Uvod u kritičku analizu biopolitičkog genocidnog rata u pojasu Gaze: Teorijski izazovi i društvene implikacije / Introduction to a Critical Analysis of the Biopolitical Genocidal War in the Gaza Strip: Theoretical Challenges and Social Implications

Abstract

This paper starts from the assumption that in contemporary society, (bio)politics permeates all aspects of life through the governance of social, political, economic, cultural, and scientific processes. Here, politics is not understood as a noble activity aimed at organizing human life—as it ideally should be—but rather as a retrograde and destructive force, a superpowered tool used to serve the interests of individuals, groups, and states on both local and global levels. Contemporary politics is portrayed as biopolitics, which is difficult to encapsulate within a single, universally accepted cognitive framework. Through vast possibilities and strategies of manipulation and mediation, biopolitics enforces discipline, control, surveillance, and political and social conditioning of individuals and society as a whole. In addition to the subjects, destructive methods, and techniques used by biopolitics through the instrumentalization of human life and the body, as well as the production of wars, crises, pandemics, and recessions, the paper focuses on a critical analysis of the genocidal war in the Gaza Strip, which is the par excellence expression of biopolitical practice and strategy. The work draws on the theoretical framework of contemporary critics of socio-political life (Foucault, Agamben, Beck, Engdahl) and seeks to contribute to the academic discourse on the relationships between power, the body, and control in modern societies. In the critical and analytical review of the new experience of biopolitics, in addition to theoretical challenges, media sources and reports more consistently illustrate the nature and scope of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in a practical sense. The analysis of biopolitical governance over life in the Gaza Strip reveals a new nature of state biopolitical power and new strategies through which political authorities manage human life, placing the ordinary citizen in a position of watching crimes unfold in real time—without the ability to intervene. The plea of the average person for “humanitarian intervention,” addressed to the “international community,” coupled with political helplessness, industrial violence, mass killings, and destruction using the most advanced weaponry—now equipped with artificial intelligence - consequently creates global instability and regional tension not only in the Middle East. Israel’s intensive implementation of its occupation policy, violations of human rights and the laws of war, the devastation of entire cities within the enclave, ethnic cleansing, and horrific war crimes revive Foucault’s biopolitical principle of exposing one nation to death in order to secure the safety and survival of another.