Biopolitical Strategies of Security: Considerations on Canada’s New National Security Policy

This paper examines Canada’s first national security policy in relation to Foucault’s postulation that modern society is marked by the emergence of biopower, a new mechanism of power that is principally concerned with the management of biological life. Alongside disciplinary power, which focuses on individual members of a society, arose ‘biopolitics,’ which conceives of and focuses on the life of populations. This power focused on life has meant that the problem of how best to govern has not only been posed as effecting ultimate dominion over a sovereign territory, but increasingly as one of yielding productive services from the citizenry. According to Foucault, ‘reason of state’ is no longer confined to the will of the prince, but is “government in accordance with the state’s strength,” that includes the ‘ends-means’ instrumental rationality associated with state survival in a competitive international system conjoined with the observance of what is governed, and how government might improve or enhance the qualities of a population. This study is invested in examining how state-building projects of national security, such as Canada’s national security policy, are mobilized through discourses and administrative practices that take elusive risks to the freedom, health, and safety of the population as an opportunity for action, and are made possible through a generalized expansion of surveillance. This reading of the new security policy suggests that the biopolitical character of security has greatly reduced the traditionally accepted distinctions between the state as a military and legitimated actor and the state as a service providing, regulatory agency for the management of the citizenry. In the context of national security, biopolitics, I suggest, has left unscathed a rationalization of the state as a direct authority, while also fostering decentralized mechanisms of rule that govern ‘at a distance.’