440 K Srinivasan and R Kasturirangan from the conventional schema of power as something that is associated with force and overt violence, as something that is resonant with the power of the sovereign to ‘take life and let live’ (Foucault 2008, p 136) To Foucault, power in contemporary society can take multiple creative forms and be directed at promoting the flourishing of life Characterising this as biopower or the power to ‘make live and let die’, Foucault (2003, p 241) shows that many spaces of care and transformation from the eighteenth century onwards (such as the transition from monarchy to democracy) are characterised by mechanisms of power that are directed at regulating and fostering life—instead of ruling by threat of violence and death However, this focus does not necessarily imply the absence of harm Indeed, the key insight in Foucault’s scholarship lies in his teasing out of the intricate entanglement of harm with techniques of power that are aimed at caring for life As Foucault, drawing on his observations of modern warfare argues, war (and the accompanying violence) is no longer waged in defence of the sovereign, but on ‘behalf of the existence of everyone in the name of life necessity’ (Foucault 2008, p 136), that is, for the welfare of society as a whole This insight has been used to investigate spaces of care such as the war on terror, international development, and even animal welfare (Srinivasan 2013; Dillon and Reid 2009; Li 2007) Instead of violence and harm being justified in the name of the sovereign, in the exercise of biopower, harm is portrayed as fundamental to the protection of life—but life at a larger scale, at the level of the population In the exercise of biopower, individual members of society, or some groups in society, can be harmed and sacrificed in order to promote the well-being and flourishing of the larger population/collectivity (Gudmand-Hoyer and Lodrup 2009) Thus, in the logics of biopower, individuals are not attributed much ethical significance; they are largely ‘the instrument, relay, or condition for obtaining something at the level of the population’ (Foucault 2009, p 42) Furthermore, as Foucault writes, those individuals and groups who ‘resist the regulation of the population, who try to elude the apparatus by which the population subsists at an optimal level’, can become the targets of violent management including ‘exile, death and punishment’ (Foucault 2009, p 44) Biopower, the power of care, therefore is characterised by two key features: (i) a focus on the flourishing of life at the level of the population/ collectivity; (ii) the entanglement of harm and care It is these two features of Foucault’s schematisation of biopower that are crucial for the analysis of the conservationist control of invasive alien species