The term was first used by R. Kjellén (1916) who saw the state as a quasi-biological organism, a ‘super-individual creature denoting social and political power over life’. M. Foucault’s (1976) biopolitics is defined as a control apparatus exerted over a population as a whole, citing the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on. Others have seen biopolitics as the political application of bioethics (J. Hughes 2004); the sociopolitical consequences of the biotech revolution (Rifkin (2002) The Nation 274, 6); the administration and regulation of human and non-human life at the levels of both the population and the individual body (N. Castree, R. Kitchin, and A. Rogers, 2013); and there are more definitions: see Schlosser (2008) Geog. Compass 2, 5, 1621.

Morrissey (2011) Geopolitics 16, 2, 280 tries to combine a spectrum of definitions into one: biopolitics is ‘the spatial politics through which life is constituted and governed; in other words, how life is incorporated into modern forms of governmentality’.