Government and Politics in Sri Lanka

Biopolitics and Security

A. R. Sriskanda Rajah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351967990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'etnia

The island of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) was one of the few Asian colonies in which the British Empire experimented liberal state-building in the nineteenth century, and where many British colonial officials predicted that the independent state would become a liberal democratic success story. Sri Lanka has held on to much of the liberal democratic state-institutions left behind by the British Empire, including periodic elections. At the same time, the UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights concluded in September 2015 that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Sri Lanka committed serious international crimes against the Tamils. Such accusations are usually levelled against authoritarian states; it is unusual for a democracy to face such charges.

This book analyses where Sri Lanka stands as a state that has in place liberal democratic state-institutions but exhibits the characteristics of an authoritarian state. Using Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, the author argues that Sri Lanka enacted racist legislations and perpetrated mass-atrocities on the Tamils as part of its biopolitics of institutionalising and securing a Sinhala-Buddhist ethnocratic state-order. The book also explores the ways that, apart from military action, power relations produce the effects of battle, and thus the way that peace can often become a means of waging war. The author provides fresh insights into Sri Lanka's postcolonial policies and the system of government that it has in place.

A novel approach to analysing Sri Lanka's postcolonial policies and the system of government, this book will be of interests to researchers in the field of Political Science, Asian Politics and International Relations.

1 Biopolitics as war

The term ‘biopolitics’ is used by scholars in various social science disciplines. It is even ‘claimed by experts on biodefence, biosecurity, bioethics and biotechnology’ (Aradau, 2012). This has led to the emergence of competing definitions of the term, thus making its usage both ambiguous and contentious. As Jorg Spieker notes, biopolitics today ‘means different things to different thinkers’ (2011: 94). So what is biopolitics? What did Foucault mean by it? How has it been reinterpreted by scholars after him? This chapter addresses these questions. In doing so, it also discusses ways of reconceptualising the term ‘war’.

The chapter begins with a discussion of the concept of ‘biopolitics’, as used by Foucault, and examines how it is being used by scholars after him. It then moves on to discuss how biopolitics can be understood as a system of power inscribed with war, and capable of mobilising power relations, in addition to military action, to produce the effects of battle.

Grasping biopolitics

Although Foucault first coined the term ‘biopolitics’ in The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, and discussed it further in some of his subsequent lecture series, it was in the lecture series Security, Territory, Population that he provided the most clear cut definition of the term:

By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species. This is roughly what I have called biopower.

(2009: 1)

On the basis of this definition and a number of expositions Foucault made in his works and other lecture series, the concept of biopolitics can be understood in the following terms.

First, biopolitics deals with life at the level of populations (Foucault, 1998: 137). Unlike the ancient sovereign power of life and death that dealt with life at the level of the individual, biopolitics addresses the ‘multiplicity of men’ as a ‘global mass’; it is a ‘massifying’ power directed at ‘man-as-species’ (Foucault, 2004: 242–243). This does not mean that in biopolitical rule, life at the level of the individual is completely ignored. Biopolitics also involves treating the body of the individual as a machine, using disciplinary mechanisms to optimise its capabilities, extort its forces, increase its usefulness and docility and integrate it into systems of efficient and economic controls (Foucault, 1998: 139; 2004: 242).

Second, biopolitics is not exterior to the exercise of political power: as a system of power concerned with ‘the management of state forces’, it deals with processes such as ‘births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity’ and ‘all the conditions that can cause these to vary’ in populations. In other words, it is about improving the life chances of populations by carrying out interventions and imposing regulatory controls on processes that affect them in general (Foucault, 1998: 140; 2004: 243; 2009: 367; 2010: 317).

