biopower

Biopower is a term associated with Michel Foucault that refers to forms of power that regulate life processes within a population. It describes how modern states and other institutions seek to optimize and control aspects of life such as health, reproduction, birth rates, mortality, sexuality, and daily conduct. The concept arises with the emergence of the modern state, bureaucratic administration, and rationalized governance in the late 18th and 19th centuries, continuing to shape political analytics in later periods.

A central distinction in biopower is Between anatomo-politics of the human body (the discipline and optimization of individual bodies) and biopolitics of the population (the management of life processes at the level of groups). Techniques include statistics and data collection, surveillance and monitoring, classification and categorization, medicalization of life, and various regulatory mechanisms. Institutions such as public health agencies, hospitals, schools, prisons, and welfare systems operationalize biopower through campaigns, vaccination programs, sanitation, maternal and child health initiatives, disease surveillance, and demographic planning.

The aim of biopower is to maximize health and productivity, reduce risk and costs, and shape behavior to conform to normative standards. Power operates not only through coercion but through knowledge, everyday practices, and bureaucratic routines that govern life at the population level.

Critics argue that biopower can erode civil liberties and legitimize technocratic governance. The framework has been used to analyze contemporary issues such as public health policy, epidemiology, aging populations, migration, and the governance of risk in data-driven and neoliberal contexts.