Modern globalization in the area of IP securitizes freedom and makes it conditional, legitimizing state crackdowns and cements the state as the benevolent “protagonist” as it uses the market to control people and shape subjectivities.

In The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), Foucault addresses the basic characteristics of the liberal art of government. Herein he focuses on the new raison d’état that sees the market as a truth-telling place and liberalism as an art of government wherein the freedom of the market ensures reciprocal, correlative, and enrichment behavior for European countries. Immersed in such a scenario of the “globalization of the market,” Foucault (2008) sees commercial globalization as the means to guarantee perpetual peace—where the new governmental reason, referring to liberalism, needs freedom to buy and sell, to exercise intellectual property rights, to discuss, to express, and to consume. Therefore, Foucault highlights here that freedom is not a given, but is rather constantly produced and, in order to do that, additional control and intervention are needed.

Foucault addresses—and differentiates from neoliberalism—the liberal art of government. From a political perspective, he considers it as “the generalization of state power”—wherein states exercise vigilance, undertake activity, and make interventions. The center hereof is pure competition, and consequently, neoliberals think of a society as subject to competition dynamics—an enterprise society whose members are people of enterprise and production (Foucault, 2008). What is at stake, then, in neoliberal policy is that market, competition, and enterprise become “the formative power of society” (Foucault, 2008, p. 148).

Foucault’s work on multiple governmentalities (Thomas, 2014) has extended to neoconservatism (Nadesan, 2008), but some people refer to biopolitics and neoliberalism as universals (Walters, 2012). In spite of such theoretical confusion, critical IR scholars have incorporated biopower issues into their own approaches that question these problems differently. These particular outcomes derived from Foucault’s reading of neoliberalism as an art of government have strongly influenced the inclusion of culture and ideas in IR analysis, as well as the creation of social meaning through discourses.

Critical IR scholars aim to highlight the social, cultural, and ideological influences that condition such thinking in the first place (Spike, 2014). In fact, they conceptualize the notion of power differently from the first face of power, as they focus either on the way individuals are produced and subordinated to discourses (productive power) or on “the constitution of social capacities and interests of actors in relation to one another” (structural power) (Barnett & Duvall, 2005, p. 3). Neumann and Sending refer to structural power as a way to conceptualize the governmental notion of power used in analysis of the international realm: as one that “operates through distant social relations to set up standards for what is appropriate, effective, and legitimate for groups or individuals to do” (2010, p. 61).

Both productive and structural perspectives of power might help us to understand the reality of the international world wherein—as Dean puts it—truth is contested by social movements, while power is now de-territorialized and identity pluralized (2007). Furthermore, global governance studies that develop that conception of power might be enriched by incorporating governmentality as a mode of power into the analysis (Neumann & Sending, 2010).

Post-structuralist IR scholars examine how, historically, discourses shape the subjectivities of actors using genealogical and discourse-analytic methods to demonstrate how systems of knowledge and discursive practices produce subjects—wherein discourses refer to systems of signification (Barnett & Duvall, 2005). Despite the fact that these authors do not focus on biopower per se, their way of reasoning might help in engaging with other concepts and achieving a better outcome of political analysis. Thus, from a post-structuralist perspective, scholars argue that not only material capacities and the power derived from institutional structures matter, but ideas and norms do, too. Yet they acknowledge Foucault’s structuralism (Burke, 2008), or, as Hardt and Negri (2000, p. 28) put it, Foucault’s “structuralist epistemology.”

In an even stricter sense, some parts of the IR literature incorporate Foucault’s approach so as to ask how: productive power produces subjects’ identities (Shaffer, 2005); how some agents struggle to resist the dominating logics, such as global civil society does in respect to capitalism; and, particularly, how globalization has fostered biopolitics (Lipschutz, 2005). Yet Dean (1999), as Lipschutz (2005) shows, acknowledges that governmentality is associated with biopolitics, as it is concerned with matters such as birth, death, health, illness, and all sorts of processes that aim to balance the population itself. Biopolitics also relates to social, cultural, environmental, economic, and geographic conditions as well. As such, biopower refers to all of the conditions in which human beings as a collective interact, the ways in which individuals are an outcome of discourses and practices, and the ways in which resistances are structured.

