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Karl Wittfogel points to a vital part of geohistory: the management of water leading to what is called hydro-bio-politics. In line with this, this chapter reviews the ontology and politics of water. For Gilles Deleuze and for Félix Guattari, being is production. Being as production is symbolised in A Thousand Plateaus by the slogan, ‘the world is an egg’. An interesting illustration of the interplay of re- and deterritorialisation in the concept of ‘Hypersea’ is shown, in which the environment of life on land is the deterritorialised sea. A notion of geo-hydro-political physiology underlies that of the organism. The politics is also regarded as physiology: the body politic as a body, a system of material flows. Wittfogel mentions that aridity is the key to the connection of stratified societies and irrigation. It is also noted that the State has no monopoly on hydro-bio-politics.

Citizens in societies in conflict deal with daily exposure to war-related events. The stress and fear engendered by these events can play a critical role in determining how individual citizens perceive potential threats and in turn impact their political decisions regarding the conflict– namely, support for compromise and tolerance or militancy and exclusion. It is thus critical to examine this linkage between stress, threat perception and political attitudes in the context of protracted conflicts. This chapter proposes a stress-based model to help understand the political outcomes of exposure to terrorism and political violence. According to the model, there are three basic components in the causal chain leading to political outcomes: exposure to terrorism and political violence, stress, and threat perception. Through an extensive review of contemporary literature on political psychology in conflict zones, we examine these components, their buffers, the central role played by fear in this context and the fundamental importance of conducting research in war and conflict zones despite the objective methodological issues, in order to further our understanding of the unique psychological and political consequences for civilian populations of exposure to prolonged conflict environments. The current model, although examined in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict context, is widely applicable for other conflict zones around the world, and as such offers a strong basis for therapy, intervention and conflict resolution.

The chapter shows how among tradition-oriented scholars of the 20th and early 21st century, the interpersonal in the Talmud became effaced in the notion of a universal subject of reason, ultimately conceived of as pure thought and denying any intrinsic necessity of the intersubjective, let alone the interpersonal. At the center of the discussion is post-Kantian formal transcendental definition of what it means to be human as opposed to any phenomenal description of humanity in external phenomenal terms of a physical, biological, or other objectifying terms. The chapter follows the Jewish thinkers who, in response to Kant’s critique of Jewish law as positive law, argue that Rabbinic law – the Talmud and its interpretation – entail a transcendental rather than positive notion of the law, and a transcendental rather than empirical notion of universal humanity in each human being. The chapter further shows, how for the sake of that argument, modern Jewish thinkers reinvent Jewish law. The chapter displays how that process entails both construction and denial of the Talmud as an allegedly empty form of merely rhetorical arguments to be translated into, and according to the principles of a universal humanity, build, as it is for these Jewish thinkers after Kant, on the principles of intersubjective transcendentalism, and on the resulting understanding of the political in their work.

Chapter 3 explains how the juvenile justice system became visible in Ireland. It highlights how the ‘problem’ of the juvenile delinquent emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. Both the problem of delinquency and its government are framed within various official reports by means of statistics. In addition, a new system of governing the delinquent population emerged in the form of the reformatory and later the industrial school and these regulatory sites supplemented existing sites such as the workhouse and the prison. From a governmentality perspective, the growth in bio-political knowledge surrounding the child results in the greater classification of delinquency and also results in a more refined calibration of the system itself. Although legislation providing for the borstal system and probation were later enacted, these initiatives never challenged the dominance of the reformatory and industrial school system and it was to be the early 1970s before this model began to be replaced. Around this time we see the emergence of a range of regulatory sites located within the ‘community’. The juvenile justice system has since become less visible but more pervasive within a myriad of governmental spaces within the community.

This chapter examines Michel Foucault’s revision of his initial analysis of power by introducing two new central concepts: biopower and governmentality. Foucault realized that disciplinary power alone cannot adequately explain the entirety of modern power, and thus came up with a new element, termed “biopower.” This in turn forced him to reframe his initial hypothesis that all macro forms of power could be derived entirely from micro forms. This chapter first considers Foucault’s exploration of the extent to which politics can be understood as “the continuation of war” before discussing his conception of populations in relation to “bio-politics” and biopower. It also explores Foucault’s notion of “security,” or the “apparatuses of security,” as well as “pastoral power” before concluding with an assessment of his argument that an analysis of power relations necessarily frames ethics and that it simultaneously provides resources for such an ethics.

This introductory section first sets the book’s aims. Then, after providing a brief theoretical overview of nationalism, it suggests that prisoners of war and medical professionals provide two important sites to study Turkish nationalism. It is suggested that those junior officers who became prisoners of war and left behind most of the unique sources for this book came largely from economically humble provincial backgrounds; and as such their views on the problems of the nation and empire as evidenced among the peasant and middle classes might be more directly reflective of the concerns of these groups than those of the intellectual and political elite studied by other scholars.

