`` The concept of biopolitics has recently become fashionable: it is often, and enthusiastically, invoked in every kind of context. We should avoid this automatic and unreflective use of the term. Let us ask ourselves, then, how and why life breaks through the center of the public scene, how and why the State regulates and governs it.'' Virno (2004, page 81) Introduction For much of the 20th century, sovereignty circulated among Western political geogra- phers, political sociologists, and international relations scholars as a shared shorthand about the location and nature of power, authority, and legitimacy in the global political economy (Agnew, 1999). And, yet, if it was an essentially uncontested concept (cf Connolly, 1993, pages 9^44), a number of different presuppositions circulated under sovereignty's sign. As Walker (1993, page 165) argued in his memorable genealogy of the term, a ``presumed convergence'' of concepts related to sovereignty (ie state, democracy, identity, community, etc), treated for the most part as synonyms, made it ``easy to string certain names together'' into a selective epistemological ``cannon of textual reference''. Walker's point was that beneath the too often taken-for-granted categorical presentation of sovereignty was a rich and overdetermined diversity of texts and thinkers. Most importantly, Walker suggested that to neglect these complex undercurrents was simultaneously to displace the disciplinary politics of thinking sovereignty. As Virno signals above, a similar possibility exists today with the neologism ``bio- politics'', coined by French political theorist Foucault as part of his search for a vocabulary about politics and power not ``erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition'' (1980a, page 121). We note, in particular, the term's frequent deployment by critics and devotees alike to describe ö as if in a word öthe `nonsovereign' and/or `postsovereign' organization of political Biopolitics, biopower, and the return of sovereignty Mathew Coleman, Kevin Grove Department of Geography, Ohio State University, 1156 Derby Hall, 154 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210-1361, USA; e-mail: coleman.373@osu.edu, grove.80@osu.edu Received 11 March 2008; in revised form 19 December 2008 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009, volume 27, pages 489 ^ 507 Abstract. In this paper we want to open up for discussion what counts as `biopolitics' öa term frequently used by critics and devotees alike to describe the organization of political power and authority in a world after Bretton Woods, the Cold War, and 9/11. We do so on two fronts. On the one hand, we contrast Foucault on war and the normalizing society, Agamben on thanatopolitics, and Hardt and Negri on biopotenza. Our goal here is to draw attention to multiple competing definitions of biopolitics, and in so doing problematize the term as a catchall category to describe either the `nonsovereign' or the `postsovereign' operation of power. On the other hand, while refusing some baseline definition of what counts as biopolitics, we develop our own specifically geographical criticisms of Agamben and Hardt and Negri on the topic of biopolitics. Following Sparke's recent interrogation of postfoundational thought on account of its oftentimes buried metaphysics of geopresence, we submit that Agamben as well as Hardt and Negri deploy biopolitics in both metaphysical and metageographical ways. We contrast this with Foucault's inductive, genealogical, and time-specific and place-specific use of the concept. doi:10.1068/d3508