Biopolitics refers to a form of politics concerned with administering and regulating the conditions of life at an aggregated level of populations. This book provides a biopolitical perspective on water governance and its effects. It draws on the work of Foucault to explore how notions of scarcity are used in strategies of governance and how such governance differentiates between different populations. Furthermore, the author investigates what such biopolitical regulation means for people’s lifestyles and the way they understand themselves and their moral responsibilities as humans, individuals and citizens. The book begins by investigating the global water agenda, with a particular emphasis on its focus on water for basic needs, and provides different examples of hydromentalities around the world. It also presents rich empirical details of one local case in South Africa. By carefully exploring the water 'stories' of water users, the book provides new perspectives on the relationship between water and power. Additionally, it offers an innovative methodological framework through which we can study the workings of governance more generally, and water governance specifically. It thereby contributes to the scholarship on water governance in relation to how water governance and technologies are part of producing subjectivities, notions of life and lifestyles and, more specifically, how the global water agenda can work so as to produce, or further entrench, distinctions between different lives and lifestyles. Ultimately, such differences between individuals and populations that are produced as an effect of water governance are assessed in relation to social sustainability.

This collection brings together contributions from both established scholars and researchers working at the forefront of biopolitical theory, gendered and sexualised governance and the politics of race and migration.

This seminal work is the first fully to engage human security with power in the international system. It presents global governance not as impartial institutionalism, but as the calculated mismanagement of life, directing biopolitical neoliberal ideology through global networks, undermining the human security of millions. The book responds to recent critiques of the human security concept as incoherent by identifying and prioritizing transnational human populations facing life-ending contingencies en mass. Furthermore, it proposes a realignment of World Bank practices towards mobilizing indigenous provision of water and sanitation in areas with the highest rates of avoidable child mortality. Roberts demonstrates that mainstream IR's nihilistic domination of security thinking is directly responsible for blocking the realization of greater human security for countless people worldwide, whilst its assumptions and attendant policies perpetuate the dystopia its proponents claim is inevitable. Yet this book presents a viable means of achieving a form of human security so far denied to the most vulnerable people in the world.

Foucault’s late work on biopolitics and governmentality has established him as the fundamental thinker of contemporary continental political thought and as a privileged source for our current understanding of neoliberalism and its technologies of power. In this volume, an international and interdisciplinary group of Foucault scholars examines his ideas of biopower and biopolitics and their relation to his project of a history of governmentality and to a theory of the subject found in his last courses at the College de France. Many of the chapters engage critically with the Italian theoretical reception of Foucault. At the same time, the originality of this collection consists in the variety of perspectives and traditions of reception brought to bear upon the problematic connections between biopolitics and governmentality established by Foucault’s last works.

For years critical theorists and Foucauldian biopolitical theorists have argued against the Aristotelian idea that life and politics inhabit two separate domains. In the context of receding social security systems and increasing economic inequality, within contemporary liberal democracies, life is necessarily political. This collection brings together contributions from both established scholars and researchers working at the forefront of biopolitical theory, gendered and sexualised governance and the politics of race and migration, to better understand the central lines along which the body of the governed is produced, controlled or excluded.

'Governing China's Population' tells the story of political and cultural shifts, from the perspectives of both regime and society.

This book is a volume of essays on the Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century, by Professor Mick Dillon. It is at first of its kind in that no other study currently available covers the same field of research with the same degree of innovation. There is clearly growing attention to biopolitics in general, and the biopolitics of security in particular, beyond international relations and into the social sciences more generally (Geography, Sociology, Criminology, Law, and the Management Sciences). This volume will provide a genealogy of the biopolitics of security beginning with Michel Foucault’s original account of the rise of biopolitics at the beginning of the 18th century, and will clarify and further develop Foucault’s original analytic of the biopolitics of security. This work is an original introduction to the emerging field of the biopolitics of security, tracking its development into the 21st century, which will serve as an intellectual provocation to researchers as much as it will a pedagogical guide to graduate and undergraduate teachers. This book will be of great interest to students of critical security studies, IR theory, political theory, philosophy and ancillary social science disciplines, such as criminology and sociology.