Review: 'Global Governmentality: Governing international
spaces'
Wendy Larner and William Walters
(eds.),
Global Governmentality: Governing
international spaces (London: Routledge, 2004,
261 pp., no price given).
Reviewed by Nicholas Kiersey
With the publication of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, many scholars of international studies have found a new interest in Foucault’s theories of biopolitics and governmentality. However, this interest has yet to yield substantive debate within the discipline. Global Governmentality, a new edited volume of twelve essays, represents a noteworthy effort to rectify this situation.
Reviewed by Nicholas Kiersey
With the publication of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, many scholars of international studies have found a new interest in Foucault’s theories of biopolitics and governmentality. However, this interest has yet to yield substantive debate within the discipline. Global Governmentality, a new edited volume of twelve essays, represents a noteworthy effort to rectify this situation.
The book explores its topic in two sections. Part
I (Chapters 1-4) engages with global governmentality from a theoretical
perspective, noting how shifting discourses on danger create the possibilities
for new expressions of disciplinary power. Part II (Chapters 5-12) focuses on a
selection of practical dimensions of global governmentality, providing a degree
of the empirical substance found lacking by many in the more prose-driven
approach adopted by Hardt and
Negri.
The essays in the first part of the book are linked by a common concern with the persistence of disciplinary power in the foreign policies of liberal governments. Of course, the significance of governmentality is traditionally thought to stem from its ability to ‘govern through freedom’. Yet, as Hindess notes in Chapter 1, the government of subjugated peoples in the age of classical imperialism was often shaped by a perceived need for coercive rule. This perception stemmed not from liberal hypocrisy but from liberalism’s fundamental preoccupation with “the question of what can be sensibly governed through the promotion of appropriate forms of freedom and what must be governed in other ways” (32).
Today, the developmental discourses that informed classical imperialism are being displaced by neoliberal understandings of the human species. However, as Dillon (Chapter 4) notes, these new understandings also come with their own anxieties. While liberalism today refuses to target specific races as immutably different or essentially dangerous, it struggles instead to comprehend the potential for danger within the species itself, construed as a fluid and dynamic referent object. This point is developed by Dean in Chapter 2, who notes how the pervasiveness of ontologically nonspecific enemies has ruptured the very logic upon which the European Law of Nations was founded, replacing it with a world order based on a logic of “international civil war” (p. 52). This is a vision of world order then in which human practice plays a central role. Indeed, as Kendal (Chapter 3) argues, global governmentality is constituted by a multiplicity of networks, each an assemblage in the Deleuzian sense, produced through practices of language, ideas, and material. And it is this concern with practice that differentiates governmentality from those more totalizing or ‘grand theory’ approaches concerned with globalization, network or risk society.
This last point provides the common thread of the more empirical works presented in Part II. In Chapter 12, for example, Valverde and Mopas examine the global proliferation of private agencies in law enforcement processes. This shift is significant, they argue, not because it implies a decrease in state sovereignty or evidence of ‘globalization’ but because it suggests the emergence of a new regime of disciplinary power based on the logic of risk management. In Chapter 11, Larner and Le Heron explore some implications of this development, noting the general extension of corporate calculative benchmarking and audit practices into economic and social life. The increasing use of such techniques is significant, they suggest, because of their capacity to render completely disparate spaces ontologically commensurable and thus capable of being differentiated within the ‘global’ in terms of standards of ‘best practice’.
The turn to risk management also has implications for self-governance. As Barry notes in Chapter 10, the rise of the audit as an instrument of “ethicalization of business” (p. 195) can be interpreted as a strengthening of governmental ability to rule ‘at a distance’. Similarly, Rojas (Chapter 5) suggests that in the wake of the ostensible failure of structural reform approaches to development in the late 1990s, poverty has come to be viewed as a problem immanent to the will of the poor themselves. Likewise, in Chapter 6, Lui examines the definition of refugees as subjects lacking capacities of self-sufficiency. In both these cases, intervention is justified to the extent that it promotes the subject’s sense of ‘ownership’ over their own reform programs.
Of course, neo-liberal governmentality does not always have things its way. Places are messy and not always amenable to being ordered. Ò Tuathail and Dahlman explore just this point in Chapter 7, using the case of the war in Bosnia to see how different mentalities of government can compete with each other at different scales for power. Two other chapters in the book usefully demonstrate the diverse scalar possibilities of governmentality as they relate to European integration. Walters (Chapter 8) draws a contrast between the discourse inherent in the writings of such mavens of European integration as Ernst Haas and discourses of contemporary globalization in order to suggest a diminishing faith in the twin notions of modernity and progress. Dale develops this point in Chapter 9, noting at how this passage has informed the creation of the EU’s Open Method of Coordination.
