Foucault on Politics, Security and War

This diverse collection of essays is the first to specifically engage Michel Foucault on questions of politics, security and war. It is also the first to take up the provocations found in Michel Foucault’s recently published Collège de France lectures, particularly Society Must Be Defended, Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. The contributors reassess the way Foucault worked experimentally and in collaboration and dialogue with others. In so doing, the essays pursue lines of enquiry that Foucault briefly extolled but did not exhaust, and take him in directions that he could not have foreseen, including the War on Terror, risk, biosecurity and biopolitics, AIDS, racial and ethnic conflict, and the critique of law. Foucault on Politics, Security and War is an essential contribution to Foucault scholarship and also poses wider challenges to political theory, international relations, security studies and legal theory.

CONTENTS:

Introduction; M.Dillon & A.W.Neal

PART I: SITUATING FOUCAULT

Strategies for Waging Peace: Foucault as Collaborateur; S.Elden

PART II: POLITICS, SOVEREIGNTY, VIOLENCE

Goodbye War on Terror? Foucault and Butler on Discourses of Law, War and Exceptionalism; A.W.Neal

Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault; J.Reid

Security: A Field Left Fallow; D.Bigo

Revisiting Franco’s Death: Life and Death and Bio-Political Governmentality; P.Palladino

PART III: BIOS, NOMOS, RACE

Law Versus History: Foucault’s Genealogy of Modern Sovereignty; M.Valverde

The Politics of Death: Race War, Bio-Power and AIDS in the Post-Apartheid; D.Fassin

Security, Race, and War; M.Dillon

MICHAEL DILLON is Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations and cultural theory. Among his books are Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (1996). Michael Dillon is also coeditor of The Journal of Cultural Research.

ANDREW W. NEAL is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His PhD, which he is currently developing for publication as Exceptionalism and the Politics of CounterTerrorism: Liberty, Security and the War on Terror, won the British International Studies Association thesis prize in 2006. He has published articles as sole and joint author on Foucault, exceptionalism and critical approaches to security.

October 2008 Hardback £50.00 9781403999047

Foucault on Politics, Security and War