Biopolitical Production

How are individuals produced by and subordinated to discourses? Furthermore, if such production of subjectivities is brought into an IR discussion, which theoretical outcome from biopower has most significantly influenced the discipline?

So far, it is possible to grasp that Foucault’s lack of differentiation between biopower and biopolitics (Castro-Gómez, 2010) corresponds in some way with Hardt and Negri’s (2000) statement that Foucault fails to explain the real dynamics of biopolitical production in a biopolitical society. The ultimate reason for Foucault not developing the concept and study of biopolitics further was his death (Agamben, 1998, p. 4); Guattari and Rolnik’s (2006) work does, though, help us to better comprehend how societies are produced in a mechanical way. Here, human nature is shaped and consumed while immersed in a “capitalist culture”; in other words, they explain how the micro-physics of power are assembled. Thus, along with such an understanding, Foucault also offers highly productive methods of inquiry into the (un)making of modern subjectivity (Pasha, 2010).

In an attempt to shed light on biopolitical power production at the macro level, Hardt and Negri (2000) show how IOs such as, the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, and the GATT interconnect with transnational corporations (TNCs)—thereby elaborating a complex fabric within the biopolitical world through the power of capital. Such highly interdependent networking between these international actors facilitates the ways in which territories and populations are articulated, and determines where TNCs distribute labor power, allocate resources, and organize the economic centers of global production.

So far, what Foucault (Foucault, 2008) tentatively brings to attention regarding the political perspective of neoliberalism and state power can be seen to focus on competition, enterprise, and production. Hardt and Negri re-create this when they recall that monetary and financial dynamics allow for the production of individuals subordinated to the discourses led by those institutions. Such a cyclical and never-ending dynamic is clearer when the production of language and communication is taken into account as part of the communication industries (Hardt & Negri, 2000). In this case, the media organizations existing as TNCs in alliance with locals are the key private actors.

Thus, Empire, as a concept, allows IR scholars to critically rethink the means that are used to exercise power, with it being a power to intervene that rests on its moral dimensions. This is enacted through the moral interventions practiced by nonstate actors such as NGOs at the global, regional, and local levels of action (among others, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Mèdecins sans Frontières). These actors become, then, very active players within “the biopolitical context of the constitution of Empire” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, pp. 35, 36).

Biopower itself is conceptualized and used within different academic contexts. For example, Hardt and Negri approach defense and security issues in their seminal work Multitude (2004). Conceptually different from social subjects, people, masses, and the working class, Multitude refers to a multiplicity of innumerable internal differences never capable of being reduced to a single identity—as they are composed of different cultures, races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, forms of labor, ways of living, and so on. They acknowledge both global war, and its regulative legal capacity, and imperial war, and its task of shaping the global political environment, as forms of biopower in the productive sense, as both have a regulating function that consolidates the existing order of Empire. Thus, this concept denotes that traditional state boundaries are no longer needed, as its rule encompasses the whole of humankind without the need for temporal boundaries (territory)—instead operating in the social world (population) and regulating all social life in its entirety (Hardt & Negri, 2000). In that sense, Empire represents a form of power that regulates social life (biopower)—one whose main concern is “the production and reproduction of life itself” (Hardt & Negri, 2000).

Corporate biopower is another scenario wherein new forms of (economic) management are developed so as to cope with the challenges of the global food system, to get to an equilibrium of that mass, and to keep the biopolitical machine running. As Nally (2011) shows, the acceleration in the use of biotechnologies followed by the interest of industrialized states in enforcing intellectual property rights on agricultural products—according to the mandate of IOs such the WTO—denotes a protagonist role being played by the transnational business community, leading states, and global rulers. Likewise, such corporate biopower coexists with IO agendas (WTO, IMF, WB) that theoretically focus on enhancing and optimizing the living conditions of the “global poor” (Di Muzio, 2008). But behind such an objective lies a neoliberal development discourse that has the global poor as its target population (Di Muzio, 2008, p. 313). Herein food and aid practices of famine relief lead to methods that discipline and reproduce relations of power, as long as preventing famine centralizes expert knowledge and funding in IOs or research institutes and their subsequent (re)production of practices (Edkins, 2000).