Governmentality, Welfare and the Biometric State
This unit examines how the modern state governs not only through law and coercion but through more subtle, pervasive, and everyday techniques of power. Moving beyond classical theories that focus on sovereignty or class domination, critical political theory highlights governmentality, welfare governance, and biometric technologies as key features of contemporary state power. Together, these frameworks reveal a transformation in the nature of the state—from ruling territory and subjects to managing populations, risks, and life itself.
From Sovereignty to Governmentality
Traditional political theory understood state power primarily in terms of sovereignty—the authority to make laws and enforce them within a territory. However, this perspective is insufficient to explain how modern states regulate social life in liberal and post-liberal contexts.
The concept of governmentality, developed by Michel Foucault, marks a major shift in the study of the state. Governmentality refers to the “art of governing” beyond the state in its narrow institutional sense. It focuses on how power operates through knowledge, norms, expertise, and techniques aimed at directing the conduct of individuals and populations.
Rather than ruling through force alone, modern states govern by shaping choices, behaviors, and capacities—encouraging people to govern themselves in line with state-defined objectives.
Population, Knowledge, and Biopolitics
At the heart of governmentality lies the emergence of population as the primary object of governance. Unlike sovereignty, which targets territory and obedience, governmentality targets life—birth rates, health, mortality, productivity, and security.
This form of power is closely linked to biopolitics, where the state seeks to optimize life through statistics, public health, education, and social policy. Knowledge practices such as censuses, surveys, and risk assessments allow the state to classify, measure, and intervene in society.
Biopolitical governance thus blurs the boundary between care and control. Policies framed as welfare or development simultaneously function as mechanisms of regulation.
The Welfare State as a Mode of Governance
The welfare state represents one of the most significant transformations of modern state power. Rather than relying solely on repression, welfare governance seeks to secure social order through protection, provision, and prevention.
From a governmentality perspective, welfare is not simply a moral response to poverty or inequality. It is a technique for managing populations—ensuring a healthy, productive, and disciplined workforce. Social security, healthcare, education, and housing stabilize capitalist societies by reducing social risks and integrating citizens into the state’s regulatory framework.
Welfare thus produces citizens who are simultaneously protected and governed, tying social rights to norms of behavior, productivity, and responsibility.
Neoliberal Governmentality and the Retreat of Welfare
Since the late twentieth century, welfare governance has been restructured under neoliberalism. Neoliberal governmentality does not eliminate state power; instead, it reconfigures it.
Under neoliberalism, individuals are encouraged to act as entrepreneurial subjects, responsible for managing their own risks through markets. Welfare provision is reduced, privatized, or made conditional, while the state expands mechanisms of surveillance, assessment, and discipline.
This shift represents a move from collective welfare to individualized responsibility, where social problems are reframed as failures of personal conduct rather than structural inequality.
The Biometric State: Governing through Data and Identification
A defining feature of contemporary governance is the rise of the biometric state—a state that governs populations through digital identification, data collection, and algorithmic management.
Biometric technologies such as fingerprints, facial recognition, iris scans, and centralized databases allow states to uniquely identify individuals and link identity to welfare delivery, security, and citizenship rights. These technologies promise efficiency, inclusion, and transparency.
However, critical scholars argue that biometrics also deepen surveillance and exclusion. They transform citizens into data subjects, making access to rights conditional on successful identification. Errors, exclusions, and data misuse disproportionately affect marginalized populations.
The biometric state thus represents an intensification of governmentality, where governance operates through continuous monitoring rather than episodic intervention.
Welfare, Biometrics, and Conditional Citizenship
When welfare governance is combined with biometric technologies, citizenship itself becomes conditional and graded. Access to food, healthcare, pensions, or mobility increasingly depends on digital verification.
This creates new forms of inclusion and exclusion. Those who are “legible” to the state benefit from services, while those who fall outside databases—migrants, informal workers, the homeless—face denial and precarity.
From a critical perspective, biometric welfare does not simply deliver benefits; it redefines the relationship between the state and citizens, shifting from rights-based entitlements to technocratic authorization.
Power, Consent, and Resistance
Governmentality does not operate solely through coercion; it relies heavily on consent and normalization. Individuals internalize norms of productivity, responsibility, and self-management, aligning their behavior with state objectives.
At the same time, welfare regimes and biometric systems generate resistance. People contest exclusion, challenge data regimes, and negotiate governance in everyday ways. Informality, evasion, and protest reveal the limits of governmental power.
Thus, governmentality should be understood as a contested process, not a totalizing one.
Global and Post-Colonial Dimensions
In post-colonial contexts, governmentality and biometrics interact with histories of colonial surveillance and control. Techniques once used to classify and manage colonial populations are reworked through digital technologies and development policies.
Welfare and biometric governance often operate unevenly, producing differential citizenship and reinforcing existing inequalities. This highlights the importance of situating governmentality within global power relations and historical legacies.
Conclusion: Rethinking the Modern State
Governmentality, welfare, and biometric technologies reveal a transformation in how the modern state exercises power. The state no longer governs primarily through command and coercion, but through care, calculation, and continuous monitoring.
While welfare and biometrics promise inclusion and efficiency, they also expand surveillance and conditionality. Understanding these dynamics is essential for analyzing contemporary governance, citizenship, and democracy.
This unit demonstrates that the modern state is best understood not as a fixed institution, but as a set of evolving techniques for governing life, populations, and social order.
References
- Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population.
- Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics.
- Rose, Nikolas. Powers of Freedom.
- Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State.
- Dean, Mitchell. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society.
