Word.ws English Dictionary

biopower

biopower noun: the sum of the various techniques used by modern nation-states to control not individual subjects but their entire populations, as contrasted with traditional modes of power based on the threat of death from a sovereign.

Noun

biopower (uncountable)

  1. The sum of the various techniques used by modern nation-states to control not individual subjects but their entire populations, as contrasted with traditional modes of power based on the threat of death from a sovereign.
    • The third type of power, biopower, emerges from the eighteenth century onward, and is directed toward populations rather than individual bodies.2015, Joe Painter, “Power”, in John Agnew, Virginie Mamadouh, Anna J. Secor, Joanne Sharp, editors, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography, Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons...
  2. Bioenergy.

Origin of biopower

From bio- + power, calque of French biopouvoir, coined by Michel Foucault.

Questions about biopower

What does biopower mean?
Biopower means the sum of the various techniques used by modern nation-states to control not individual subjects but their entire populations, as contrasted with traditional modes of power based on the threat of death from a sovereign.
What part of speech is biopower?
Biopower is a noun.

Words near biopower in the dictionary

  1. biopotency
  2. biopotent
  3. biopotential
  4. biopotentiality
  5. biopotentials
  6. biopower
  7. biopowerful
  8. bioprecarity
  9. bioprecipitate
  10. bioprecipitates
  11. bioprecipitation

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: biopower (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “biopower.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/biopower. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.