Global Governance and Biopolitics: Regulating Human Security

This book offers a powerful critique of mainstream ideas of global governance. Going beyond recent critiques of "human security" as a fundamentally incoherent concept, David Roberts offers practical political responses to the genuine problems facing the most threatened human populations worldwide. Focusing on water provision and sanitation, he takes a bottom-up approach to reduce avoidable infant mortality — a creative biopolitics. Roberts points the way to a redirection of World Bank lending strategies towards the mobilization of indigenous private sector provision of water and sanitation. The policies Roberts proposes offer a genuine human security that transcend borders without violating sovereignty, focused on the most lethally-exposed people in the world.

This seminal work is the first fully to engage human security with power in the international system. It presents global governance not as impartial institutionalism, but as the calculated mismanagement of life. David Roberts demonstrates that mainstream IR's nihilistic domination of security thinking blocks the realization of greater security for the world's most vulnerable people and perpetuates the dystopia its proponents claim is inevitable.

In response, Global Governance and Biopolitics presents a viable means of preventing the termination of millions of everyday lives.

'Driven by the spectre of preventable poverty and suffering. David Roberts delivers a devastating critique of the neoliberal global order. This is a must-read for all those interested in not only social justice but the means by which social protection can be applied globally.' Mark Duffield, director of the Global Insecurities Centre, University of Bristol

'David Roberts has produced a tightly argued and impassioned manifesto for human security on a global scale. He offers a new and challenging vision of power, policy-making and security for the twenty-first century.'

David Chandler, professor of international relations, University of Westminster

'This book is an excellent critique of the theoretical games that academics can become distracted by and the hegemonic norms that policy-makers perpetuate as common sense.'

Pauline Eadie, co-director of the Institute of Asia Pacific Studies, University of Nottingham

David Roberts is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Ulster.