthful, as arriving at the realization of the “reality” of this ontologized state of primordial clashes? On Foucault’s own ontology, “Nietzsche’s hypothesis” would itself have to be unmasked as yet another contender among many to capture the final truth about the human condition, and shown to mask a partial will to power (Milbank, 2006: 282; Oksala, 2012: 27). If one deploys the genealogical suspicion onto the genealogical disposition itself, it is revealed as but one option among others. Reading the genealogical ethos as expressing a distinctive (anti)theological core, one may, with Milbank (2006), ask whether the Nietzschean suspicion that Foucault takes over “is the final and truly non-metaphysical mode of secular reason, or else itself embodies an ontology of power and conflict which is simply another mythos” (2006: 2). One may also follow Milbank in his suggestion that secular discourse of which he reads post-Nietzschean genealogy as a radical exponent of emerged out of an active rejection of some of Christianity’s core teachings. Foucault (2003 [1975–1976]) articulates this rejection when he refers to genealogy as the very opposite of those traditional analyses that try to find beneath the apparent or superficial confusion, beneath the visible brutality and passions, a basic rationality which is both permanent and related, by its very essence, to the just and the good. (2003 [1975–1976]: 269) However, in classical Thomist Christianity, difference does not have to be suppressed, reduced, or subsumed in any kind of dialectical movement. Thus, in contrast to Foucault’s genealogy, “[p]eace no longer depends upon the reduction to the self-identical, but is the sociality of harmonious difference. Violence, by contrast, is always a secondary willed intrusion upon this possible infinite order” (Milbank, 2006: 6). Once one realizes that the ontology of violence is no more than one possible mythos, one can put forward “an alternative mythos, equally unfounded, but nonetheless embodying an ‘ontology of peace’, which conceives differences as analogically related, rather than equivocally at variance” (Milbank, 2006: 279). On the one hand, the reading that Milbank proposes affirms what we find in genealogy, namely “the reduction of substance to transition.” On the other hand, such a reading “questions the transcendental reading of transition as conflict” (Milbank, 2006: 298). So while Milbank retains a differential ontology, he questions whether the elements would have to relate to one another arbitrarily and violently. Milbank puts the crux of the issue thus, The question of the possibility of living together in mutual agreement, and the question of whether there can be a charitable act, […] turn out to be conjointly the question of whether there can be an “analogy” or a “common measure” between differences which does not reduce differences to mere instances of a common essence or genus. In other words a likeness that only maintains itself through the differences, and not despite nor in addition to them. (Milbank, 2006: 290) The point is not necessarily that IR scholarship should embrace Milbank’s alternative vision, but rather to make clear that the genealogical rendition is but one option, no more and no less grounded than ontologies which refuse violence as foundational. Conclusion This article has examined genealogy as a form of critique in IR. The first part of the article demonstrated that Foucault’s genealogy was an important component in the work of the first generation of post-structuralist IR as well as in contemporary scholarship informed by frameworks of governmentality and biopolitics. It was shown that when genealogy is understood as critique, violence risks being inscribed as foundational to global political life. However, despite the fact that it is virtually impossible to understand the meaning of “critical” in this work without a grasp of genealogy, the assumptions of genealogy have been insufficiently engaged. To rectify this, the second part of the article critically examined the philosophical underpinnings of genealogy. Through a close reading of three core texts where Foucault grapples with genealogy, it was shown that genealogy relies on an ontology of forces, which are postulated as arbitrarily and violently related. Genealogy therefore tends to inscribe violence as foundational to social relations. It was further noted that genealogically informed critique brings a peculiar form of suspicion to all that is presented as common, shared, and universal. This suspicion was traced back to Nietzsche and characterized as “baseless,” which again reflects a set of particular ontological commitments idiosyncratic to genealogy. These commitments, which inscribe violence as foundational, were finally contrasted to an ontology which follows the genealogical understanding of emergent forces, but refuses the assumption of them as arbitrarily and violently related. Finally, what are the implications for empirical Foucauldian work for the argument I have pursued in the article? In empirical work informed by governmentality and biopolitics, IR scholars often examine the encounter between Western and non-Western countries. The problem to which I ultimately want to draw attention is not that such scholarship is often critical of military intervention undertaken by Western powers. On the contrary, it is important to bring out and critically scrutinize the paternalistic and indeed hierarchical renditions that no doubt are common in, for instance, the liberal peace project (e.g. Richmond, 2011). The problem is rather that the genealogical ethos risks turning into a global interpretive disposition, with which all global interactions by whatever means are made a priori suspect. Instead of seeking to engage in a careful empirical consideration of the merits of forms of intervention in each case, the generalized genealogical suspicion [prevents] disables any other understanding of global political life than a ceaseless unfolding drama of clashing wills to dominate and conquer. Since the liberal project is exposed as just a particular will to power, it must inscribe a relation of violent hierarchy to non-Western localities, as opposed to an understanding of similar and harmoniously overlapping subjectivities already existing in those places. On such a pre-methodological genealogical disposition, intervention becomes suspicious in whatever form it may take. Whether it is in the form of peacekeeping troops or rule of law advisors assisting local actors in security sector reform, any involvement can only be read as a manifestation of “the West’s” ongoing will to colonize and impose its will on others.

Post-Development literature is highly influenced by Foucault and the method of discourse analysis: consequently, hegemony and power structures are being deconstructed. But what follows is the ignorance of how discourses can be transformed and resisted at the local level. The celebration of local knowledge and local resistance leads to a romantization and an unquestioned believe in tradition. ‚The Local‘ is set equally with authenticity and emancipation. But power structures are, especially in application of the work of Foucault, ever-present (Jakinow 2008: 313). Why then are grassroots movements guarantors for being inclusive, non-hierarchic and democratic? Local forms of oppression are overlooked (Engel 2001:140). Nederveen Pieterse comments: „while the shift towards cultural sensibilities that accompanies this perspective is a welcome move, the plea for ‚people‘s culture', indigenous culture, local knowledge and culture, can lead if not to ethnochauvinism, to reification of both culture and locality or people. It also envices a one-dimensional view of globalization which is equated with homogenization“ (Nederveen Pieterse 1998: 366). Additionally, the exclusive validity of local knowledge precludes the view on multiple knowledge. In consequence the fundamental criticism on modernity and modern science implicates a rejection of the benefits: for example, the rights of the individual as well as the techniques of modern medicine are dismissed, although they brought health security and a higher life-expectancy (Ziai 2007: 102). Nederveen Pieterse even classifies Post- Development to belong “to the neo-traditionalist reaction to modernity“ (Nederveen Pieterse 1998: 366?). In his opinion, Post- Development is struck into a paradox: not showing any regard for progressive implications and dialectics of modernity but at the same time dealing with issues like anti-authoritarianism, democratization, emancipation, that all clearly arose out of the Enlightenment and the modern age, is highly inconsistent (ebd. 1998: 365). global structures of inequality are not taken into concern. Storey asks for example how local actors are supposed to find solutions at the global level (Storey 2000). in emphasizing cultural diversity and in rejecting universalism, Post- Development is criticized of being cultural-relativist. Therefore Post- Development stands in suspicion to accept oppression and violence and to be indifferent towards the violation of human rights. Post- Development is accused to feel an affinity for neoliberalism. According to Nederveen Pieterse, it is argued that both approaches reject state intervention and agree on state failure: Escobar is skeptical towards state planning, he questions social engineering and the faith in progress lead by the state. The neoliberal thinker Deepak Lal condemns state-centered development economies (Nedeveen Pieterse 1998: 364). Further, also advocates of a neoliberal capitalism favor a strong civil society and the liberty of all citizens to choose their possibilities. The final criticism is that Post-Development, instead of offering a solution, sticks on the classical development paradigm by being in position of permanent critique. According to Tanja Jakimow Post- Development is “in danger of having to constantly re-manoeuvre to retain its ‘alternative’ status as elements of its critique are incorporated into the mainstream“ (Jakimow 2008: 313). There is no vision of how Post- Development can look like in practice: „Post- Development parallels postmodernism both in its acute institutions and in being directionless in the end, as a consequence.

