Michel Foucault, the French historian and philosopher, never actually sat down and wrote a single dedicated treatise on violence. And yet his sprawling and extensive body of work – one that was dense, elliptical, and piercing – offered up perhaps one of the most profound critiques of how modern societies organise violence, not through spectacle, but through systems.
He had a hard gaze. For more than most, Foucault dissected the cold, clinical procedures through which power embeds itself in everyday life. And for organisations such as us here at Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) – committed to unpicking the systems that legitimise state and non-state force (and often the over-reach of such) – his insights still remain fresh and essential to the work we do.
Foucault did not ask us, “When is violence just?” Instead, he asked something deeper and – in some ways – more troubling: “What forms of power make violence invisible?”
From sovereign to disciplinary violence
Foucault’s famous shift from sovereign to disciplinary power marked a radical reframing of violence. In pre-modern states, kings executed their enemies in public squares – what Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975) called “sovereign power.”
Its violence was visible, spectacular, and rooted in the body. It was the guillotine. It was the gibbet. It was the executioner’s block.
But the modern state, he argued, evolved a subtler trick of asserting authority.
Instead of breaking bodies, the modern state trained them. Instead of the occasional dramatic execution before jeering crowed, it imposed the persistence authority of surveillance, inspection, and classification. This new mode – disciplinary power – was to be put to task in our schools, our prisons, our hospitals, and our barracks. It was no less violent, in many regards. It simply dispersed that violence through institutions, where domination and dominion was asserted by procedures, not by whips and guns.
A striking example of this shift from sovereign to disciplinary power can be found in the transformation of military punishment. In the 18th century, a deserter might be publicly flogged or executed in the town square, a gruesome display intended to instil fear. But by the 20th century, discipline had migrated behind barracks walls: soldiers who disobeyed were subjected to routines of silence, isolation, and forced labour.
“The judges of normality,” he wrote, “are present everywhere.” So too is their power.
For AOAV, which hopes to document how modern militarism is present from the battlefield to the police unit to the prison cell to the newspaper, his analysis cuts to the bone. Whether it’s biometric data used to control refugee movement or predictive policing tools applied in inner-city London, Foucault reminds us: the most insidious forms of violence are not always the most visible.
Biopolitics and the right to let die
Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, developed in his later work – particularly in his two books Society Must Be Defended (1976) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1979) – marks a profound shift in how we understand the exercise of modern power.
Unlike sovereign power, which operated through explicit threats, punishments, and the right to kill, biopolitics sets out to describe a form of governance concerned with the optimisation and regulation of life itself. It focuses on populations rather than individuals, and works through mechanisms such as public health initiatives, birth and death rates, sanitation policies, risk management, and even statistical forecasting.
When Foucault wrote that modern power seeks to “make live and let die,” he meant that the state increasingly sees its role as cultivating life – promoting fertility, preventing disease, extending lifespans – while simultaneously allowing death to occur in neglected or marginalised populations. This might be seen in how some groups are exposed to environmental hazards, denied healthcare, or pushed into precarious living conditions – not by overt execution, but by systemic abandonment.
For organisations like AOAV, Foucault’s biopolitics offers up a critical lens to look at armed violence. How militarism, surveillance, and who is sold arms to and who is not sold arms to can operate not through brutality alone, but through selectiveness – where some lives are protected, and others, quite literally, are left to die.
This is not simply metaphor.
Today, the differential valuation of human lives is a structural feature of global politics. The civilian in Gaza whose home is destroyed by a “precision” missile. The migrant drowning in the Channel while seeking asylum. The disabled person in a conflict zone whose medical care is severed and whose medical communities are attacked.
These are not accidents.
They are the result of biopolitical decisions – where life is supported for some and systematically abandoned for others.
In Society Must Be Defended (1976), Foucault writes: “The very fact that you let more die, means you have made a decision about who gets to live.” He called this thanatopolitics: a politics of death.
AOAV’s work on the civilian casualties of explosive weapons in populated areas speaks directly to this. The question is not merely how many were killed – but why some were protected and others not. It is about the racial, economic, and geopolitical lines that separate mourned deaths from unmourned ones.
Surveillance and the militarisation of visibility
Next we should turn to another vital philosophy of Foucault, that of surveillance.
Foucault’s emblem of modern surveillance – the Panopticon – was a Benthamite prison design in which every inmate could be watched at any moment, but never knew when the eye was upon them. Power, under such conditions, becomes internalised. The prisoner, unsure of being or not being watched, disciplines himself.
