biopower

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English[edit]

Etymology[edit]

bio- +‎ power, calque of French biopouvoir, coined by Michel Foucault.

Noun[edit]

biopower (uncountable)

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

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