We can see an example of biopower producing life today in the Apple Watch. This apparatus constantly monitors one’s level of fitness – checking the pulse, blood oxygen saturation, calories burned, and heart arrythmias. The watch can even call for an ambulance if it detects that the wearer has fallen. People invest in it for the healthy lifestyle that it promises, but by doing so, they unwittingly participate in the logic of biopower. As a site of biopower, the Apple Watch produces a subject utterly preoccupied with its survival. The company advertises this product with the slogan: “The future of your health is on your wrist.” The Apple Watch makes live – it forces constant attention to life on us – and is thus evidence that Foucault’s nightmare has become our everyday reality. By highlighting this example of what appears as biopower, the problem with the theory already becomes apparent. The concern for healthy life – making live – in this instance doesn’t emanate from the state but from capital. While it is true that contemporary capitalism demands that subjects concern themselves with sustaining their lives, this is not necessarily a preoccupation of the state, despite the focus of biopower’s theorists on the state. This lacuna exposes just how the theory of biopower leads us astray.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the distance between capital and the state blows wide open. In order to respond to the crisis, states around the world resort to measures that stop the flow of capital and restrict the functioning of capitalist society. The state’s attempt to ensure the survival of its citizens – to “let live,” in the words of Foucault – take on a clearly anticapitalist hue. Biopower, if that is what we must call it, reveals itself as an opponent of unbridled capitalism rather than as capitalism’s handmaiden. States make emergency payments to all citizens, freeze evictions, expand free medical care, offer state-funded child care, and close businesses. These are not actions that benefit capital.

At this point, the power of the state and the interests of capital come into opposition. The theorists of biopower have no way to account for this division, which is why Agamben’s response to the pandemic is so woeful. Unable to recognize the potential radicality of the split between state power and the forces of capital, Agamben lumps both together under the rubric of biopower and launches a series of diatribes against its expansion during the Covid-19 pandemic. When he does discuss the difference, he laments capitalism’s capitulation to the state and its regime of biopower. These diatribes show the failure of the theory of biopower to think through the politics of capitalist society in crisis. But more than this, Agamben’s reactions to the pandemic highlight fundamental missteps that have always been present but never fully apparent. The pandemic reveals that the theory of biopower is not a theory of emancipation after all but rather a theory that supports the workings of capital.

It is my contention that the Covid-19 pandemic reveals the unviability of the theory of biopower. This theory, which sees dominance being exercised through the production of bare life, is in its heyday. According to this theory, power invades our lives by creating a preoccupation with survival above everything else. In the epoch of biopower’s reign, survival and health become the only values, which take up the center of our political world. As Giorgio Agamben, the leading proponent of the theory of biopower puts it, “The ancient right to kill and to let live gives way to an inverse model, which defines modern biopolitics, and which can be expressed by the formula to make live and to let die.” (5) According to this theory, a radical transformation of the political field – from threatening death to enforcing life – comes to define the new epoch of power. (6) But the response of authorities and theorists of biopower to the Covid-19 pandemic indicates that the explanatory power of the theory, like Leibniz’s theodicy in the face of the Lisbon Earthquake, cannot survive our contemporary disaster. The attempt to save lives – to make live, in Agamben’s terms – cuts against the economic imperatives of capitalism. The efforts to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 put a wrench in the accumulation of capital. As a result, as much as any of the human victims of this disaster, the theory of biopower succumbs to its ravages. The Covid-19 pandemic gives the lie to the theory of biopower because the prevailing responses to the pandemic reveal the tension between survival and the exigencies of the ruling socioeconomic system. The attempt to preserve life – what the theorists of biopower view as the primary operation of power – in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic actually interrupts and disturbs the functioning of capitalism. The capitalist system finds itself unable to deal with the massive threat to life, which reveals that the ruling structure today is not one of biopower at all. Instead of aiding in the process of capitalist accumulation, the measures designed to address the pandemic operate as a brake on the capitalist system. At the moment when it imposes on the economy, state power ceases to work hand-in-hand with the forces of capital. Thus, the pandemic and the response to it show that the theory of biopower marks a fundamental theoretical misstep, a misstep that has had baleful political consequences. The attempt to preserve life during the Covid-19 pandemic leads to a series of measures that interrupt the flow of capital: social distancing that limits possibilities for exchange, lockdowns that close retail establishments and keep consumers in their homes, and mask mandates that disturb the everyday activities that sustain the economy. The leaders of capitalist states institute these measures in the name of allowing citizens to continue to live, but they recognize that such measures have a deleterious effect on the economy, which is why they occasion so much resistance, especially from right-wing proponents of unbridled capitalism. Leaders employ them reluctantly because they have no interest in damaging the capitalist economy that runs their societies, but the exigencies of people’s survival depends on these state interventions. In this way, the conflict between the exercise of state power and the capitalist economy comes to a head in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the midst of this response, it becomes clear that there is no pure exercise of biopower because there is no single site of authority. The divide between the state and capital comes to a head when disaster strikes, which is what the theory of biopower fails to account for. Rather than confronting this discrepancy between the state and capital, Agamben proclaims that capital simply capitulates before the power of the biosecurity regime that now controls the state. For Agamben, it is this regime, not capital, that holds the cards today. In Where Are We Now?, he writes, “Capitalism, for its part, has with only a few exceptions accepted loses to productivity that it would never previously have considered, probably hoping that later on it can find an accord with the new religion [of medicine].” (7) As Agamben frames it here, capitalism is not the strongest force in contemporary society. The pandemic shows that it bows before the exigencies of what he calls the religion of medicine. But this position underestimates the dominance that capitalism typically has over the state. It is not a secondary force in our existence but the primary one. The provenance of the resistance against the measures instituted to protect against the pandemic indicates their political bearing. The resistance movements are not emancipatory efforts struggling against the ruling order. They are not fights against an oppressive power structure. Instead, the resistance against the measures used to fight the pandemic stem from those who champion the free flow of capital, from business owners and libertarians to Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. The political fault line during the pandemic separates those who side with the forces of capital and those opposing unbridled capitalism. The former fight the restrictions, and the latter embrace their necessity. Confronted with being on the side of Trump and Bolsonaro, Agamben claims that we live in politically confused times, where Right and Left lose their straightforward significance. He then claims, “A truth remains such, whether it is expressed by the Left or enunciated by the Right.” (8) While this seems like a neutral statement about the nature of truth, it is actually an indication of Agamben’s turn to the Right. The leftist understanding of truth necessarily includes the site of enunciation as integral to the truth being articulated. For instance, it is a far different matter when Donald Trump denounces the exploitative practices of Jeff Bezos and a union leader does so. Trump says this to damage a competitor while the union leader says it as part of a collective struggle against the forces of big capital. Trump uses the truth to lie because of the desire driving the statement, whereas this is not the case with the union leader. The desire that informs the statement of truth – why one is saying it – is part of what one says. To fail to take this into account, as Agamben fails to do, is to play into the hands of the Right, which must ignore the logic of desire. The fact that Agamben finds himself on the same side as Trump and Bolsonaro in response to the pandemic points to the error in biopower’s conception of politics. For the theorists of biopower, the struggle is always against power, which is typically manifested in the state. With the pandemic, however, a split opens up between the state and the forces of capital. The site of power itself becomes clearly divided. This is a divide that the theorists of biopower have difficulty reckoning with, which is why, aside from a brief comment about capitalism’s capitulation to the forces of biosecurity, Agamben remains silent about capitalism during the pandemic.

