[3] The governmental power of biopolitics is exerted through practices such as surveillance, healthcare policies, population control measures, gender-based laws, and the implementation of biometric identification systems.
Foucault's thesis claims that contemporary power structures are increasingly preoccupied with the administration of life itself, rather than solely focusing on individual behaviors or actions.
[4] Accordingly, biopolitics entails the governance of populations as biological entities, with an emphasis on optimizing their health, productivity, and reproductive capacities in manners conducive to broader political and economic objectives.
[5] In its essence, biopolitics investigates how political power intersects with biological life, shaping the bodies, behaviors, and well-being of populations through diverse strategies and controls.
[6] Kjellén used the term in the context of his aim to study "the civil war between social groups" (comprising the state) from a biological perspective, and thus named his putative discipline "biopolitics".
[8] In the work of Foucault, biopolitics refers to the style of government that regulates populations through "biopower" (the application and impact of political power on all aspects of human life).
[10] According to Professor Agni Vlavianos Arvanitis,[11][12][13] biopolitics is a conceptual and operative framework for societal development, promoting bios (Greek for "life") as the central theme in every human endeavor, be it policy, education, art, government, science or technology.
[24] French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault first discussed his thoughts on biopolitics in his lecture series "Society Must Be Defended" given at the Collège de France from 1975 to 1976.
[25] Foucault's concept of biopolitics is largely derived from his own notion of biopower, and the extension of state power over both the physical and political bodies of a population.
Whereas in the Middle Ages pandemics made death a permanent and perpetual part of life, this was then shifted around the end of the 18th century with the introduction of milieu into the biological sciences.
Agamben theorises that sovereign power (the state) needs to perpetually produce bare life (homo sacer) in order to reproduce itself- applying biopolitics as a tool to maintain control.