Biopolitical Dynamics and Social Resistance

For decades, scholarship on biopolitical dynamics has illuminated the complex interplay between state authorities and individual bodies. Rooted in the work of Michel Foucault, biopolitics examines how modern power is exercised through the management of life processes such as health, reproduction and mortality. Social resistance emerges as collective and individual practices that challenge or subvert this governance of life, ranging from hunger strikes and forced-feeding protests to digital and affective forms of dissent. Recent theoretical shifts emphasise the materiality of bodies, the role of emotion and affect in mobilising opposition, and the ways in which global crises—such as pandemics, climate change and systemic racism—reconfigure the terrain of biopolitical control. By analysing both state-led health interventions and grassroots technologies of resistance, researchers highlight the global significance of these dynamics for human rights, public policy and social justice.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent work has advanced understanding of how affective and embodied processes sustain power relations. One foundational study analyses the bodily dimensions of racialisation, demonstrating that affective responses like disgust and abjection expose discrepancies between welfare-state ideals and racialised lived realities. This research reveals that bodily forms of resistance are inseparable from deeper ideological structures and that attending to both affect and embodiment is crucial for comprehending contemporary biopolitical regimes.

Biopolitical Dynamics and Social Resistance publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in biopolitical dynamics and social resistance across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Biopolitics: The strategies and mechanisms through which states regulate populations at the level of life processes such as health and reproduction.

Biopower: The exercise of power over bodies and populations, emphasising management, optimisation and regulation of life.

Governmentality: The ensemble of institutions, procedures and tactics that guide how societies are governed beyond formal state structures.

Necropolitics: The power to determine who may live and who must die, focusing on political conditions of mortality and dispensability.

Embodiment: The lived experience of the body as a site of political inscription, ideology and resistance.

Biopolitical technology: Practices or tactics that harness bodily processes to challenge, negotiate or transform state power.

References

1. Racial embodiment and the affectivity of racism in young people’s film. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2015).
2. The hunger strike as a biopolitical technology: re-reading the 1981 Irish republican prison protest. Cultural Studies (2024).
3. Forced to Live: Controlled Forced Feeding of Political Prisoners and the Challenge to Nation‐States’ Civilising Processes. British Journal of Sociology (2025).
4. The Necropolice Economy: Mapping Biopolitical Priorities and Human Expendability in the Time of COVID-19. Societies (2021).