Critical Biopolitics of the Post-Soviet

This book is a critical attempt to cast a biopolitical gaze at the process of subjectification of Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Estonia in terms of multiple and overlapping regimes of belonging, performativity, and (de)bordering. The authors strive to go beyond the traditional understandings of biopolitics as a set of policies corresponding to the management and regulation of (pre)existing populations. In their opinion, biopolitics might be part of nation building, a force that produces collective political identities grounded in the acceptance of sets of corporeal practices of control over human bodies and their physical existence. For the authors, to look critically at this biopolitical gaze on the realm of the post-Soviet means also to rethink the correlation between the biopolitical vision of the post-Soviet and the biopolitical epistemology on the post-Soviet, which would demand a new vocabulary. The critical biopolitics might be one of these vocabularies, which would fulfill this request.

Andrey Makarychev is visiting professor at the University of Tartu.
Alexandra Yatsyk is senior researcher at the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies.

Introduction. Mapping Biopolitical Routes
Chapter 1: Biopolitics Beyond Foucault and Agamben
Chapter 2: Biopolitics a-la Russe
Chapter 3: Europe as a biopolitical space
Chapter 4: Biopower in Times of Post-Politics: Juxtaposing Ukraine and Georgia
Conclusion: The Biopolitical Gaze: Looking beyond the Post-Soviet