Governmentality of What? Populations, States and International Organisations

Abstract

As more work on governmentality appears in International Relations (IR), it is time to take stock and deal with a few questions. In social theory, the governmentality approach has mainly addressed “advanced liberal” societies and can be defined as having the health, wealth and well-being of populations as its target and governance from a distance through the “conduct of conduct” as its means of operating. There are two major problems in transferring governmentality to IR. First, not all societies can be described as “advanced liberal” ones. Second is the problem of whether there is such a thing as “global governmentality”. This article argues that the lack of the necessary social conditions does indeed make it difficult to apply the technologies of governmentality to various parts of the world. However, the aim of international organisations might be less the regulation of populations as the application of governmentality to states.

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 108.

2. See the chapters by Jacques Donzelot and François Ewald in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

3. Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

4. Pat O'Malley, “Risk, Power and Crime Prevention”, Economy and Society, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1992), pp. 252–275.

5. Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, The Power of Psychiatry (Cambridge: Polity, 1986); Thomas Osborne, “Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and the Liberal Profession of Medicine”, Economy and Society, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 345–356.

6. The term “advanced liberalism” is used by Miller and Rose to characterise those societies with such things as multiple social technologies, new specification of the subject of governance and a new relation between expertise and politics. Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, Governing the Present (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), pp. 18, 212–213. They prefer to talk of “advanced liberalism” as a form of governmentality rather than as a type of society. Here the term will be made more ontological to apply to types of societies where this type of governmentality works owing to the particular nature of their capitalist social development and the institutional changes of the last part of the 20th century.

 7. Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 237. This term is not translated in this way in English versions of Foucault.

 8. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 108.

 9. Ibid., p. 96.

10. Ibid., pp. 88, 95, 101.

11. Ibid., p. 353.

12. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), p. 10.

13. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 45.

14. Ibid., p. 108.

15. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), p. 28.

16. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power”, in James D. Faubion (ed.), trans. Robert Horley and others, Power: The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3 (New York: The New Press, 2001), p. 123.

17. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 277.

18. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), p. 157.

19. Ibid., p. 165.

20. Dean, op. cit.; Nikolas Rose, “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies”, in Miller and Rose, Governing the Present, op. cit., pp. 199–218; Graham Burchell, “Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self”, in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds.), Foucault and Political Reason (London: UCL Press, 1996), pp. 19–36.

21. Ibid., p. 155.

22. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 147.

23. Burchell, op. cit., p. 29.

24. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 173.

25. Dean, op. cit., p. 179.

26. For more on this see Jonathan Joseph, “Globalization and Governmentality”, International Politics, Vol. 43, No. 3 (2006), pp. 402–418.

29. Ibid., p. 209.

32. Abrahamsen and Williams, “Security Sector Reform”, op. cit., p. 19.

27. Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams, “Introduction: The Privatisation and Globalisation of Security in Africa”, International Relations, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2007), p. 132.

28. Anna Leander and Rens van Munster, “Private Security Contractors in the Debate about Darfur: Reflecting and Reinforcing Neo-liberal Governmentality”, International Relations, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2007), p. 202.

30. For example, Abrahamsen and Williams look at private security in Kenya arguing that: “Despite its size and significance, the private security sector in Kenya is entirely unregulated and little or no attention has been paid to its role and functions. There is no specific legislation or regulation pertaining to private security companies, and no oversight or monitoring of their practices, services, and training. No special license is needed to open a security company, and it is a common complaint in the sector that it is as easy to start a security company as it is to open an ice cream kiosk. Moreover, the vast majority of security companies are not registered at all. Accordingly, the quality of companies and their services vary considerably, and there are concerns that private security companies (like the police) may, or have already, become a source of insecurity. There are frequent accounts of security guards colluding with criminal individuals and gangs in robbing their clients, although the absence of statistics makes the extent of this impossible to establish. What remains the case is that the absence of any government regulation and oversight provides no provisions for imposing sanctions, penalties or closing companies that engage in unlawful or unprofessional activities” (Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams, “Security Sector Reform: Bringing the Private In”, Conflict, Security & Development, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2006), p. 15).

31. See Benoît Dupont, “Security in the Age of Networks”, Policing & Society, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2004), pp. 76–91.

33. World Bank, World Development Report: Building Institutions for Markets (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 36.

34. Ole Jacob Sending and Ivor B. Neumann, “Governance to Governmentality: Analyzing NGOs, States, and Power”, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2006), p. 658.

