Sovereign Power and Social Justice

Abstract

Abstract One of Foucault’s biopolitical trajectories emphasizes the rulers’ life-and-death sovereignty over subjects and conquered peoples. This chapter argues that in this rule-of-force trajectory since antiquity, biopolitics is the biopower to inflict ravaging life or death on peoples once they resist collective surrender as men’s combatant and women’s non-combatant subservient multitudes under colonialist conquest. Ravaging, a gendered and genocidal warfare, imposes obedience by slaughtering the men or men and boys of resistant peoples and selecting and redistributing the women and girls kept alive for rape, enslavement, procreation, and childrearing among the aggressors. This practice forcibly assimilates the offspring to the conquerors’ ethnoreligious rule and identity, thus reinforcing martial conquest but violating civil law and justice. Against this practice, Plato and Aristotle argue biopolitically that copulating and educative childrearing are a “first law” leading to social justice or injustice. To outlaw ravaging and sovereign conquest, responsible governance should implement nonviolent copulation, procreation, and nurture.