In my book, The Revenge of The Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World, I consider the origins and doomed future of Agamben’s brand of negative biopolitics. “While Agamben’s own worldview is classically Europeanist, dripping with lurid Heideggerian theology, his influence on the Humanities is much wider and deeper” and so the reckoning due goes well beyond revised syllabi. “The question is how much of the philosophical traditions to which Agamben has been attached over the last decades will also need to be shelved. What then to do with the artifacts of Agamben’s life work? It is a traditionalist, culturalist, locally embedded doctrinal edifice, protecting the ritual meaningfulness of things against the explicit nudity of their reality: like the defiant monologues of a Southern preacher, his sad, solemn theory is undeniably beautiful as a gothic political literature, and should probably be read only as such” Even so, the reckoning with legacies of his and other related projects is long overdue. His mode of biopolitical critique blithely ventures that science, data, observation and modeling are intrinsically and ultimately forms of domination and games of power relations. Numbers are unjust, words are beautiful. To accept that real, underlying processes of biochemistry are accessible, and generative of both reason and intervention, is presumed naive. It's a disposition also found in different tones and hues in the work of Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and especially Ivan Illich, who died from a facial tumor he refused to treat as doctors recommended. Even here at University of California, San Diego, a hub of interdisciplinary biotechnology research, many colleagues insist that the “digitalization of Nature” is “an impossible fantasy”, even as they accept an mRNA vaccine based on a prototype bioprinted from a computational model of the virus’ genome uploaded from China before the actual virus even made it to North America. As I have suggested elsewhere, this orientation is exemplary of the drawn-out influence of Boomer Theory. The baby boomers have tyrannised the Left's imagination - bequeathing tremendous capacities to deconstruct and critique authority but feeble capacities to construct and compose. Perhaps the ‘68 generation’s last revenge upon those who inherit their messes, is the intellectual axiom that structure is always more suspicious than its dismantling and composition more problematic than resistance, not just as political strategies but as metaphysical norms. Their project was and remains the horizontal multiplication of conditional viewpoints as both means and ends, via the imaginary dismantling of public reason, decision and structuration. This is how they can at once fetishize “the Political” while refusing “governmentality.” I grew up in this tradition, but the world works very differently than the one imagined by soixante-huitards and their secretaries. I hope that philosophy will not continue to fail those who must create, compose and give enforceable structure to another world than this one. Agamben’s pandemic outbursts are extreme but also exemplary of this wider failure. Philosophy and the Humanities failed the pandemic because they are bound too tightly to an untenable set of formulas, reflexively suspicious of purposeful quantification, and unable to account for the epidemiological reality of mutual contagion or to articulate an ethics of an immunological commons. Why? Partially because the available language of ethics is monopolized by emphasis on subjective moral intentionality and a self-regarding protagonism for which “I” am the piloting moral agent of outcomes. The pandemic forced another kind of ethics. The Idealist distinction between zoē and bios as modes of “life” around which Agamben builds his biopolitical critique is a conceit that snaps like a twig in the face of the epidemiological view of society. Why did we wear masks? Because of a sense that our inner thoughts would manifest externally and protect us? Or was it because we recognize ourselves as biological organisms among others capable of harming and being harmed as such? The difference is profound. As we pass by a stranger, how do the ethics shift from subjective intention of harm or endearment to the objective biological circumstance of contagion? What is then the ethics of being an object? We will find out. But when presented with the need for intensive sensing and modeling in the service of highly granular provision of social services to those in need, many public intellectuals choked, only able to offer hollow truisms about “surveillance”. At stake is not just some obscure academic quarrel, but rather our ability to articulate what it means to be human, that is to be all together homo sapiens, in connection with all the fraught histories of that question. I argue that we need instead a positive biopolitics based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, transformation and prevention, and we need a philosophy and a humanities to help articulate it. Fortunately, in many ways we already do. A short and very incomplete list of such might include Sylvia Wynter’s mapping of “who counts” as Human in Colonial Modernity in ways that open the category to reclamation: “We” have been defined by exclusion. It includes those studying the microbiome including the role of microbial life inside of human bodies to keep us alive: The human is already inclusive of the non-human. It includes those studying Anthropogeny and common evolutionary origins of the human species and planetary future: The human is continuous, migratory and changing. It includes those studying experimental Astronautics and the limit conditions of survival in a fragile artificial environment: At thresholds of survivability the human is like a fish discovering water. It includes those studying CRISPR and other re-weaving technologies for genetic therapy: The human can recompose itself at the deepest levels. The affirmation or negation of what the human is also plays out through what humans can be. This animates the cultural controversies over gender reassignment therapies and techniques. The human is also a contingent, complex and pluralistic assemblage available to self-fashioning so that one may finally feel at home in their own skin. But the general availability of synthetic androgens, estrogens and progesterone draws on Modern laboratory biotechnology that Agamben’s biopolitics sees as invasive and unnatural. If Philosophy and the Humanities are to claim due legitimacy for present and future challenges, the collective conception of another positive biopolitics –based in the reality of our shared technical and biological circumstances–is absolutely essential. Toward that, I conclude with another passage from The Revenge of The Real: “A laissez-faire vitalism for which “life will find a way” is not an option; it is a fairy tale of a comfortable class who don’t live with the daily agency of sewage landscapes and exposed corpses…” Instead, “(This positive) biopolitics is inclusive, materialist, restorative, rationalist, based on a demystified image of the human species, anticipating a future different from the one prescribed by many cultural traditions. It accepts the evolutionary entanglement of mammals and viruses. It accepts death as part of life. It therefore accepts the responsibilities of medical knowledge to prevent and mitigate unjust deaths and misery as something quite different from the nativist immunization of one population of people from another. This includes not just rights to individual privacy but also social obligations to participate in an active, planetary biological commons. It is, adamantly, a biopolitics in a positive and projective sense.” The pandemic is, potentially, a wake-up call that the new normal cannot be just the new old normal. This means a shift in how human societies —which are always planetary in reach and influence— make sense of themselves, model themselves and compose themselves. This is a project that is as philosophical as it is political. Failure is not an option.

