Abstract
There is broad interest in both analytics and politics of governmentality in international security studies. Going beyond sovereignty-focussed perspectives, governmentality approaches contribute to a better understanding of security rationalities, strategies, and practices as well as provide important new insights into trans-border security issues. However, because the rejection of traditional, sovereign understandings of security is a constitutive trait of governmentality, governmentality-focussed approaches in general ignore the security logics and practices in non-liberal settings as well as the persistence of sovereign security patterns besides and within governmental security rationalities. Such blind spots are even more problematic in light of universalist analytical tendencies in governmentality IR. This paper aims at highlighting these blind spots of governmental security studies and argues for a more inclusive perspective that takes into account the ongoing relevance of sovereign security logics and practices. As a result, I suggest a linear conceptual model of a sovereignty-governmentality continuum that is able to grasp the complex and adjustable configurations of sovereign and governmental politics in empirical research, while sovereign and governmental patterns still remain distinguishable.
Notes on Contributor
Andreas Vasilache holds a PhD in Political Science and is Professor of European Studies at Bielefeld University and Director of the Centre for German and European Studies (CGES/ZDES). His research spans on International Relations, European Studies, and Political Theory, focussing i.a. on governmentality approaches, borders and boundaries, and security studies. Email: [email protected]
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 When used as an adjective, ‘governmental’ in this paper refers to ‘governmentality’, and not to ‘governance’ or to the institution of ‘government’. For the relation between governance approaches and governmentality see Sack (Citation2014) and Vasilache (Citation2009).
2 Bourbeau (Citation2017) highlights that the reference to Foucault in IR has contributed to the increasing interest in practices in IR.
10 While Foucault himself was not much interested in doing empirical research, in Foucauldian IR, the empirical orientation is most often realized by case studies with, however, a strong theoretical interest or even focus.
11 In his insightful book on a Foucauldian concept of freedom and on the individual sovereignty of the subject, Prozorov (Citation2016, 14, see also 14–18) rightly puts forward that “Being Foucauldian” includes “The Freedom of Unfaithful Interpretation”. My approach could be read as such an unfaithful interpretation—but it does, however, not aim at a reinterpretation of Foucault’s theoretical or conceptual description of sovereignty. Much more modest, this article is both focused on and restricted to complementing governmental security studies in IR by a sovereign perspective.
12 Although I will suggest a conceptual model that aims at interrelating the governmental and the sovereign perspective, I nonetheless agree to Adorno (Citation2003, lectures 1-3) that critical approaches, deficiency analyses, and thus, negative critique are legitimate undertakings and that the legitimacy of negative critique does not depend on providing positive, affirmative, and alternative counter-proposals. For a recent justification of negative critique see Flügel-Martinsen (Citation2017, chapter 1.2).
13 Dean (Citation2013, 36-37) even sees a particularly pronounced “need to distinguish the new from the old” in Foucault’s late thinking on different forms of power.
14 See Biebricher (Citation2014) for an overview of previous debates and of recent discussions about the role of the law in governmentality theory and for governmental politics.
15 Simons (Citation1995, 51) even speaks about “Foucault’s Regicide of Political Philosophy”.
16 It has been rightly stressed by, for instance, Dean (Citation2013, 36–38) as well as by Dillon and Reid (Citation2009, 93) that Foucault has not given a final account on the relations of the different power types that he has outlined and described throughout his intellectual life. They bring forward that later concepts and terms are not always coherent to former works and that Foucault “left various aspects of his work incomplete” (Dean Citation2013, 38). I owe this hint to one of the reviewers.
17 See also Agamben (Citation2011, 106–107, 109–110) who points to the systematic distinctiveness of the different types of power in Foucault’s work. He highlights that the birth of governmentality implies the decline of sovereignty. Agamben also refers to Foucault’s quote about the sovereign’s inability to exert the governmental power type.
18 Dillon and Reid (Citation2009, 93) discern that Foucault “tended to reproduce the traditional account of sovereignty understood largely as the power to kill or threaten death” (see, accordingly, Agamben Citation2011, § 4.4). Dillon and Reid’s reconciliation of both forms of power, in a somewhat similar way to Neal, overcomes this “traditional account” by ascribing the governmental target of “the exercise of power over life” to sovereignty (Citation2009, 93).