Third, remaining part and parcel of the exercise of political power, biopolitics is also the power to take human lives; as well as being a system of power that makes life live, it is also one that kills life. The ancient sovereign power over the life of the individual was largely exercised as the power of death (Foucault, 1998: 136). It was exercised ‘as a means of deduction’ that was ‘levied on the subjects’ to ‘appropriate a portion of wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and blood’ (Foucault, 1998: 136). In seeking to make life live, biopolitics, however, has not put behind the ancient sovereign power of death/the right to kill: ‘I wouldn’t say exactly that sovereignty’s old right – to take life or let live – was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which penetrates it, permeates it’ (Foucault, 2004: 241). In biopolitics, the power of death/the right to kill is exercised as ‘the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life’ (Foucault, 1998: 136). Thus, ‘wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended’; they are waged ‘on behalf of the existence of everyone’ (Foucault, 1998: 137). In Foucault’s view, some power complexes resort to genocide not because they are obsessed with killings but because they largely exercise power biopolitically: if ‘genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population’ (1998: 137).

As a system of power that deals with life at the level of populations and concerned with making life live, how is the power of death/the right to kill exercised? It is done by creating a binary division within the human species: the ‘good’ part of the human species that must be looked after and the ‘bad’ part of the human species that must be eliminated for the ‘good’ part of the human species to live (Foucault, 2004: 254–255). People of different races, political adversaries, the criminals, the mentally ill and people with various anomalies become defined as biological threats to the existence of the ‘good’ part of the human species (Foucault, 2004: 258–259 and 262). In other words, in the biopower system, killings are undertaken for the ‘elimination of the biological threats to and the improvement of the species or race’ (Foucault, 2004: 256). Thus, in biopolitical rule, massacres are seen to be vital for the human species to live: ‘entire populations are mobilised for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity’ (Foucault, 1998: 137).

In Homo Sacer, claiming to correct and complete the Foucauldian thesis of biopolitics, and drawing on ancient Greek political thought, Giorgio Agamben (1998: 1 and 4) divides life as ‘bare life’ (meaning ‘the simple fact of living common to all living beings’) and ‘qualified life’ (meaning ‘the form or way of living proper to an individual or group’). Claiming that Foucault had misconceived biopolitics as a development of modern power politics, and citing the ancient Roman law figure of the Homo Sacer (the criminal whose execution is ‘classifiable neither as sacrifice nor as homicide’) as an example, Agamben claims that the ‘inclusion of man’s natural life in the mechanisms and calculations of power’ are not modern but ‘absolutely ancient’ (1998: 9 and 82). Modern politics is not so much characterised by the inclusion of bare life in politics or the use of life as ‘a principal object of the projections and calculations of State power’, but the entry of both bare life and qualified life into ‘zone of irreducible indistinction’ coupled with the ‘processes by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule’ (Agamben, 1998: 9). Though Agamben confines much of his study to the biopolitics of the Nazi state, he also touches on its thanatopolitical (the politics of death) character in ‘democratically’ constituted states: as both the ‘bearer of rights’ and ‘sovereign subject’, every individual is a Homo Sacer, who may be eliminated when he breaks the law (1998: 124 and 142). In essence, for Agamben, biopolitics is the thanatopolitics over the individual’s life.

Contesting this claim of Agamben, in Biopower Today, Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose claim that biopolitics is not the power to take life but the power to foster life: it should be understood to ‘embrace all the specific strategies and contestations over problematizations of collective human vitality, morbidity and mortality; over forms of knowledge, regimes of authority and practices of intervention that are desirable, legitimate and efficacious’ (2006: 197). In their view, Foucault’s concept of biopolitics ‘operates according to logics of vitality, not mortality’ (Rabinow and Rose, 2006: 211). While acknowledging that biopolitics includes ‘circuits of exclusion’, they argue that ‘letting die is not making die’ [emphasis in original] (Rabinow and Rose, 2006: 211). Claiming the Nazi state to be ‘one configuration that modern biopower can take’, they criticise Agamben for characterising it as the ‘hidden dark truth of biopower’: biopower under the Nazi state, they argue, ‘was dependent upon a host of historical, moral, political and technical conditions’ that functioned alongside ‘a complex mix of the politics of life and the politics of death’ (Rabinow and Rose, 2006: 201).

