The two-year program provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the politics of ‘life’ through training in the theories and concepts of biopolitics, as formulated by Michel Foucault and other key thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri and Roberto Esposito. The programme will focus especially on the importance of biopolitics for the development of issues in the Social Sciences, and International Relations and Political Science especially.

The program examines how biopolitics provides a distinctive way of understanding how states and other political powers have learnt to govern populations in the global era, as well as how biopolitical governance has developed in constitution of global problems. It engages students in the study of a broad range of biopolitical issues, historical and contemporary, practical and theoretical, from a variety of perspectives, but with particular attention to the importance of biopolitics for problems of war, peace, violence, security, and development. Students will learn how the concept of biopolitics opens up new and distinctive perspectives for political theorists and the critique of power, naming distinct forms of power and domains of struggle, and how the concept and problem of the political is changing as a result.