Critique-without-Alternative The first mode of critique in peace and conflict studies is critique-without-alternative. This approach has its origins in the early efforts within critical peace approaches to reveal the weaknesses of liberal peacebuilding and its rarely provided alternative solutions, which are often counterfactual to the solutions of mainstream peacebuilding theories and praxis. Critique-without-alternative has concentrated largely on “revealing the implicit political underpinnings of international peacebuilding, and [demonstrating] their flaws,” such as power imbalance, ideological inconsistency, and flawed sources of legitimacy (Tadjbakhsh 2011, 6; see also Paffenholz 2015). For the critique-without-alternative camp, critique is an endpoint, which often creates the impression that critiquing is done for the sake of critiquing. Their quest is to highlight the impossible and incomplete, and they in fact aspire to problem-shifting, thereby avoiding the need to propose alternatives. By not offering an alternative, they aim to see the current system fall under its own contractions. They do this by deconstructing the ethics and politics of political interventions, seeking more to find faults than solutions (Jackson 2015, 26). In other words, critique-without-alternative seeks to unmask power relations and dynamics of dominance and to create space for a politics of resistance. It is a type of critique that seeks “to politicize practices that have been profoundly depoliticized” (Walker 2002, 258). This approach draws its epistemological inspiration less from empirical observation than from political and philosophical theories. Scholars pursuing critique-without-alternative have been drawn away from generating practical and alternative solutions, fearing that they might be co-opted by state-led policy agendas (see Heathershaw 2008, 616–18). They have been strongly influenced by the work of other critical scholars and their normative alternatives on human security, humanitarian intervention, and responsibility to protect have been utilized by policy makers, not for advancing emancipatory interests but for disguising international interventions (see Browning and McDonald 2011, 244). Kurki (2013, 243) has argued that a “danger resides in . . . policy-driven engagement: the danger of feeding into the legitimacy of a specific policy area, simply through critique.” Many aspects of critique-without-alternative are exemplified in the influential work of Chandler (2006, 2010, 2013, 2017), who is known for systematically criticizing other critical peace theories while avoiding engaging with the question of alternativity. From the outset, Chandler (2017, 209, 9) defined peacebuilding “as an evolving set of problem-solving prescriptions,” which has resulted in blurring “the boundaries between peace and war and between sovereignty and intervention.” Chandler’s critique leans more toward deconstructive methods, which highlights the weaknesses of mainstream thinking, but intentionally avoids providing any alternative solution apart from implicitly favoring human agency and the political autonomy of the state as a form of political community. The closest Chandler (2013, 32) gets to articulating an alternative is to spell out ambiguously his favor for [[TABLE OMITTED]] material and social conditions behind both interventions and resistance to external peacebuilding efforts, which at some point takes on the connotation of “post-liberal governance.” Chandler (2010, 16) criticizes the critical scholars who provide alternatives for being uncritical about their “critique of liberalism in post-conflict societies” and for creating a consensus framing the problem of state-building and peacebuilding intervention as a “problem of the relationship between the liberal West and the non-liberal Other.” For him, the postliberal governance framework does not operate based on the principles of human rights, political legitimacy, and the social contract but instead it seeks, as he asserts, “to secure stability through balancing internal and external interests and concerns as matters of technical and administrative competences in the formulations of good governance” (Chandler 2010, 15). From this position, generating alternatives when international interventions fail is an attempt to make the responsibility for unwanted consequences disappear. Following the same logic of critique, Chandler (2013, 9) has recently moved on to debates on resilience, where he has argued that, in the context of international state building, resilience has emerged as an “apologia for the limits of international interventions” and as an attempt to evade responsibility for the outcomes of state-building interventions. He has found that, as a result of this shift, local capacities, vulnerabilities, and agencies have been the target of intervention and research: consequently, the field of intervention involves societal reengineering rather than regime change (Chandler 2013, 211). Moreover, Chandler (2013, 24–25, 32) has argued that the return to nonlinearity, together with the local and intersubjective understandings of practices, moves away from structuring economic and social relations, such as “market inequality” and “asymmetries of intervention.” He adds that “the non-linear discourses of local ‘hidden’ agency neither create the basis of any genuine understanding of the limits to liberal peace nor provide any emancipatory alternative” (Chandler 2013, 31). In addition, critiquewithout-alternative takes issue with the recent critical turn in peacebuilding studies, which seeks to achieve emancipation by using Western agencies, structures, and institutions as epistemological bases for studying conflict-affected societies (see Sabaratnam 2013). They claim that current emancipatory possibilities within peace and conflict studies assign the responsibility for materializing their security alternatives to dominant powers, which render change impotent (see Hynek and Chandler 2013, 50). Here, proponents of critique-without-alternative fear that emancipating individuals as subjects of security plays into the hands of ruling forces. The closest Chandler and other proponents of critique-without-alternative get to alternativity is highlighting—through negational dialectics—the absence of something, without elaborating its key features or indicating how such a possibility could be translated into practice (see also Hameiri 2010). Because critique-without-alternative avoids offering practical alternatives, it has turned debates on peacebuilding from a praxis to a discourse, which facilitates conceptual interrogation and problematization free from the messy nuances and incommensurability of practices and empirical facts (see Heathershaw 2008, 602). Yet in Chandler’s (2006, 2010, 2017) work, there are trace arguments in favor of a strong, autonomous state free from external intervention, which, surprisingly, are not problematized by other noncomplicit critical scholars. Another example of critique-without-alternative is the recent work by Catherine Goetze (2017), which offers an interpretative critique of peacebuilding by deconstructing actors, relations, and processes of peacebuilding using Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus. Goetze (2017, 1) has argued that peacebuilding “exists because it has become for a sufficiently large number of people and institutions with sufficiently important authority an unquestioned way of political action in the world and, on a more individual level, a way of making a living.” Goetze’s (2017, 4) study intentionally avoided offering alternatives that considered questions relating to the efficiency and success of peacebuilding as problem solving alternatives which fail to “investigate the economic, social, and political conditions that make the unequal relationships between internationals and locals possible, relationships that sustain themselves over time.” This claim is similar to Chandler’s method of critique—indicating what is wrong with the existing system, and vaguely articulating power relations and socioeconomic conditions of inequality as the structural causes of failure, without exploring how to change or overcome such structural blockages. A typical feature of critique-without-alternative is epistemological escapism, which is also present in Goetze’s work: he admits that “this book is not about a better peace we could build, it does not conclude on any policy recommendations,” leaving it implicit for attentive readers to “draw out practical lessons from my analysis, in particular in the ways peacebuilding work is organizationally structured” (Goetze 2017, 14). Finally, the work of Mark Duffield (2001, 2007) on the security-development nexus represents a borderline example of critique-without-alternative: it offers a valuable critique of the merging of development and security, highlights the contradictions and fallacies of liberal peace and the entire humanitarian and development assistance industry, and points out the complicit role of Western states in reproducing insecurity and maintaining underdevelopment in conflict- and disaster-affected societies. Duffield, however—like other proponents of critique-without-alternative—missed the opportunity to capitalize on his critical observations and promote emancipatory alternatives in greater detail. Although Duffield’s (2001) work on global governance and the new wars tracked down different political alternatives arising as a response to the networked character of liberal peace and the aid industry, he fell short of elaborating sufficiently on emancipatory alternatives for an inclusive global order embedded in cosmopolitan politics. Later on, Duffield (2007) made a compelling critique of development aid and its role in entrenching insecurities and creating uninsured subjects in turbulent societies but again fell short of teasing out further alternatives for building a solidarist global order that delivers aid to impoverished societies without expecting security, material gains, and political favors in return. Across the board, critique-without-alternative has deemed alternativity a form of intervention that plays into the hands of the existing global, regional, and local power holders. The major concern of critique-without-alternative is that if these power holders describe or prescribe what emancipatory peace might look like or how it might come about in reality, it could succumb to the instrumentalist logic of mainstream, interventionist epistemic and policy forces. This notwithstanding, it still does not resolve the primary question: how does critique for the sake of critique bring about social change? Critique-without-alternative has become a mode of delivering critique that is detached from social reality and imprisoned by the ontological recirculation of metatheoretical narratives (Duvall and Varadarajan 2003). The works of critical scholars that avoid alternativity are grounded to a considerable extent on imaginary and theoretical premises in which normative emancipatory empiricism does not feature greatly. Cynthia Weber (2017, 54) rightly argues that critical scholars in IR who tend to endorse antinormative knowledge risk making critique a dogmatic form of knowledge with moral certainty and a singular understanding of history, ideology, and political community. For Levine (2012), epistemic reification is one of the main fallacies of critical knowledge in IR. The quest for never-ending critique and antisolutionism evident among those subscribing to critique-without-alternative is gradually pushing critical peacebuilding debates toward metatheoretical and postempirical discussions. Ian Angus (2000, 258) has argued that discourse theories have lost touch with reality, as they regard discourses and language as disembodied representations of reality rather than a means for “understanding them as figuration of praxis.” In the context of peace and conflict studies, David Lewis (2017, 3) found that “the explicit or implicit reliance of many critics of liberal peace on a Foucauldian framework of discourse and knowledge is undermining the capacity to conceptualize and engage with the challenges of peace and conflict in a rapidly changing international order.” While it might be understandable why critique-without-alternative avoids offering practical solutions, its proponents miss the opportunity to perhaps capitalize on what Ulrich Beck (2015) referred to as emancipatory catastrophism, which holds that risks, disasters, and failures have hidden performative and emancipatory side effects that may produce positive common goods. Critique-without-alternative could benefit from this logic of inquiry without compromising its criticality. Yet it remains unfinished until it offers an emancipatory alternative—at either the conceptual, normative, or practical levels of inquiry. In essence, what this mode of criticality lacks is expanding the critique of power, security, and governmentality to also include non-Western societies that are affected by illiberal and authoritarian regimes, where the Eurocentric critical lens used to criticize liberal interventionism might no longer be relevant (see Lewis 2017). By constantly deconstructing liberal peace discourses and practices, critique-without-alternative has unintentionally contributed to the constitution of liberal peace as a unitary discursive framework, making it consistent in its inconsistency, timeless in its temporality, solid in its fluidity, and liberal in its illiberalism. Cynthia Weber’s (2017, 54) most recent critique of critical IR fits well in the fallacy of critique-without-alternative: “even though they know themselves to be working against all manner of disciplinary formations of knowledge, power, and practice, Critical IR scholars often stabilize these disciplinary formations through their opposition to them.” Moreover, recent attempts to displace peacebuilding and state-building discussions to broader philosophical debates has opened up the possibility for the critique of peacebuilding to lose any practical relevance. Consequently, scholars subscribing to the critique-without-alternative approach have stopped engaging with problem-solving, realist, and liberalist perspectives. As critical approaches now battle each other, the question is no longer how they can challenge dominant epistemological orthodoxies but how to rescue them before they lose practical relevance.

