Biopolitics

Abstract The notion of biopolitics is at the core of many contemporary scholarly discussions involving both life and politics. Biopolitics originates from positivistic ideas in life and political sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Michel Foucault's critical work on biopolitics in the 1970s, along with major contributions from contemporary scholars such as Giorgio Agamben and Donna Haraway, initiated the “biopolitical turn” in the social sciences and the humanities. In human geography, and especially political geography, efforts to consider biopolitics have yielded not only significant theoretical work but also rich and innovative empirical work, covering a wealth of diverse topics such as historical bio‐geopolitics, (post)colonial politics, biosecurity, state and population governance, spaces of exception, global health, (im)mobility, and animal and more‐than‐human geographies.