In ‘Society Must Be Defended’, Foucault noted the Nazi state’s appropriation of biopolitics to be ‘a paroxysmal development’ (2004: 259). Taking this characterisation at face value, Rabinow and Rose (2006: 199 and 201) claim that Foucault understood the Nazi state to be only an exceptional development in the history of biopolitics: they argue that Foucault understood biopolitics to be the techniques for ‘maximising the capacities of both the population and the individual’ within various domains of power – such as medicine, town planning and so on – and not the power to kill. This is an incorrect assertion. As we saw earlier, in introducing the concept of biopolitics to the study of power relations, Foucault presented both its productive and violent dynamics. Moreover, he did not refer to the appropriation of biopolitics by the Nazi state to be a paroxysmal development because it was the only state that exercised biopolitics as the power of death/the right to kill. Instead, Foucault made this characterisation on the basis that the Nazi state is an example of the state’s use of the tight relationship between disciplinary power and biopower:

After all, Nazism was in fact the paroxysmal development of the new power mechanisms that had been established since the eighteenth century. Of course, no State could have more disciplinary power than the Nazi regime. Nor was there any other State in which the biological was so tightly, so insistently, regulated. Disciplinary power and biopower: all this permeated, underpinned, Nazi society (control over the biological, of procreation and of heredity; control over illness and accidents too). No society could be more disciplinary or more concerned with providing insurance than that established, or at least planned, by the Nazis. Controlling the random element inherent in biological processes was one of the regime’s immediate objectives.

(2004: 259)

Rose further argues that the death pole of biopolitics should not be understood as the power to kill but as the power to allow death to occur through ‘contraception, abortion, preimplantation, genetic diagnosis, debates about the right to die’ and so on (2007: 64). Rose’s argument, as Spieker (2011: 103) points out, was not actually derived from Foucault’s works or lecture series. Thus, in developing a different conception of biopolitics based on reproduction and genomic medicine, Rabinow and Rose effectively depoliticise it.

This is not to suggest that Agamben’s conceptualisation of biopolitics is not without its problems. Even though Agamben recognises the violent dynamics of biopower, the Roman metaphorical figure of Homo Sacer that he uses to develop his concept of ‘bare life’ ignores the massifying character of biopolitics. The metaphorical figure of Homo Sacer falls within the ambit of the ancient sovereign power of death that dealt with life at the level of the individual. Moreover, as Aradau (2012) notes, and as we saw earlier in this chapter, in contrast to the ancient sovereign power of death that was ‘individualising’, biopolitics is a ‘massifying’ technique: it ‘captured the transformation of power from sovereign and disciplinary techniques to a technique which acts upon populations as collectives’. Agamben’s work on biopolitics also ignores the fact that the power of death/the right to kill in biopolitical rule is intimately linked to the power of making life live.

In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define biopolitics as the form of power that is concerned with administering the ‘production and reproduction of life’ in service of global capitalism: ‘In the biopolitical sphere, life is made to work for production and production is made to work for life’; it is a power that ‘extends throughout the depths of the consciousness and bodies of population’ and ‘across the entirety of social relations’ (2001: 23–24 and 32). Though much of their work is concerned with the ‘productive dimensions of biopower’, and how biopower is being used today in the service of global capitalism, Hardt and Negri (2001: 27 and 35) acknowledge its violent dynamics.

However, in The Liberal Way of War, while recognising the violent dynamics of biopolitics and its intimate relationship with capitalism, Michael Dillon and Julian Reid define it as ‘an order of politics and power which, taking species existence’ of humans ‘as its referent object, circumscribes the discourse of what it is to be a living being to the policing, auditing and augmenting of species properties’ (2009: 24 and 29). For Dillon and Reid (2009: 24–25), when Foucault coined the term biopolitics, economy (understood in terms of ‘capitalist modes of production and exchange’) was the key expression of species life in biopolitics. However, as a result of the ‘confluence of the digital and molecular revolutions’, economy has today become one, among many, of the primary expressions of ‘species properties’ of biopoliticised life (Dillon and Reid, 2009: 23–24 and 28–29). On this basis, Dillon and Reid argue that biopolitics today can only be understood by examining the life sciences (2009: 46).

