The science of ammunition lethality is a field that seeks to define the point at which military ordnance takes life and produces death. By historicising lethality's epistemology, I reveal the intellectual fissures and scientific uncertainties that have been reified and embedded into contemporary conceptions of military power. This not only tells us something about the processes by which science is subordinated to war, but also offers a new lens from which to consider the way knowledge claims about battle are co-constructed and legitimated through military practices. As a result, this article places science back into a narrative that otherwise frames the ontology of war in terms of fighting.

The term “biopolitics” carries multiple, sometimes competing, meanings in political science. When the term was first used in the United States in the late 1970s, it referred to an emerging subdiscipline that incorporated the theories and data of the life sciences into the study of political behavior and public policy. But by the mid-1990s, biopolitics was adopted by postmodernist scholars at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting who followed Foucault's work in examining the power of the state on individuals. Michel Foucault first used the term biopolitics in the 1970s to denote social and political power over life. Since then, two groups of political scientists have been using this term in very different ways. This paper examines the parallel developments of the term “biopolitics,” how two subdisciplines gained (and one lost) control of the term, and what the future holds for its meaning in political science.