20 It would be interesting to discuss Agamben’s account on biopolitics and biopower and relate it to Foucauldian thinking (I have done so for instance in Vasilache Citation2007, 271–277). However, Agamben’s approach is barely aimed at understanding the relation between sovereignty and governmentality in Foucault’s work. His theory of bare life and the sovereign exception (Agamben Citation1998; Citation2005) is in stark contrast to basically all characteristic traits of governmentality and its underlying concept of power. Agamben highlights the sovereign, repressive, negative, juridical, and violent core of biopolitics. His approach lacks the discursive, subjectifying, economic, normalizing, and productive techniques and functions of power and governmental steering outlined by Foucault. Hence, Agamben describes the/an archetype of sovereign power that Foucault attempted at overcoming in both his general approach to power theory and in his reflections on governmentality. As Ojakangas puts it, Foucault’s “concept of life is the antithesis of bare life” (Citation2005a, 11, see correspondingly also 11–18; Citation2005b, 50–51; Lemke Citation2004, 957–961; Geulen Citation2005, 85–86; Vasilache Citation2007, 271–277; for a more Foucauldian reading of Agamben see Margaroni Citation2005, 36; Pandolfi and Abélès Citation2002, 9; and, more careful, Dillon Citation2005). Thus, while I will argue in favour of taking into consideration the ongoing relevance of sovereignty in governmentality IR, Agamben’s theory of sovereignty and (bio-)power is not much concerned with the Foucauldian approach of governmentality. In a later book however, Agamben (Citation2011) to some degree puts his earlier understanding into perspective. In the final part of the homo sacer series, his main aim is to write a genealogy of economic power as a profane power form that emerged from theological roots (Citation2011: xi-xiii, 110). Here, his references to Foucauldian governmentality are indeed affirmative. At the same time, the references are sporadic and basically interested in the genealogical aspect—highlighting that Foucault has failed to formulate the genealogy of governmentality in a convincing manner (Citation2011, 109–112).
21 Following Dillon and Reid, one could even argue that the self-perception of liberal warfare consists in the permanence of friendly fire in that every liberal war in its entirety is seen and becomes justified as a highly deplorable, but unavoidably necessity.
23 This article’s focus on governmentality-oriented security studies in IR and on the understanding and role of sovereignty in governmentality research is a thematic one. While being deliberately restricted to depicting the relation between these two security perspectives, this by no means implies a claim to a universal approach to security. It goes without saying that there are various approaches in international security studies that challenge traditional perceptions of sovereignty and security on many different theoretical backgrounds, like—to name just three prominent research streams—securitization research (see still Buzan et al Citation1998), critical security studies (see Booth Citation2005), and current approaches to ontological security (Delehanty and Steele Citation2009; Ejdus Citation2017). For a broad overview see Buzan and Hansen (Citation2009).
24 Because of this contrasting conceptualization of sovereignty and governmentality in Foucault’s thinking, both Dean as well as Dillon and Reid position their approaches to relating sovereign power with governmental power and security in parts “contra Foucault” (Dean Citation2013, 87, original emphasis) and “Contra Foucault, somewhat” (Dillon and Reid Citation2009, 93, original emphasis), respectively.
25 See Vasilache (Citation2007) for a discussion of the constitution and understanding of sovereign power in social contract theory. See Marciniak’s book on political security (Citation2015, chapter 1-2) for a thorough historical and genealogical reconstruction of the traditional concept of sovereign security.
26 In epistemological terms, it is important to underline that the inexistence of a thing cannot be proved, but just observed.
29 Tagma, Kalaycioglu, and Akcali put this forward with regard to policies of a governmental reshaping of Egypt after the Arab Spring.
30 Having said this, governmentality seems to be a perspective mainly suitable for foreign and national security policy analysis. Indeed, most governmental approaches in international security studies put their focus on analysing the foreign and security behaviour of states—very often or even mainly of the US (see for instance de Larrinaga and Doucet Citation2010b; Evans Citation2010; Grondin Citation2010; Jabri Citation2006; Kienscherf Citation2011; Kiersey Citation2010; Selby Citation2007; Vasilache Citation2014). Indeed, the particular added value of governmentality studies seems to lie in analysing the governmental framing of national foreign and security policies. But at the same time, such a focus—in conceptual and analytical terms—implies that the governmentality lens is a perspective for foreign and security policy analysis rather than really being targeted at understanding the international in its relational sense and without a specific national foreign policy focus. The main problem is, however, not about disciplinary distinctions between IR and foreign policy studies—in particular since the theory of governmentality, as Foucauldian thinking in general, is not concerned with the establishment or safeguarding of disciplinary boundaries, but with their transgression.