That said, I want to close by suggesting that biopolitics, while perhaps not necessarily good, is at least not wholly bad. Absent realistic alternatives, this claim is certainly worth considering. Foucault, for example, never charted a way out of biopolitics beyond developing an individual aesthetic of selfdiscipline and regulation—the “care of the self.”94 Other writers speak of achieving something like a “new politics,” which usually means some combination of personal freedom that includes the substance—but often not the legal baggage—of individual human rights, combined with an ideal of community that fits uneasily with the ideal of personal freedom (thus the “politics,” which are likely to be anything but new), as well as a more egalitarian economic arrangement and the social safety net of the modern welfare state, but without the modern state itself. Even assuming this vision is desirable, no one has any practical idea how to make it happen.95 My basic assertions are that the ills laid at the feet of biopolitics are not entirely its fault and that they are in any event the costs of “progress.” Consider, first, the charges. Critics point out that in the modern, centralized, biopolitical state, our individuality is suppressed to the larger goal of managing the population. As a result, we become detached and alienated, even as we are disciplined and regulated. At best we can resort to coping strategies, but larger transformation of our social environment is impossible.96The flaw in this diagnosis is that it treats the alienated individual as problematic, as if there were an acontextual, dehistoricized thing known as “an individual” that is capable of being alienated or not, with the result that we should try to make it less, rather than more, alienated. Far more likely is that the idea of the individual developed in the modern period along with the modern state and that alienation is part of what defines an individual. To the extent the “problem” of the alienated individual has significance in the contemporary world, in other words, it is a direct consequence of the enlightenment and can only be solved through biopolitics. Indeed, biopolitics simply reflects the enlightenment project of promoting reason in place of “superstition” and arbitrary power. Social structures have become rationalized, so that governments are more likely to operate by articulated policy instead of fiat, the rule of law instead of whim, and democracy instead of hereditary rule or warlordism. The creation of the individual—a rational, rights-bearing but also alienated entity—is critical to all of these developments. Importantly, under this account, these changes may not be liberating in any objective sense, because the freedoms they create come with real costs—the costs of being free in this way as well as the consequences of being part of a power structure in which these particular freedoms are defined, managed, and subject to suspension. Still, this process leads not only to centralization and state violence but also to rights that channel the exercise of state power, to pervasive regulation of our lives and environment but also to a significant amount of predictability and security for many people. Our modern anxiety can be imperfectly assuaged by the comforts that flow from management and technology, and there is no reason to believe we are any less happy than people were in the past—although neither is it clear that we are any happier.

