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The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies pp 1–7Cite as

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Biopolitics

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Introduction

The notion of “biopolitics” is extremely popular in contemporary social science research. Popularity entails numerous rival conceptualizations and layers of meaning, as well as many exciting research agendas. This piece aims to introduce to readers the main areas in which the concept of “biopolitics” has been used in the past decades and to sketch the outlines of this diverse research agenda. In a more general sense, biopolitics refers to an intersectional field, at the frontier of biology and politics.

Biology means, according to its etymology, the study of life itself. This broad definition should first be narrowed, in this case, to the study of human life and more specifically the study of human life through the body. With the idea of biopolitics, an ancient question resurfaces: are humans inherently political? Aristotle, notably, imagined men as living beings with political capacities and treated questions of biological existence separately. This tradition then...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of International Relations, Corvinus University of Budapest, Budapest, Hungary

    Dorottya Mendly

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  1. Dorottya Mendly
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Correspondence to Dorottya Mendly .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Alberta, Alberta, AB, Canada

    Scott Romaniuk

  2. University for Peace, San Jose, Costa Rica

    Manish Thapa

  3. Nemzetkozi Tanulmanyok Intezet, Rm 503, Corvinus Univ, Inst of Intl Studies, Budapest, Hungary

    Péter Marton

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Mendly, D. (2020). Biopolitics. In: Romaniuk, S., Thapa, M., Marton, P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_630-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_630-1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74336-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-74336-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Political Science and International StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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