Critical Biopolitics of the Post-Soviet: From Populations to Nations

(Hardback)

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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.

Reviews

Whether or not you know the difference between geopolitics and biopolitics, read this short book for its inordinate theoretical clarity, the luminescent details, andnot in the leastfor how it complicates scholarly thought about the post-Soviet varieties of postmodernity. -- Georgi Derluguian, NYU Abu Dhabi
This studyin which political philosophy and cultural studies cross-pollinate each otheris a long-awaited attempt at reading the post-Soviet experience beyond the dominant institutional, geopolitical, and ideological approaches of largely Western post-Sovietology. This important undertaking demonstrates the authors ability to complicate standard Foucauldian theory into a refreshing analysis of biopolitical changes across a number of post-Soviet countries. Andrey Makarychev and Alexandra Yatsyk combine their efforts to rethink major biopolitical theories with an excellent command of versatile and rich empirical material. -- Madina Tlostanova, Linkping University

Author Bio

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