In this way, Negri and Hardt bring forward a polemical argument that biopolitics and biopower are actually within an antagonistic relationship, or better biopolitics is biopower’s antagonist: ‘history is determined by the biopolitical antagonisms and resistances to biopower’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 31). In other words, the entire development of humanity ‘is dominated by this insubordination of life (the power of life) against Power (the domination of life)’ (Negri, 2008c: 207). What we have here then is a distinction between the categories of biopower and biopolitics at a level which is not close to Foucault’s own. Negri speaks of biopower as ‘the big structures and functions of power’ imposing ‘command over life its technologies and its mechanisms of power [from the top]’ (2008a: 73). And, he speaks of biopolitics ‘when the critical analysis of command is done from the viewpoint of experiences of subjectivation and freedom, in short, from the bottom’ (2008a: 73-4). In brief, as Toscano summarises, ‘biopower is on the side of subjection and control, while biopolitics is rethought in terms of subjectivity and freedom’ (2007: 118).

3.3.2 Disclosure effects Another channel through which the patent system may foster scientific and technological progress is via disclosure effects. When filing patent applications, inventors are obliged to disclose technical information about their innovations (see e.g. Hall et al., 2014, for a review of the literature on the trade-off between secrecy and disclosure). The empirical evidence on these effects provides generally mixed results.26 In the pharmaceutical sector, the effectiveness of disclosure ought to allow easier technology transfers among firms and universities, as well as a more "ordered" path of search avoiding the costly duplication of efforts (Coriat and Orsenigo, 2014). In our model, information disclosure effects are captured by parameters 훾1 and Ψ (in Eq. 10 and 11) which respectively facilitate the imitation of existing products and the entry in new submarkets after the expiration of patents. We investigate the role of information disclosure under four scenarios, namely low disclosure (훾1 = 0.5, Ψ = 0.5); baseline (훾1 = 1, Ψ = 1); high disclosure (훾1 = 2, Ψ = 2); and a limiting case with "very high disclosure" (훾1 = 50, Ψ = 50). The simulation results are reported in Figure 12 (Monte Carlo averages and standard errors for each experiments are in Table B.4). Substantial effects emerge only in the limit case ("very high disclosure") wherein we observe a reduction in the share of blocked products introduced by incumbents as well as a moderate decrease in average product quality. Quite intuitively, more disclosure shapes the direction of the innovative process towards imitating products with expired patents (i.e. the development of generic drugs), rather than towards quality enhancements. On the one hand, the patterns of search become relatively more "efficient" since firms are discouraged from developing "me too" drugs (i.e. these located in proximity of existing ones) while they are incentivized to copy products only after the expiration of patents. This, in turn, might lead to lower litigation rates and less blocked products. On the other hand, disclosure favours imitation as compared to quality-enhancing innovations within submarkets, thus, resulting in a mild decrease in the average product quality. Nevertheless, neither the number of submarkets discovered nor total product variety appear to be substantially affected by disclosure parameters. Finally, we also run simulations combining together the “strong R&D incentives” and the “very high disclosure” settings in order to build a scenario even more favourable to patents. We did not find any significant difference with the results of the two experiments taken alone.27

Yet patents are not the only means of promoting product commercialization. Newly approved drugs and biologics, for example, receive a period of market exclusivity during which time no other party can sell a generic or biosimilar version of the product. Newly approved biologics, for instance, receive a twelve-year exclusivity period in the United States. Because of the length of time it takes to get a new biologic approved, the market exclusivity period may exceed the term of any patent an originator company has on its product. A heightened bar to patentability may lead to greater reliance on alternative forms of intellectual property protection such as market exclusivity, prizes, grants, or tax incentives.223 With regards to disclosure, without the ability to receive patent protection, owners of inventive machines may choose not to disclose their discoveries and rely on trade secret protection. However, with an accelerated rate of technological progress, intellectual property holders would run a significant risk that their inventions would be independently recreated by inventive machines. Depending on the type of innovation, industry, and competitive landscape, business ventures may be successful without patents, and patent protection is not sought for all potentially patentable inventions.224 In fact, “few industries consider patents essential.”225 For instance, patents are often considered a critical part of biotechnology corporate strategy, but often ignored in the software industry.226 On the whole, a relatively small percentage of firms patent, even among firms conducting R&D.227 Most companies do not consider patents crucial to business success.228 Other types of intellectual property such as trademark, copyright, and trade secret protection, combined with “alternative” mechanisms such as first mover advantage and design complexity may protect innovation even in the absence of patents.229

4 Conclusions In this work, we have studied how different configurations of the patent system affect innovation and competition in pharmaceuticals, indeed, one of the industries where IPR seem to matter most (Cohen et al., 2000; Levin et al., 1987). To address such research question, we have developed an evolutionary, agent-based model tailored on the pharmaceutical industry. Firms in the model compete and innovate in different therapeutic areas according to routinized search rules, while a process of market selection determines their demand, market shares and profitability. The patent system has a dual role: on the one hand, it protects innovations by preventing firms to move into areas of the product landscape nearby the newly discovered drugs, while, it might favour information disclosure and easier imitation after the expiration of patent rights. In a baseline scenario, the model yields results in line with observational data and replicates a set of robustly established stylized facts of the pharmaceutical industry, including a few micro distributional properties and an increasing industry size and concentration (cf. Section 3.2). We then run policy experiments studying different degrees of tightness of IPR systems in terms of patent breadth and length. Our results suggest that larger extent and duration of patent rights have negative consequences not only on competition, but also on innovation outcomes. In addition to rising prices and market concentration, a stronger patent regime entails lower product variety and quality, as well as, interestingly, less breakthrough discoveries. We also implemented different policy scenarios varying the strength of positive R&D incentives provided by patents and the effectiveness of information disclosure. Patents exert positive effects on innovation only when combining a very large (arguably unrealistic) response of R&D investment under a low patent breadth. Introducing stronger information disclosure effects only alter the direction of the innovative process, fostering imitation and the development of generic drugs. Our work can be extended in different ways. First, we mean to explicitly model the role of public funding of basic research and the spillovers to private firms. Second, it is important to model at greater detail the different phases which lead to drug discovery and commercialization. Third, as already mentioned, we intend to explore the evolutionary implications of ecologies of firms characterized by different propensities to innovate and imitate. Finally, one can study which policy tools and, more generally, innovation system (e.g., innovation prizes, public drug discovery, etc.) can boost innovation and the discovery of new therapeutic areas at the lower cost for the public (see e.g. the policy proposals in Cimoli et al., 2014).

