Sovereignty

According to Foucault, biopower is the power of biography (making biographical profiles of human populations for risk management), and it is different than discipline which is "the techniques and practices by which the human body is make subject to regular and predictable routines" and sovereignty which is "the command of central authority over territory" (Ericson & Haggerty, 1997, p. 91).

Foucault saw discipline, sovereignty and government as a triangle of interconnectivity (Nadesan, 2008, p. 7). Sovereignty is a more centralized, authoritarian use of power (Nadesan, 2008, p.11). This works with biopower to deny life capable/incapable subjects who are exceptions to neoliberal views).

Sovereign power changed away to more liberal states because 1) wealth and security extended government spaces and 2) more pastoral power over the population and less power by a sovereignty (Nadesan, 2008, p. 24).

"Sovereignty thus arises in the decision of exceptionality and in the concomitant use of repression to discipline those deemed incapable of self-government" (Nadesan, 2008, p. 196). "Nineteenth-century biopower operated in the sovereign mode by designating populations as degenerate and/or threatening, leading to the in institutional exlusion in enclosed and disciplinary spaces. Twentieth-century biopower is sought to engineer the health of populations through hygienic and neohygyienic techologies, which eventually stressed technologies of the self" (Nadesan, 2008, p. 187).

Nationalsim

Anderson’s (2006) position is that nations are sovereign because "the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions,and the allomophism between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state" (p. 7).

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

Nadesan, M.H. (2008). Governmentality, biopower, and everyday life. Florence, KY: Routledge.

Ericson, R. V., & Haggerty, K.D. (1997). The Risk Society. In R.V. Ericson & K.D. Haggerty (Eds.) Policing the risk society (pp. 81-130). U of Toronto: Toronto.

See: technologies of control/self (where the self is regulated by the self to conform to forms of control)