This dynamic of internalised control finds an eerie echo in surveillance systems and modern warfare. Drone surveillance, biometric scans, facial recognition – all are the gateways of identification from which late the promise of ‘surgical’ violence, neatly delivered. Yet their effect is to create a permanent exposure for those targeted. Whole populations now live under the gaze of weaponised vision and this, franky, is terrifying.
In Gaza, in Kramatorsk, in Sanaa – drone surveillance and militarised control operate hand in hand. It is a form of “anticipatory violence”: where suspicion itself becomes grounds for pre-emptive strike.
Foucault foresaw this logic. He warned that surveillance does not merely record, but produces a reality of its own. In so doing, it classifies, it pathologises, and ultimately it targets. Those under constant observation do not just fear violence – they are remade by its possibility.
What does this mean? It means that there is a reshaping of identity under surveillance., This is not an abstract, theoretical concept. It has real, lived consequences.
Take, for example, life under Israeli drone surveillance in Gaza. Residents report how the constant buzzing overhead affects every aspect of daily life: children grow up unable to sleep, farmers fear tending their fields, and families avoid gathering on rooftops in the evening for fear of being mistaken for militants. The drone does not need to fire a missile to exert power; its mere presence disciplines behaviour, instils fear, and alters the rhythms of civilian life.
As Foucault predicted, the watched do not just respond to the threat of violence – they are fundamentally changed by it. In Gaza, suspicion becomes atmosphere, and the people living under that gaze categorised not as civilians, but as potential targets.
Surveillance, then, is not neutral. It actively produces the conditions under which violence is both justified and enacted.
Knowledge as Violence
Foucault famously said that knowledge and power are not opposites – they are co-constitutive.
“Power produces knowledge,” he wrote, “and knowledge produces power.”
This is crucial in understanding the language of modern war. When militaries classify entire villages as “hostile areas,” or designate swathes of land as “kill boxes,” they are not describing reality. They are shaping it.
The language of risk assessment, of “collateral damage,” of “high-value targets”—these are not neutral descriptors. They are technologies of violence, legitimising “remote harm.”
And such classification doesn’t stop in war. In the UK, the Prevent programme’s emphasis on “pre-criminal” signs of radicalisation, or the use of predictive models in determining policing strategies in disadvantaged areas, all stem from this Foucauldian matrix of knowing and controlling. In this, the line between intelligence and intimidation dissolves. And from that the notion of violence as control rises.
Resistance and the rejection of normativity
Yet Foucault is not a fatalist. His theory of power is not that of a totalising machine. He writes: “Where there is power, there is resistance.” But this resistance is not always found in slogans or protest marches. Often, it lies in the refusal to be defined.
This resistance isn the work of the whistleblower who challenged the SAS’ ethos of killing in Afghanistan. It comes from British doctors who come under threat in Gaza and speak out about the British-weaponry systems that threatened their lives. It comes in the civil servant who resigned, rather than accept the signing-off of arms export licences to Israel.
Foucault’s ethics is one of subjectivation: the struggle to become something other than what power has made us. It is a form of counter-conduct. A refusal to be told who we are. And who deserves (or does not) to live.
Foucault’s challenge for humanitarianism
Foucault, then, does not give us the comfort of moral categories. He resists those binaries of just vs. unjust war, of good states vs. bad ones. Instead he asks us to trace how power operates in its capillaries, in its norms, in the institutional habits that become invisible through repetition.
It’s a call that says: look beyond the theatre of war and instead investigate the mundane machineries that makes violence possible. Interrogate not just where the bombs dropped, but the systems that enabled them to fall. To shift our focus from the spectacular to the structural; from explosions on battlefields to the spreadsheets, algorithms, and policy memos that quietly permit such harm to happen in the first place.
To read Foucault today, then, is to be reminded that violence is not always announced by gunfire. Sometimes, it arrives as a policy document, a software upgrade, a customs agreement.
And so, if we are to resist violence in the 21st century, we must do more than condemn its outcomes. We must, as Foucault did, unearth its assumptions, challenge its “regimes of truth,” and imagine ways of being that do not depend on the domination of others.
Further reading:
- Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1977.
- Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Picador, 2003.
- Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 – An Introduction. Pantheon Books, 1978.
Did you find this story interesting? Please support AOAV's work and donate.
Donate