Foucault (1998: 140–143; 2009: 1 and 367; 2010: 22 and 317) acknowledged biopolitics to be ‘an indispensable element in the development of capitalism’, though, as Aradau and Blanke (2010: 44–45) point out, his analysis dealt with capitalism’s appropriation of biopolitics for disciplining individual bodies and governing circulation. Capitalism would not have been able to develop without ‘the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes’ (Foucault, 1998: 140–141). Biopolitics helped to adjust the ‘accumulation of men to that of capital’; it went hand-in-hand with the ‘growth of human groups’, the ‘expansion of productive forces’ and the ‘differential allocation of profit’ (Foucault, 1998: 141). It also helped to prevent, contain and often eliminate, threats – such as epidemics and famines – to the human species and capitalism (Foucault, 1998: 142). With biopolitics working hand-in-hand with capitalism, the ‘Western man’ gradually learnt the meaning of existing as ‘a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, and individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner’ (Foucault, 1998: 142). Thus, Hardt and Negri cannot be faulted for asserting the relationship between biopolitics and capitalism. However, this does not mean that it is only about the production and reproduction of life in the service of capitalism.

For Foucault, it was not only capitalism that appropriated biopolitics; it was also used by European colonialism, the Nazi state and Soviet-type socialist states (2004: 257–263). It was European colonialism that first used biopolitics in a thanatopolitical mode (Foucault, 2004: 257). Despite being capitalist, European colonialism did not initially use biopolitics in a productive way, but used it in a destructive way, which Foucault calls ‘colonizing genocide’: biopolitics under European colonialism was used to ‘justify the need to kill people, to kill populations, and to kill civilizations’ in colonies (2004: 275). This was also the case with the Nazi state, which was also capitalist. The Nazi state largely used biopolitics in its project of constituting the German race as the ‘superior race’ by seeking to eliminate and enslave other races (Foucault, 2004: 259–260). Soviet-type socialist states (in particular the Stalinist ones) also used biopolitics in a destructive manner to ‘deal with the mentally ill, criminals, political adversaries, and so on’ (Foucault, 2004: 261–262). Thus, biopolitics not only functions in the service of capitalism. Instead, it is a system of power that has been appropriated by various power complexes to manage populations in a calculated way. Each of them promote their own way of living for the human species and kill groups (the ‘bad’ part of the human species) that are seen to be a threat to the way of living they promote.

Foucault refers to this relationship of life and death – that is ‘if you want to live, you must take lives, you must be able to kill’ – as the ‘relationship of war’ (2004: 255). It is a relationship that has origins in the ‘principle underlying the tactics of battle – that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living’ (Foucault, 1998: 137). Does this mean that when power is exercised in biopolitical mode, there is war? The next section will explore this.

Reconceptualising war

In his treatise, On War, Carl von Clausewitz defined war as ‘a duel on an extensive scale’ (1832/1997: 5). This definition has become the conventional wisdom that war is generally understood in terms of violence that involves military action. As a consequence, when wars are waged through other means, they are not seen as wars, except when the term is used metaphorically, i.e., ‘war on drugs’, ‘war on gun crime’ and so on. However, when Clausewitz wrote his treatise, there existed more than one definition of the term ‘war’. This was acknowledged by Clausewitz himself, even though he did not elaborate what these different definitions were: ‘We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of war used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel’ (1997: 5).

In the lecture series ‘Society Must Be Defended’, Foucault analysed politics and law through the matrix of war. For Foucault (2004: 16), politics ‘sanctions and reproduces the disequilibrium of forces manifested in war’; it achieves this by perpetually reinscribing the ‘relationship of force’ in ‘institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals’. As a form of power, law is, even in its most regular form, also inscribed with the mechanisms of war (Foucault, 2004: 50–51). This was also a point that Foucault made when he examined the violent dynam...