31 With regard to the empirical examples in this chapter, it would of course be interesting to follow up a detailed discussion on the question of agency. Although in this article I will have to content myself with tracing characteristics of sovereign and/or governmental rationalities in the different illustrative examples, briefly highlighting the issue of agency is nonetheless necessary. Not only in Foucault’s thinking, but in poststructuralist and (de-) constructivist philosophy in general, the critique of an essentialist idea of (primordial) subjectivity has also put into question the possibility of agency. However, rejecting a traditional, essentialist understanding of subjectivity does not exclude the possibility of agency. As Butler (Citation1991, 212) has highlighted, the subjects that are constituted through discourses and power technologies have to be seen as intelligible. While they cannot be understood as primordial or external to their discursive shaping, they are in no way purely passive constructs, but have actor-quality. Subjects are discursively constituted, but they are constituted as subjects, not as mere objects. This does not only not impede agency, but in fact constitutes and enables it, including the ability of subjects to actively participate in their own and in other subject’s subjectivation. Thus, it is important to keep in mind, first, that foreign policy actors or governments should be understood as neither primordial to, nor outside of, subjectivation processes and, second, that the discursive constitution of their subjectivities and subject positions allows for political agency in a non-essentialist, not primordial, and not pre-discursive sense. Thus, assuming the possibility of agency is not just a pragmatic necessity when discussing benefits and limits of governmentality theory in empirical, case-oriented research. Much more, already in theoretical terms, agency is not a contradiction to subjectivation processes, but rather one of its outcomes. See on this in more detail Flügel-Martinsen et al (Citation2018, 22).
32 In her insightful study of UN peacekeeping and democratization operations in Haiti and Croatia, Zanotti highlights that international security policy is increasingly shaped by “biopolitical activities of population management” and points out that “[g]overnment performance is no longer only a benchmark of normalization but also a condition for exercising the right to full sovereignty.” She concludes that “[i]n the post–Cold War era, normalization, democratization, security, and the use of force to govern abnormality converge in prodemocracy peacekeeping” (Citation2011, 19-20, original emphases, see also 69-70). In contrast, mere support for, or even long-term safeguarding of, authoritarian political systems and governments by liberal states for their own ends can hardly be seen as an expression of governmentality.
33 This includes the outcomes of the strong ethnic as well as religious bias of the Iraqi government.
35 In February 2016, “Kaesong Industrial Park” was closed because of rising tensions between the North and the South resulting from Pyongyang’s preceding nuclear, missile, and satellite tests. In the light of the 2018 rapprochement between North and South Korea, there have recently been signs of a possible reopening of the industrial park.
36 As further examples that hint at an instrumental application of governmental measures for sovereign purposes, one could name South Korea’s commitment regarding the “Mount Kumgang Tourist Region” in the North—as well as various worldwide cases of mitigating direct state-to-state confrontations through sports or cultural diplomacy.
37 A devaluation of sovereign power to a mere instrument is implied also when the governmentality-sovereignty-relation is framed as a micro-macro-distinction, differentiating between a Foucauldian micro-level and a sovereign macro-level of power (see Jessop Citation2007; Citation2011). Indeed, it is both important and convincing to highlight that governmentality needs the state. Nevertheless, the differentiation suggested by Jessop does not work out since, on the one hand, governmental power is a broad, inclusive and, hence, also macro-oriented strategy that, on the other hand, also relies on repressive, juridical, and sovereign measures on the micro-level. In fact, Foucault himself has been criticized by many authors for not sufficiently taking into account the necessity of juridical and repressive micro-techniques for and within his understanding of power. See e.g. Brunnett and Gräfe (Citation2003) as well as, with additional references, Vasilache (Citation2011a, 9).
38 A theoretical fusion as well as an instrumental relation between sovereignty and governmentality is also suggested in Butler’s notion of “petty sovereigns” (Citation2006, 65-66). In her conceptual merger of sovereign and governmental power, she concentrates on the status and behaviour of individual state representatives as “designated sovereigns” (Citation2006, 65) that have to be considered as “a potentially permanent feature of political life in the US” (Citation2006, 67), but does not address the international security level.
40 It shall be understood that ideal types are—like all concepts or terms—discursive constructions, too. Ideal types consist in the deliberate condensation of concepts or terms for the purpose of analytical use and deployment. They do not per se bear essentialist implications and should not be charged in an essentialist manner.
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