The Global Biopolitics of Security: An Anthropological Perspective

Molecular Sciences Institute, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

In recent years, biosecurity and biodefense have emerged as topics of politicalurgency as well as medical and scientific challenges. A broadening range of experts and decision-makers are turning their attention both to the threat of bioterrorism and to the specter of new epidemics, such as BSE, SARS, and avian viruses that pose distinctive challenges for the protection of life on a global scale. Today, biological agents constitute a vital challenge to security and health. Nations and peoples live on the threshold of (or have perhaps already passed over into) an era of global bio-politics; that is, an era in which living beings and fundamental life processes are being deployed for strategic ends, including destructive ones. In this context, experts are grappling with biosecurity in relation to a range of threats to health, both from naturally occurring agents and from those that have been altered through human activities. Their work is defining one aspect of what can be called the global biopolitics of security. Given contemporary developments, there is a need and an opportunity for critical engagement with developments in the domain of biosecurity at a number of levels. The existing literature on biosecurity and biodefense is predominantly journalistic and policy-oriented or it is technical literature in the biological and physical sciences. This project proposes to develop a conceptually sophisticated and empirically grounded inquiry into the technical, political, and ethical dimensions of biosecurity. The approach singles out for analytic attention the specific initiatives and actors -policymakers, funding agencies, scientists, planners, entrepreneurs, and others - that are seeking to articulate the elements of a biosecurity system today. The aim of the project is to understand how these actors are working to specify the problem of biosecurity and to forge a technical response. The project involves two components that will be undertaken simultaneously and in close interaction. First, intensive field research using the tools of multi-sited ethnography will be conducted at specific sites of expert activity in which biosecurity is being defined and worked on. Second, these individual studies will be coordinated in a framework for comparison and collaboration that seeks to elaborate a range of broader concepts and to understand broader combinations of forms in this emerging domain. The objective is to take the first steps in developing a rich and multi-dimensional social scientific approach to contemporary problems of biosecurity. The conjuncture of rationalities of public health and new formations of security presents an opportunity to develop novel concepts and methods that are appropriate to studying the global biopolitics of security. Such engagement is essential if social scientists wish to participate in developments that are of cardinal importance to our social and political life.