3.3 Patents, innovation and market competition The central policy question of our work is how the patent system affects innovation and competition in the pharmaceutical industry. We tackle this issue by running a set of policy experiments variating over our baseline scenario. We shock at 푡 = 100 the two main parameters that regulate the appropriability conditions guaranteed by the patent system: Patbr and Patlen. The former affects the extent of patent protection in each submarket’s product space, while the latter influences its duration. Figure 8 shows the effects of changing the breadth of the patent system on different industry outcomes using boxplots of Monte Carlo distributions. To further investigate statistical significance, Monte Carlo averages and the associated standard errors are also reported in Table B.1. First, increasing the extent of patents reduces exploitable technological opportunities and has a negative impact on innovation within submarkets (innovation type A) and on firm diversification (innovation type B), as measured by the share of blocked products out of the total of products introduced. Intuitively, the broader is the area protected, the higher will be the probability to incur in IPR violations and have your product blocked by the patent system. In a similar fashion, increasing breadth also grants stronger protection to incumbents (especially to market leaders) and entails less innovation from entrants (i.e. a higher share of blocked products for entrants). Interestingly, we find that the reduction in technological opportunities associated to a larger extent of patents also (mildly) hampers the discovery of new submarkets (innovation type C), thus, posing obstacles to the emergence of new drugs for therapeutic needs that are yet unsatisfied. As in our setting total R&D efforts are correlated with sales, they also decrease following the decline in industry size (as compared with the baseline scenario). Overall, the fall in innovation rates translates into less product variety and lower average product quality. Second-order effects of rising patent breadth are higher industry concentration, as well as markups and prices, ultimately driving adverse distributional effects for society.25

Kieran, 1-1-2017, “Abuse of the Hatch-Waxman Act: Mylan 's Ability to Monopolize Reflects Weaknesses”, Brooklyn Journal of Corporate , Financial, and Commercial Law, https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/bjcfcl/vol11/iss2/12/#:~:text=Though%20the%20Hatch%2DWaxman%20Act,consumers%20of%20a%20generic%20option.

Another hole in Hatch-Waxman has allowed companies to engage in “forced-switch schemes,” or “product hopping.”121 The forced-switch scheme is a strategy used by pharmaceutical companies in which a brandname company has an NDA drug on the market, but whose patent exclusivity period is almost expired, allowing for a generic version to soon enter and compete.122 Instead of using a reverse-payment strategy or filing citizen petitions against the generic company, brand-name companies have completely withdrawn their own drugs from the market and quickly introduced their own generic versions as a substitute.123 Although another generic may come to the market after the forced-switch scheme, the court in Actavis, for example, found it unlikely that a patient with Alzheimer’s disease would choose to switch to the competitor’s generic after being forced to already switch to the brand-name company’s generic version.124 This pattern of behavior may be mimicked when it concerns a drug that is in high demand, such as the EpiPen. This scheme essentially coerces patients to switch from the company’s brand-name product to the same company’s generic product, all the while maintaining their effective monopoly in the drug market.125 This strategy grew in popularity until the Second Circuit became the first appellate court to finally address “product hopping” in Actavis. 126 The Second Circuit held that a scheme to coerce patients to switch from an old product to a new one, by withdrawing from the market with an intent to affect generic competition, violated antitrust laws.127 The court indicated, though, that efforts to persuade patients to make the switch, while keeping the old product available, would be permissible.128 As a result of public scrutiny of Mylan for the rising price of the EpiPen, the company announced it would release its own generic version of the EpiPen for half the price.129 If Mylan were to do so, the removal of the brandname EpiPen from the market immediately followed by the introduction of the generic version would be prohibited, as per the Second Circuit decision.130 This forced “hard switch” would be the exact mechanism used to maintain the relevant market monopoly that the Actavis court wished to prevent.131 By contrast, the introduction of its own generic while keeping the brand name EpiPen on the market, also known as the “soft switch” is permissible.132 Although the Second Circuit’s reliance on antitrust laws worked to outlaw this strategy, it was a result of gaping holes in the Hatch-Waxman Act that allowed Actavis to create a monopoly of its relevant market in the first place.133 The Act has been ineffective at proactively combating these strategies because the Act does not itself forbid these tactics. Mylan and other companies are not technically violating the Act, but reap the benefitsfor years until the strategies are challenged in court.134 Thus, without strict amendments to the Act that would work to further protect both generic applicants and approved generics, Mylan and other brand-name companies will continue to game the patent system to protect their monopolies. In addition, since these practices are prohibited by judicial precedent135 and not by a legislative enactment, there is no telling if or when a court may decide to overturn such a ruling.

Robin Feldman, Arthur J. Goldberg Distinguished Professor of Law, Albert Abramson ’54 Distinguished Professor of Law Chair, and Director of the Center for Innovation, The Price Tag of 'Pay-for-Delay', UC Hastings Research Paper Forthcoming, 27 Aug 2021, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3846484

Despite potential remedy-related reforms, however, the most important change needed pertains to evaluating the anticompetitive nature of the agreement itself. The landmark decision in Actavis expressed optimism that courts would be able to manage the analysis in a more structured manner. That reality has not materialized. To resolve the problem, one should return to the basic notion that agreements between competitors are strongly disfavored under antitrust law.

Robin, Fall 2023, "Patent Term Extensions and the Last Man Standing, Yale Law and Policy, https://yalelawandpolicy.org/patent-term-extensions-and-last-man-standing

