Cosmopolitics and Biopolitics in the Biosecurity Regimes of the European Union

Abstract

In the last decade the notion of biosecurity has become really relevant in Social Sciences. These have showed that the concept implies a new approach about the phenomenon of security. Nevertheless, in this paper we will argue that biosecurity means something else: it is a completely reconceptualization of the very idea of bios. On the basis of several documents and proposals of European Union plus some interviews to experts in the topic, we will put forward that European Union regimes of biosecurity are a problematization, in the sense established by Michel Foucault, of life. That is, they open a space in that this enters in the play of truth and false. Moreover, we will pose that this problematization supposes a particular exercise. One in that it is shaped at the same time a cosmopolitical and biopolitical proposal. That is to say, regimes of biosecurity produce a cosmos fold over the living that is a project of management of life as well. We will argue that the main elements of both has to do with a new conceptualitation of living as living-together, as something mobile, threaten, disperse over several scales and trap in strictly structures of codification.