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Doped and disclosed

Anatomopolitics, biopower, and sovereignty in the Russian sports industry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2019

Andrey Makarychev  and
Sergey Medvedev
Andrey Makarychev
Affiliation:
University of Tartu, Estonia
Sergey Medvedev
Affiliation:
Higher School of Economics, Moscow
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Abstract

In this article, we scrutinize a policy area in which the Russian government has had to react to negative publicity in the last few years, namely, the doping scandal surrounding the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. This scandal uncovered important aspects of Russia’s vulnerability in the global sports milieu, yet so far, it has remained almost unnoticed in the literature on mega sports events in Russia. Our analysis is premised on the convergence of two types and techniques of control and regulation: anatomopolitics, which presupposes, in Michel Foucault’s interpretation of the term, measures of control over individual bodies, and biopolitics, which refers to policy practices that target and concern the entire population. Their conflation in the Russian context results in a controversial effect: it strengthens relations of hegemony yet also exposes the sovereign power to the regulations of global sports organizations.

Keywords

anatomopoliticsbiopoliticssovereigntydopingSochi winter Olympics
Type
Article
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , Fall 2019 , pp. 132 - 143
Copyright
© Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 2019

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