This thesis develops a biopolitical perspective on Western states’ longstanding opposition to the formation of a Tamil state (Tamil Eelam) in the northeastern parts of the island of Sri Lanka (Ceylon). It does so by adopting and applying the concept of biopolitics as developed by Michel Foucault in the 1970s. Foucault used the idea of biopolitics to explain power relations and to consider peace through the matrix of war. He was especially interested in using this to understand power relations that emerged in the eighteenth century and especially in terms of the tensions between military confrontation and commercial expansion. This thesis adopts and applies the idea of biopolitics to the concept of liberal peace and its core principle, the security of global commerce, to offer a new interpretation of the rationale behind the opposition of Western states to the Tamil demand for political independence and their collaboration in Sri Lanka’s biopolitical transformation of the island into a Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-theocracy. As practitioners of the biopolitics of liberal peace, Western states have waged wars and collaborated in the wars of their Southern counterparts, allowing populations, including liberalised ones, to be killed, condoning the subversion of civil liberties, human rights and other democratic freedoms, including the right to selfdetermination of nations, that they simultaneously promote. The thesis explores the extent to which the collaboration of the West with the Sri Lankan state’s racist policies and counterinsurgency efforts is a continuation of the colonial policies of the British Empire in Ceylon. In developing a biopolitical perspective on the liberal state-building practices of the British Empire in colonial Ceylon, Sri Lanka’s adoption of the same practices, and the West’s own efforts to neutralise the Tamils’ armed struggle, the thesis explores the ways that power relations produce the effects of battle, and thus the way that peace becomes a means of waging war. When the power relations of law, finance, politics, and diplomacy produce the effects of battle, they become ways of waging war by other means. As well as being a thesis on Western policy in the war in Sri Lanka, the work is therefore also to some extent an attempt to see how far Foucault’s work on biopolitics might be pushed and developed and thus, at the same time, an attempt to turn the Foucauldian focus to an area thus far unexplored by those who have sought to engage with Foucault’s work.

En Italie, la réflexion sur le racisme, la race et leur rôle dans l’histoire nationale est fréquemment reléguée aux discours et aux pratiques qui ont caractérisé la période fasciste. Nombreuses sont les zones d’ombre qui persistent aussi bien au sujet des rapports que les humanités, les sciences et le discours politique ont entretenus avec la race et le racisme tout au long de l’histoire nationale, qu’à celui des liens entre la dimension coloniale et la dimension métropolitaine. Nous avons choisi d’examiner l’émergence du discours sur la race et les fonctions qu’il a rempli dans un domaine déterminé, celui du juridico-politique et dans deux lieux géographiques précis, le Midi et la colonie, pendant l’époque libérale italienne. Il s’agit d’une reconstruction qui a comme objectif la compréhension des rapports complexes que l’Italie libérale a entretenu avec la différence et avec les discours sur celle-ci. Notre objectif est de dévoiler la rationalité sous-jacente aux pratiques racistes, l’horizon entre lequel celles-ci trouvent leur propre possibilité d’émergence et, simultanément, leur propre justification : en d’autres termes, le discours qui est sous-jacent à leur mise en œuvre. Au terme de notre étude, nous pouvons affirmer que le discours moderne sur la race et les pratiques assimilables à ce que nous avons appelé un racisme d’État sont présents en Italie pendant la période libérale, aussi bien si nous considérons le Sud de la péninsule, que si nous nous intéressons aux débuts de la colonisation. La perspective eurocentrique de la connaissance et les relations coloniales de domination, soutenues par l’élaboration de l’idée moderne de race comme principe de naturalisation de ces mêmes relations, n’ont pas produit leurs effets uniquement aux marges et ne se sont pas limitées aux relations entre Européens et non-Européens, mais, au contraire, elles ont également investi les savoirs et les territoires qui se trouvaient au centre. Le Midi, dans cette perspective, nous semble être un exemple paradigmatique de ces dynamiques. / In Italy, the reflection on racism, race and their role in the national history is frequently relegated to the speeches and to the practices which characterized the fascist period. Many grey areas persist on the one hand about the relationships that the humanities, the sciences and the political speech maintained with the race and the racism throughout the national history, and on the other hand, about the links between the colonial dimension and the metropolitan dimension. We chose to examine the emergence of the speech on race and the functions which it performed in a determined domain, that of legal-politics and in two precise geographical areas, south Italy and the colony, during the Italian liberal period. It’s a reconstruction which has for objective the understanding of the complex relationships which liberal Italy maintained with the difference and with the speeches on this one. Our objective is to reveal the underlying rationality to the racist practices, the horizon between which they find their own possibility of emergence and, simultaneously, their own justification: in other words, the speech which is underlying in their implementation. At the end of our study, we can assert that the modern speech on race and the practices comparable to what we called a state racism are present in Italy during the liberal period, as well if we consider the South of the peninsula, that if we are interested on the beginnings of the colonization. The Eurocentric perspective of the knowledge and the colonial relations of domination, supported by the elaboration of the modern idea of race as principle of naturalization of the same relations, did not produce their effects only in the margins and did not limit themselves to the relations between Europeans and non-Europeans, but, on the contrary, they also invested the knowledge and the territories which were in the centre. The South of Italy, in this perspective, seems to us to be a paradigmatic example of these dynamics.