The NEG’s persistent Eurocentric, whitewashed, and racist theory of power in biopolitics fails to account for histories of oppression and exploitation --- leading to extreme oversights in their structural critique of state power

This article argues that while Foucauldian security studies (FSS) scholarship on the biopolitics of security and liberal war has not ignored racism, these works largely replicate Foucault’s whitewashing of the raciality and coloniality of modern power and violence. Drawing on Black, indigenous, postcolonial and decolonial studies, we show how Foucault’s genealogy of biopower rests on an unspecified concept of the “human,” failing to account for how notions of “human” were constituted through the savage and slave other, how enslaved people were rendered into things, and how punitive, sovereign violence persists as a (settler) colonial technique of gratuitous, not merely instrumental, violence. FSS exacerbates these problems. This article challenges two core FSS propositions on liberal war: 1. that “human life cannot ever be secured,” which replicates Foucault’s Eurocentric reliance on an unspecified “human” as the object of biopolitics; 2. that “everyone is (potentially) dangerous” and thus open to the punitive/lethal dimensions of liberal power, which reduces racism to a sorting process after the establishment of biopolitics and liberal war, rather than a precondition of it. This “methodological Whiteness” (Bhambra 2017a) results in major oversights in FSS empirical genealogies of: state violence, twenty-first-century digital and molecular revolutions, labor, capital, and enslavement. 

FSS is engaged in a project of critiquing the instrumentality of liberal biopower, but in doing so, it erases subjects and spaces exposed primarily or exclusively to punitive or gratuitous violence. It claims to extend Foucauldian analysis of biopolitics to security, war, and the international, but it does so without seriously engaging Foucault’s many critics. It not only reproduces Foucault’s reliance on the idea of an unspecified human, it deepens it. As a result, while this body of FSS claims to be genealogical, it cannot seriously historicize the biopolitics of the racial (settler) colonial projects that underpin modernity. 

This abstract account of the intimate connection between life and death under biopower fails to interrogate concrete mechanisms, processes, subjects/objects, or objectives. Despite references to Mbembe’s (2003) concept of necropolitics, it avoids engaging actual necropolitical practices and orders, preferring to discuss race only at the level of the “category.” It characterizes the death-making operations of biopolitics as inherent/in-built (“It always turns out”) and gives the impression that liberal politics responds to genuinely misperceived threats. Most strikingly, where Mbembe draws attention to subjects governed by social and physical death in conditions of colonial subjugation (chattel slavery and the Israeli settler colonial occupation of Palestine) he limits the operations of necropower to letting die, pitching “extermination” as fundamentally passive, brought on by the incorrigibility of “some life.” Dillon elides the (colonial) violences of racial-sexual terror, and treats racially targeted death, not as a constitutive element of the vital operations of biopower, but merely as a by-product. 

FSS’s undertheorization of racism isn’t only a problem of theory: its theoretical problems both draw on and compound errors in its empirical genealogies. In this section, we draw out three illustrative examples. First, we show how FSS’s Eurocentrism results in inadequate genealogies of state violence; second, how FSS accounts of developments in digital and molecular concepts of “life” falsely posit a “postracial” biopolitics; and third, how FSS sidelines ongoing histories of global labor exploitation, capitalism, and enslavement. In each case, we show how an inadequate framework for addressing racism produces major empirical oversights in FSS. State Racism/Violence The first empirical failure of FSS we examine relates to state violence. Both Foucault and FSS largely elide ongoing practices of sovereign and gratuitous violence, maintaining a Eurocentric account of the rise of biopower, in which Europe is treated as “self-generating,” and (settler) colonial violence is disappeared. In prominent FSS scholarship on the biopolitics of security (cf. Reid 2006; Dillon and Reid 2009; Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ips/article/13/1/2/5265732 by Northwestern University School of Law - INACTIVE user on 18 July 2024 ALISON HOWELL AND MELANIE RICHTER-MONTPETIT 11 Evans 2010), as in Foucault’s own work, the sole substantive engagement with racist state violence is with the Nazi holocaust. 

For Foucault, Nazism is the paradigmatic example of a biopolitical society committed to the “regeneration” of its “race” (Foucault 2003, 258–60). While Foucault does admit briefly that “[r]acism first develops with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide” (2003, 257), his discussion of genocidal biopower considers only Nazi death camps, which he views as “the complete conflation of war and politics” (Mbembe 2003, 18). “E(race)d” (Moore 2012) from Foucault’s account of the rise of forms of power that “no longer recognize death” and, in fact, “literally ignore death” (Foucault 2003, 248) are the brutal acts of mass violence and White supremacist terror that made (settler) colonialism possible. This includes pre-Nazi Germany’s racist, murderous, often genocidal projects in its African and other colonies (cf. Lindqvist 1996; Traverso 2003; Weheliye 2014a; Zimmerer 2011). 

Aimé Césaire (1950) and Frantz Fanon (1967) famously diagnosed the racist calculus underwriting the selective Western grief extended to European victims of the Nazi holocaust and territorial expansion. Other racialized and disabled populations, homosexuals, sex workers, and others targeted by eugenic practices are typically excluded from this grief. The deployment of the holocaust in FSS on liberal war clearly follows this pattern. By obfuscating Nazism’s derivation, not only from German colonial techniques but also from eugenics programs and Jim Crow legislation developed in the United States, the FSS account pitches Nazi politics as exceptional, rather than as emerging from widely shared White supremacist and colonial ambitions and techniques. As a result of its persistent Eurocentrism and systematic undertheorization of racism, FSS fails to locate the genocide of European Jews2 and Nazi eugenics within a transnational analytic and within histories of European (settler) colonialism and White supremacy. This, in turn, results in a thin and ahistorical conceptualization of modern state violence. 

FSS’s ability to examine how science has shaped the biopolitical strategies of security and liberal internationalism is limited by its persistent Eurocentrism and undertheorization of race. Societal notions of “life” are treated as interchangeable with the life sciences’ supposedly postracial understanding of life as generic data. This fails to engage with either the ingrained (settler) coloniality of technoscience or the stubborn (and institutionalized) persistence of broader structures of White supremacy and anti-Blackness. This has serious empirical implications.