The Biopolitics of Development ― Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present

This book offers an original analysis and theorization of the biopolitics of development in the postcolonial present, and draws significantly from the later works of Michel Foucault on biopolitics. Foucault’s works have had a massive influence on postcolonial literatures, particularly in political science and international relations, and several authors of this book have themselves made significant contributions to that influence.

While Foucault’s thought has been inspirational for understanding colonial biopolitics as well as governmental rationalities concerned with development, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of political subjectivity. Instead, they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, often describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities, and provoking a disenchantment with the political itself in postcolonial works and studies.

Working against the grain of current Foucauldian scholarship, this book underlines the importance of Foucault’s work for the capacity to recognize how this degraded view of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the discourses and politics of ‘development’, and with particular attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. It explores how we can use Foucault’s ideas to recover the vital capacity to think and act politically at a time when fundamentally human capacities to think, know and to act purposively in the world are being pathologized as expressions of the hubris and ‘underdevelopment’ of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such dramatic effect? The immediacy of these themes will be obvious to anyone living in the South of the world. But within the academy they remain heavily under-addressed. In thinking about what it means to read Michel Foucault today, this book tackles some significant questions and problems: Not simply that of how to explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have; nor that of how we might better equip them with the means to suborn the life of postcolonial peoples more fully; but that of how such peoples, in their subjection to governance, can and do resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance which seek to remove their lives of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance.

Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the University of Bologna and is adjunct fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society of the University of Western Sydney. In the last decade his work has particularly centered on the relations between globalization, migration and citizenship as well as on postcolonial theory and criticism. He is an active participant in the 'post-workerist' debate and one of the founders of the UniNomade network (http://uninomade.org/).

Julian Reid is Professor of International Politics at the University of Lapland in Finland. Prior to that he taught at King‘s College London, the University of Sussex, and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has written extensively on the biopolitics of war and security in the modern age, and is the author of two monographs, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror (Manchester University Press, 2006) and The Liberal Way of War (with Michael Dillon) (Routledge, 2009). He is also co-editor (with Brad Evans) of a new edited volume, Deleuze and Fascism (Routledge, 2012).

Ranabir Samaddar is Director of the Calcutta Research Group. He has pioneered along with others peace studies programmes in South Asia. He has worked extensively on issues of justice and rights in the context of conflicts in South Asia. The much-acclaimed The Politics of Dialogue (2004) was the culmination of his work on justice, rights, and peace. His particular research has been on migration and refugee studies, the theory and practices of dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control. His recent political writings, published in the form of a two-volume account, The Materiality of Politics (Anthem Press, 2007), and The Emergence of the Political Subject (Sage, 2009), have challenged some of the prevailing accounts of the birth of nationalism and the nation state, and have signalled a new turn in critical postcolonial thinking.