Practical Biopolitics of COVID 19

The book introduces the concept of practical biopolitics and discusses its applicability for anti-pandemic crisis management in Indonesia and Russia. The authors scrutinize the functioning of sovereign power and governmentality during the state of exception. Practical Biopolitics of COVID-19: Indonesian and Russian Experiences consists in applying biopolitical theorizing – in particular, the concept of practical biopolitics – as a framework for studying different experiences and policies of tackling health and medical crises. The book explains how the COVID-19 pandemic transformed the enormity of interconnections between life and politics, and the ensuing challenges for political actors in Indonesia and Russia.. Practical biopolitics as a concept includes different regimes of care and protection, along with different techniques of governing human lives and administering healthcare, conditioned by the self-securing and self-sustaining public “conduct of the conduct”. Practical biopolitics is a sub-field of that, which comprises analysis of specific policy practices and administrative and managerial tools, and the measures that governments apply to fight health threats. The book raises a number of questions: how did the COVID-19 state of global alert transform the conceptual vocabulary of politics? How different national experiences of crisis management during a pandemic might be compared with each other, and how these comparisons might be theorized in terms of national sovereignties, good governance, and public policy, and foreign policy?