Biopolitics as an Enabling Function of Genocide: Revisiting Foucault’s Theory of Biopower to Conceptualize Mass Mobilization for Genocide

Abstract

Why do people participate in genocide? This thesis seeks to answer the question of what prompts civilians to actively participate in genocide or, alternatively, to passively support genocidal policies. Through the concept of the “banality of evil,” Arendt, a political philosopher and Holocaust survivor, explains that participants in genocide are not necessarily fanatics or sociopaths but rather ordinary people who may be motivated by other aims than extremist ideology, such as professional success or peer pressure. Similarly, the recent political science scholarship questions the role of dehumanization and propaganda in mass mobilization for genocide, i.e., whether civilians simply hear dehumanization discourses on the radio or read about it in the newspapers and suddenly decide to participate in the commission of mass atrocities. This thesis relies on the writings of Michel Foucault, a French thinker who coined the concept of biopolitics, which refers to the state’s management and regulation of all biological aspects of a human population through modern technologies, e.g., birth control, marriage, food, religion, sexuality, and public health. As such, it revisits Foucault’s theory of biopower to explain mass mobilization in intrastate genocide, defined as cases in which a genocidaire government seeks to destroy one of its own groups. This thesis therefore argues that, well before genocide is planned or even intended, biopolitical restrictions taken by the state regulate – and call into question – the existential rights of the targeted group. As such, it argues that dehumanization and hate propaganda are only made possible whenever compounded with pre-existing structural violence against the targeted group enshrined in laws and institutions.