Abstract
This article examines how the concept of biopolitics is applied in development studies, focusing especially on Giorgio Agamben's account of biopolitics as intrinsic to the analysis of sovereignty and a state of exception. Agamben analyzes sovereignty as a biopolitical enterprise of disciplinary control in which sovereign power is able to enforce its role by the most draconian means while remaining nominally within the law. Agamben further claims that development is a biopolitical enterprise through which the Third World poor are reduced to a situation of bare life. The article interrogates this proposition, questioning how far biopolitics/development must necessarily be conceived as an exercise in oppression.
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