The University of Lapland is host to a unique community of research and teaching expertise in this area. The programme provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the politics of ‘life’ through a training in the theories and concepts of biopolitics, as formulated by Michel Foucault and other key thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri and Roberto Esposito.

Global Biopolitics is a 2-year research-based international master’s programme. The programme will focus especially on the importance of biopolitics for the development of issues in the Social Sciences, and International Relations and Political Science especially. The programme will examine how ‘biopolitics’ provides a distinctive way of understanding how states and other political powers have learnt to govern populations in the global era, as well as how biopolitical governance has developed in constitution of global problems. The course will engage students in the study of a broad range of biopolitical issues, historical and contemporary, practical and theoretical, from a variety of perspectives, but with particular attention to the importance of biopolitics for problems of war, peace, violence, security, and development.

Students will learn how the concept of biopolitics opens up new and distinctive perspectives for political theorists and the critique of power, naming distinct forms of power and domains of struggle, and how the concept and problem of the political is changing as a result.

Eligible applicants for the programme must have
  • Bachelor’s degree (180 ECTS) in the field of social sciences or in the relevant field of humanities
  • Good command of English language
More information www.ulapland.fi/biopolitics