Biopolitics, development, insecurity, exclusion and violence

Abstract

The objective of this article is to understand the control and violence exercised by the State through legal instruments and the rationality of economic-political devices and their implications for regional development. Based on the writings of Michael Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Maurizio Lazzarato, it is permissible to establish an ambiguous and complex relationship in which the State – based on legal injunctions and economic-political devices – exerts an institutionalized violence that not only determines conduct, but also segregates individuals and populations, produces constant threats and ensures contracts and financial impositions on communities and peoples, under the obsession of the developmentalist pattern. This model is so avid that it liquefies the biopolitical project and transforms human life into merely biological life, especially in peripheral or socially, culturally and economically excluded populations. Violence, linked to the law and this process, contaminates all institutions, projects and injunctions, including “development”, in its most diverse adjectives, conserving and (re)producing disqualified lives.