While a reader seeking either an introduction to Foucault’s theory of governmentality or even a broad guide to the impact of poststructural thinking on IR theory would be advised to give Global Governmentality a wide berth, it must be said that the book is an invaluable resource for those interested in exploring the diverse ways in which governmentality can be applied beyond the domestic sphere. As debate over the applicability of Foucauldian theories of governance to world politics gathers, this book will no doubt come to achieve significant bibliographic recognition.
Technorati tags:
Foucault
governmentality
The essays in the first part of the book are linked by a common concern with the persistence of disciplinary power in the foreign policies of liberal governments. Of course, the significance of governmentality is traditionally thought to stem from its ability to ‘govern through freedom’. Yet, as Hindess notes in Chapter 1, the government of subjugated peoples in the age of classical imperialism was often shaped by a perceived need for coercive rule. This perception stemmed not from liberal hypocrisy but from liberalism’s fundamental preoccupation with “the question of what can be sensibly governed through the promotion of appropriate forms of freedom and what must be governed in other ways” (32).
Today, the developmental discourses that informed classical imperialism are being displaced by neoliberal understandings of the human species. However, as Dillon (Chapter 4) notes, these new understandings also come with their own anxieties. While liberalism today refuses to target specific races as immutably different or essentially dangerous, it struggles instead to comprehend the potential for danger within the species itself, construed as a fluid and dynamic referent object. This point is developed by Dean in Chapter 2, who notes how the pervasiveness of ontologically nonspecific enemies has ruptured the very logic upon which the European Law of Nations was founded, replacing it with a world order based on a logic of “international civil war” (p. 52). This is a vision of world order then in which human practice plays a central role. Indeed, as Kendal (Chapter 3) argues, global governmentality is constituted by a multiplicity of networks, each an assemblage in the Deleuzian sense, produced through practices of language, ideas, and material. And it is this concern with practice that differentiates governmentality from those more totalizing or ‘grand theory’ approaches concerned with globalization, network or risk society.
This last point provides the common thread of the more empirical works presented in Part II. In Chapter 12, for example, Valverde and Mopas examine the global proliferation of private agencies in law enforcement processes. This shift is significant, they argue, not because it implies a decrease in state sovereignty or evidence of ‘globalization’ but because it suggests the emergence of a new regime of disciplinary power based on the logic of risk management. In Chapter 11, Larner and Le Heron explore some implications of this development, noting the general extension of corporate calculative benchmarking and audit practices into economic and social life. The increasing use of such techniques is significant, they suggest, because of their capacity to render completely disparate spaces ontologically commensurable and thus capable of being differentiated within the ‘global’ in terms of standards of ‘best practice’.
The turn to risk management also has implications for self-governance. As Barry notes in Chapter 10, the rise of the audit as an instrument of “ethicalization of business” (p. 195) can be interpreted as a strengthening of governmental ability to rule ‘at a distance’. Similarly, Rojas (Chapter 5) suggests that in the wake of the ostensible failure of structural reform approaches to development in the late 1990s, poverty has come to be viewed as a problem immanent to the will of the poor themselves. Likewise, in Chapter 6, Lui examines the definition of refugees as subjects lacking capacities of self-sufficiency. In both these cases, intervention is justified to the extent that it promotes the subject’s sense of ‘ownership’ over their own reform programs.
Of course, neo-liberal governmentality does not always have things its way. Places are messy and not always amenable to being ordered. Ò Tuathail and Dahlman explore just this point in Chapter 7, using the case of the war in Bosnia to see how different mentalities of government can compete with each other at different scales for power. Two other chapters in the book usefully demonstrate the diverse scalar possibilities of governmentality as they relate to European integration. Walters (Chapter 8) draws a contrast between the discourse inherent in the writings of such mavens of European integration as Ernst Haas and discourses of contemporary globalization in order to suggest a diminishing faith in the twin notions of modernity and progress. Dale develops this point in Chapter 9, noting at how this passage has informed the creation of the EU’s Open Method of Coordination.
While a reader seeking either an introduction to Foucault’s theory of governmentality or even a broad guide to the impact of poststructural thinking on IR theory would be advised to give Global Governmentality a wide berth, it must be said that the book is an invaluable resource for those interested in exploring the diverse ways in which governmentality can be applied beyond the domestic sphere. As debate over the applicability of Foucauldian theories of governance to world politics gathers, this book will no doubt come to achieve significant bibliographic recognition.
Technorati tags:
Foucault
governmentality
Posted: Tue - January 25, 2005 at 11:36 PM
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