Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War

This paper forms part of our continuing exploration of the diverse character of global liberal governance as a form of global biopolitics. Here we are concerned to draw attention to the ways in which global biopolitics deploys force and violence. We argue that global biopolitics operates as a strategic game in which the principle of war is assimilated into the very weft and warp of the socio-economic and cultural networks of biopolitical relations and that in the process it has been developing a form of biopolitical strategic discourse. Biopower is however in the process of moving from the carceral to the molecular via the digital. We therefore also observe how a common biophilosophical strategic interest in the initiation and the manipulation of life, seeking to govern it through the laws of connectivity, network forms of organisation and reproduction, has been engendered by the confluence of the digital and the molecular revolutions. We trace this development through noting its impact on the biopolitical strategic discourse characteristic of the liberal way of war, in particular its current Revolution in Military Affairs, and how the emergence of network society has been paralleled by the emergence of network-centric warfare.