Aselection of the most pressing political questions of the moment might include the following: should women wear headscarves? May we buy and sell our bodily organs? How can we control the weather? The questions sound almost frivolous, and they are certainly not matters on which the canonical texts and traditions of political theory give much purchase. (What is a conservative position on the hijab? A socialist view of organ harvesting? A liberal policy on climate change?) That such issues should simultaneously be among the most debated of our time suggests a fundamental transformation in the landscape of politics.
The change is the result of technological advances that have enhanced our ability to travel, communicate and modify ourselves and our environment, yet the specifically political challenge posed by these developments comes from their global reach, and their widely differing impact on diverse populations. A few years ago, the issues arising from this transformation were routinely subsumed under the rubric of globalization, which, for both its proponents and detractors, hinged on the relationship between the global and the local. Now, many are considered biopolitical in the sense that they are produced through interactions of political power with the private and the corporeal. Almost imperceptibly, globalization has become biopolitics, the pivot between the two 9/11 and the global state of emergency known as ‘the war on terror’.