35. David Chandler, Empire in Denial (London: Pluto, 2006); Paul Cammack, “What the World Bank Means by Poverty Reduction and Why it Matters”, New Political Economy, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2004), pp. 189–212; Ray Kiely, “Poverty Reduction through Liberalisation? Neoliberalism and the Myth of Global Convergence”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2007), pp. 415–434.

36. Chandler, Empire in Denial, op. cit., p. 77.

37. Ben Fine, “Neither the Washington nor the Post-Washington Consensus: An Introduction”, in Ben Fine, Costas Lapavitsas and Jonathan Pincus (eds.), Development Policy in the Twenty First Century: Beyond the Post-Washington Consensus (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 12.

38. Miller and Rose, Governing the Present, op. cit., p. 15.

39. International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 1997), p. 72.

40. Kiely, “Poverty Reduction through Liberalisation?”, op. cit., p. 434.

41. World Bank Development Report, Building Institutions for Markets (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 99.

42. Cammack, op. cit., p. 204.

43. Mark Duffield, “Social Reconstruction and the Radicalization of Development: Aid as a Relation of Global Liberal Governance”, Development and Change, Vol. 44, No. 5 (2002), p. 1066.

44. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 121.

45. Jacqueline Best, “Why the Economy is Often the Exception to Politics as Usual”, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2007), p. 102.

46. Tore Fougner, “Corporate Power in World Politics: The Case of the World Economic Forum”, Journal of International Trade and Diplomacy, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2008), p. 118.

47. Tore Fougner, “Neoliberal Governance of States: The Role of Competitiveness Indexing and Country Benchmarking”, Millennium, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2008), p. 308. Fougner goes on to talk of this in relation to benchmarking: “First, given its provision of ‘an external frame of reference explicitly linked to concerns about competitiveness’, benchmarking constitutes states as competitive entities driven not by internal socio-political processes, but rather by external or global standards of conduct. Second, given the importance ascribed to quantitative measures and comparisons of performance, benchmarking constitutes states as calculative agencies, or entities with a capacity to calculate and rank alternative courses of action. Third, given the overriding concern with implementing ‘best practice’, benchmarking constitutes states as technocratic agencies acting in accordance with expert determination of what works best. Fourth, given the centrality of change and continuous improvement—as a consequence of how standards or ‘best practices’ undergo continuous change—benchmarking constitutes states as transformative agencies, or entities engaged in a never-ending process of reinventing themselves” (ibid., p. 319).

49. Michael Merlingen, “Governmentality: Towards a Foucauldian Framework for the Study of IGOs”, Cooperation and Conflict, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2003), p. 368.

48. Laura Zanotti, “Governmentalizing the Post-Cold War International Regime: The UN Debate on Democratization and Good Governance”, Alternatives, Vol. 30, No. 4 (2005), p. 479.

50. Biopower includes the notions of biopolitics—concerned with populations—and anatomopolitics—concerned with individuals.

51. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., pp. 317–318.

52. Ibid., p. 317.

53. Zanotti, op. cit., p. 480.

54. Ibid.

55. That many Foucauldians do not develop a critical approach to the actual expressions of governmentality can be attributed to their refusal to engage with deeper underlying social relations. As Zanotti says of her approach: “Instead of asking under which conditions and through what kind of interventions democratization can best be achieved, it uses the tools developed by Foucaultian studies on government to explore the conditions of emergence of good governance as the UN political rational [sic], the mechanisms of government it promotes, and the political effects it produces” (ibid., p. 462). This is a good example of the tendency to give priority to an analysis of the rationality of governmentality rather than the social conditions within which it operates. Larner and Walters are even more explicit: “What we have called global governmentality entails a move of ‘bracketing’ the world of underlying forces and causes, and instead examining the different ways in which the real has been inscribed in thought” (Wendy Larner and William Walters, “Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces”, in Wendy Larner and William Walters (eds.), Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 16). For a scientific realist account of underlying causal relations see Jonathan Joseph, “Foucault and Reality”, Capital & Class, Vol. 82, No. 2 (2004), pp. 141–163.

56. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 109.

57. Enthusiastically embraced by Alexander Wendt, “The State as Person in International Theory”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2004), pp. 289–316.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Joseph

The author would like to thank Ruth Blakeley, Nicholas Kiersey and Jan Selby for their comments.