Title I of the Hatch-Waxman Act cuts deeply into brand pharmaceutical companies’ hegemony and profits. Thus, it is unsurprising that the industry had major misgivings about the law, and that pharmaceutical companies sought a major concession from Congress as compensation for Hatch-Waxman’s industry-altering effects. Namely, Congress included Title II, which provided a mechanism allowing innovator companies to extend the lives of their ground-breaking patents.[35] Title II was a conscious compromise: Congress made it significantly easier for generics to enter drug markets, and, in exchange, brand companies had the opportunity to prolong—for a limited, statutorily defined time—their patent-enabled market monopoly. Taken as a whole, the law reveals Congress’s clear expectations of how drug markets would play out over time. Before exploring Title II’s specific provisions, one should note that the brand companies’ position is rational. Patents offer innovators the opportunity to earn enormous value by excluding others from their inventions, but they last only for a limited time. In the case of pharmaceutical products, much of that time is eaten up by the FDA, which may take years to approve a drug before it can be sold. By allowing generics to piggyback on innovators’ safety testing, Congress forced brands to absorb the cost of full-time and expensive testing processes, while providing generics an alternative route. Extending the life of a patent based on the length of the FDA’s regulatory review process was, therefore, a natural and intuitive compromise for brand companies that sought to enjoy the “full lifespan” of their patents, despite the FDA’s time-consuming approval process. The procedure by which an innovator company seeks a patent term extension is fairly straightforward. Following FDA approval, the applicant has sixty days to submit an application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“Patent Office”).[36] Upon receipt of the application, the Patent Office requests that the FDA state whether the product was subject to a regulatory review period and, if so, the period’s length.[37] The FDA publishes its determination of the regulatory review period in the Federal Register, after which the Patent Office uses several statutorily defined criteria, discussed below, to determine whether the patent is eligible for an extension and, if so, for how long.[38] The process is complete when the Patent Office grants a certificate, visible as part of the patent’s record, officially extending the patent’s expiration date.[39] With that in mind, a close look at how Congress structured the rules for patent term extensions reveals, with remarkable specificity, the timeline that the statute contemplates for new drugs retaining and then losing their market dominance. First, Congress explicitly restricted eligibility for patent term extensions to patents on active ingredients; such patents are referred to herein as core or marker patents. Secondary patents covering, for example, inactive binding agents are excluded from the definition of drug products that may receive a patent term extension.[40] Moreover, only one patent may be extended per regulatory review period that a product was subject to, even if multiple patents cover its active ingredient.[41] A regulatory review period comprises two phases: the testing phase, which runs from when a drug company’s investigational new drug application becomes effective (and the company may thereby begin clinical testing) until submission of the company’s new drug application; and the approval phase, which runs from submission until approval of that new drug application.[42] In general, the length of an extension is equal to the duration of a drug’s approval phase plus one half of the duration of its testing phase.[43] An additional restriction precludes drug makers from seeking patent term extensions for new versions of old drugs. Not only must an extension go to an active ingredient, but it must also go to an active ingredient that has not been previously approved for marketing.[44] Most important, the statute caps extensions at five years.[45] The statute further specifies that no extension may extend a patent’s expiration date beyond fourteen years from the time of the drug’s FDA approval.[46] In other words, in Congress’s eyes, drugs that had more than fourteen years of patent-protected market time did not need additional protection. Anticipating that drug makers would delay seeking their patents in order to maximize market exclusivity, Hatch-Waxman does not count FDA approval time before a patent’s issuance towards an extension of that patent.[47] In other words, Congress, in extending drugs’ monopolies, refused to give a patent credit for an FDA review period that occurred before the patent issued. No matter how long it took the FDA to approve a new drug, Congress said, the product’s monopoly must come to a timely end. Notably, the legislative history indicates congressional intent to prevent patent holders from obtaining multiple extensions of protection beyond the patent term extension on the original, core patent. As explained in the report of the House Judiciary Committee, the Committee rejected a proposed amendment supported by the Patent Office because “the net result of [this proposed] amendment was to permit multiple patent term extensions on what was essentially the same drug product.”[48] Ultimately, what the Patent Office supported was to enable patent holders to extend even their secondary patents through patent term extensions. After considering these arguments, the Committee rejected the amendment, citing a “need to avoid multiple patent term extensions” and concluding that “only the first patent on a drug-type product should be extended” because it is the only patent that “experiences any substantial regulatory delay.”[49] The Committee elaborated on this last point, stating that “subsequent patents on approved drug products are frequently not the same magnitude of innovation as occurs with respect to the initial patent.”[50] In other words, the Committee recognized that secondary patents do not provide the same degree of innovative contribution to society as the original patent on the drug itself. To be clear, the Committee rejected a proposal to grant patent term extensions for secondary patents. Nevertheless, the Committee’s logic pushes against the use of secondary patents at all for the purposes of extending a drug’s monopoly past the extension of the core patent, even if the secondary patents are not themselves extended. The simple takeaway is that core patents are the only patents deserving extension, should receive only one extension, and should be the longest and last-expiring protection on a drug—not other patents on essentially the same drug. As the data presented below will show, however, the exact opposite is playing out. For roughly 75% of the drugs in this study, core patents are not the last-man-standing protection.[51] C. Hatch-Waxman and Follow-on Regulatory Exclusivities In addition to extending patents, Hatch-Waxman provides brand drugs with other, non-patent related methods for protecting their monopoly time. As mentioned briefly in our discussion of Title I, there are two data exclusivities available to certain first movers that block the approval of abbreviated new drug applications for a set amount of time. One of these protections is termed the “New Chemical Entity” exclusivity. As stated, this provision prohibits submission of an abbreviated new drug application that piggybacks on the data from a brand drug that had applied with a never-before-approved active ingredient; the prohibition runs for five years[52] from when the FDA approves the brand drug’s application.[53] Although generic manufacturers could conduct their own safety and efficacy tests to avoid the four- or five-year wait, the costs would be immense.[54] Thus, qualifying brand-name drugs enjoy a peaceful four or five years of money-making before any realistic threat of competition. This period without competition is in addition to the amount of time it would take an abbreviated new drug application submitted after the exclusivity period to be processed and approved. The other non-patent exclusivity baked into Title I of Hatch-Waxman grants brand drugs protection if they present new clinical data that support changes to how a previously approved drug is formulated or used.[55] Termed the New Clinical Investigation exclusivity, the provision operates by prohibiting abbreviated new drug applications that use another company’s safety and efficacy data from gaining FDA approval for any uses or formulations revealed by the new clinical investigation; the prohibition runs for three years from when the other company gets FDA approval.[56] These two limitations that Hatch-Waxman places on approval of abbreviated new drug applications can be viewed as additional concessions to brand companies. In exchange for giving up certain data rights, brand drugs receive guaranteed protection of that data for a period of years, in addition to receiving some time back after FDA delays. That, however, appears to be the extent of the vision of brand company entitlement. Hatch-Waxman’s construction of unique protections for brand drugs, with explicit eligibility criteria and clear time limits for both the exclusivities and patent extensions, indicates a desire for the timely conclusion of market monopolies after the expiration of such unique protections.[57] In statutes other than Hatch-Waxman, Congress authorized three additional exclusivities.[58] Roughly two years before enactment of Hatch-Waxman, Congress introduced the Orphan Drug exclusivity.[59] Passed as part of the Orphan Drug Act of 1983,[60] and amended in 1984,[61] 1985,[62] and 1988,[63] this exclusivity is available to drugs that treat rare conditions.[64] If a drug is approved for Orphan Drug protection, the FDA is unable to approve abbreviated new drug applications—or, for that matter, new drug applications or 505(b)(2) applications—for the same drug and indication for seven years.[65] Intending the Orphan Drug exclusivity to benefit drugs for which the drug-maker had no reasonable expectation of recouping its development costs,[66] Congress in 1984 added a short-cut for measuring lack of ability to recoup costs by making the exclusivity available to any drugs that serve a population of fewer than 200,000 patients.[67] Companies have become adept at dividing a drug’s population into smaller market segments,[68] and the Orphan Drug Act has become associated with highly profitable drugs.[69] For example, in 2015, seven of the ten highest-revenue drugs were associated with an Orphan Drug designation.[70] The Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now, or GAIN, exclusivity became available in 2012 under the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act.[71] This protection is applicable to drugs designated as qualified infectious disease products, meaning they treat certain life-threatening infections.[72] Obtaining this designation extends an existing exclusivity, namely the New Chemical Entity, New Clinical Investigations, or Orphan Drug exclusivity, by five years.[73] The third non-Hatch-Waxman exclusivity was introduced as part of the FDA Modernization Act of 1997 and is commonly referred to as the “Pediatric Exclusivity.”[74] To obtain this protection, a company must submit studies to the FDA demonstrating that its drug is beneficial to pediatric populations.[75] If the FDA grants this protection, the designated drug extends its last protection, whether it be a patent or an exclusivity, by six months.[76] These three protections constitute the exclusivities available to small-molecule drugs, besides the two embedded in Hatch-Waxman. In sum, the time limitations expressly set in Hatch-Waxman envisioned well-defined patent term extensions of no more than five years, and for core patents only, and determined that drugs that have enjoyed market monopolies of more than fourteen years need no extension beyond fourteen years, regardless of any amount of FDA delay. These clear textual limitations on patent term extensions, and the secondary patents and exclusivities that are nonetheless used by brand companies to elongate their market monopolies, would appear to be working at cross-purposes.