The book begins by illustrating the profound crisis of liberation felt by the poor of South Africa, who won the struggle against the apartheid system, only to find themselves in worse living conditions and confronting an epidemic of unparalleled proportions in the post-apartheid era. Rather than attributing this crisis to the cronyism or corruption of a postcolonial state, the chapter argues that the post-apartheid state confronted a “postcolonial paradox” – which entails a simultaneous need to respect the demands of neoliberal capital in order to compete successfully on the world market and a responsibility to redress entrenched inequality, secure legitimacy from the poor, and forge a national imaginary. The chapter explains how HIV/AIDS became the primary venue through which the post-apartheid state has attempted to resolve these contradictions. As such, this chapter provides a theoretical frame for the more detailed analyses made throughout the book.

This chapter focuses on the Treatment Action Campaign, and its struggle for the public provision of antiretrovirals. The international struggle against patent protection on essential medicines is the backdrop of this movement’s success. The chapter argues that the TAC instigated the introduction of biomedical citizenship by linking welfare rights to certain disciplinary biomedical behaviors. The chapter asks: what happens when structural inequality makes the assumption of biomedical technologies of the self impossible? It argues that bio-politics blurs into necropolitics at the threshold of citizenship, constituting a new form of exclusionary inclusion.

The book ends with a ‘Coda’ that reflects on the contribution this book makes to the political battle against the disease, in its fourth decade of existence. In so doing, it provides a critique of the ways in which technocratic neoliberal and biomedical solutions have failed to address some of the underlying, fundamental causes of the epidemic. As inequality has become a bemoaned but accepted facet of life in the late neoliberal era, the survival of the poorest of the poor becomes an increasingly political project.

Chapter delineates ways in which we can overcome humanist as well as posthumanist dialectics of inclusion and exclusion. It also critically engages with the persistence of positing pure forms and opposing them with each other in the contemporary context of posthumanism. It analyses how Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go contaminates the symbolic with its supposed opposite: embodied life. Similarly to the replicants in Ridely Scott’s Blade Runner or the cloned child in Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence, the clones in Ishiguro’s novel are capable of the same emotions and the same forms of behaviour characterising humans. These films as well as Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go persuade us to change the way we think about distinct and opposed entities: as no longer distinct in opposition but as mutually implicated with each other. The figure of contamination describes this force of mutual implication and interdependence. It emerges as an alternative to notions which posit divisions between ‘pure’ entities such as the one separating mind from body, natural history from human history, or bios from zoé.

This chapter examines the relationship between the vampire and science from its origins in folklore through to 21^st century science-fiction cinema. It considers how the vampire in film has increasingly been re-imagined through the language of science, with a particular emphasis upon discourses surrounding virology, pandemic, contagion, that have played a significant role within the genre’s development. The chapter also considers how the blood of the vampire has, in recent years, increasingly been presented as a cure for human ailments and explore the relationship between this narrative trope and a growing culture of bio-politics and bio-medicine. Case studies include Blade, Twilight, Rise, I Am Legend, Underworld, Daybreakers and Perfect Creature.

This chapter considers the increasingly prevalent presence of a ‘hybrid’ hero, a hybrid of human and vampire and/or zombie, within 21^st century vampire and zombie films and television. Through an examination of a selection of special-effects driven, hybrid horror/science-fiction films, this chapter considers how the hybrid hero celebrates notions of hybridity through the figure of the post-human, or cyborg, hero while also challenging conceptions of racial purity and the controlling doctrines of contemporary bio-politics. These heroes defy accepted behaviour, perceived racial boundaries, physical limitations and the boundaries of the body, reimaging the human as a hybrid form in which the lines between human, machine and monster are blurred. In so doing, they invite the audience to embrace hybridity in all of its forms and see the world through the eyes of the monster. Case studies include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Blade, Underworld, Ultraviolet and Resident Evil.

Imperial arts and sciences primitivized colonized subjects, making their abject bodies public and visible through the gaze, probing, and dissection of cameras, measuring devices, and surgical instruments. As loyal attendants of modern bio-power, Korean naturalist and realist literature came into existence simultaneously with imperial physical anthropology’s production of depraved bodies. This is why colonial Korean literature is fraught with representations of the underclass, criminals, the disabled, and the insane. South Korean literary historiography has tended to aestheticize these bodies for the purpose of shoring up anti-colonial nationalism in the post-Liberation era. How, then, might we recuperate the resistance of colonized bodies in reading colonial literature? How do these silent bodies respond to the camera, to the scientists' scalpels? How do they return the gaze of those who measure and probe? How do they emerge as subjects of resistance, transforming from the seen to the observer?

A devastating prison epidemic broke out in Thayetmyo jail in Lower Burma in the summer of 1881, resulting in the deaths of over one-hundred inmates. The event could be justifiably described as a failure of colonial bio-politics and the state’s use of Western medicine to preserve the lives of those under its care. Certainly all the medical interventions made to arrest the spread of the deadly disease were ineffective. Even diagnosis remained disputed. However, this episode also reveals the centrality of medical knowledge and practice to how colonial officials performed and enacted the state. The official inquiry into the epidemic demonstrates that Western medicine informed the disciplining of state practices. Rather than illustrating how medicine was deployed by the colonial state, the epidemic provides us with a window onto how the colonial state was shaped by medicine.