1,721,023 research outputs found
”Governmentality” in world politics
No full textIn this chapter I take a look at how actors in the international system (including states) as well as the things they try to govern are shaped in the first place. The French thinker Michel Foucault coined a new term – governmentality – to try to capture the ways that not just ideas but bodies of knowledge (savoirs) and technologies of governing provide frameworks (or ‘book-ends’) for behaviour and governing within a society. These ideas have recently been applied to relations between polities. The idea is to uncover how such frameworks for understanding and action operate in the international sphere. The chapter proceeds as follows:Section 1 presents a brief account of a shift in frameworks of governing that began to take place from around the seventeenth century. As new knowledge-based tools of statecraft such as statistics began to be increasingly utilised, the basic focus of governing shifted from dominating territory towards a new aim of governing populations and their lives. From this account, I draw out some basic characteristics of ‘governmentalities’.Section 2 looks at how governmentalities operated in more recent times and analyses frameworks guiding the politics of development since the 1980s. You will read about the neo-liberal agenda of privatisation, financial liberalisation and the promotion of markets known collectively as ‘the Washington Consensus’. The politics of development illustrates that governmentalities – even ones based on ideas about freedom – are never neutral bodies of knowledge but always expressions of power and therefore often significant political battlegrounds themselves.Section 3 considers whether a rival ‘Beijing Consensus’ is emerging around the Chinese model of development, offering a distinct approach to interacting with developing countries. This underscores the idea that even dominant governmentalities are always in competition with others.Section 4 offers some reflections on the idea of a ‘global governmentality’ and how it affects not just the actors in international politics and their identities but also objects of governance in international relations
When it all kicks off:revolution, social protest and networks in international politics
No full textIn this chapter we take a closer look at disruptive events and moments of major and often unexpected political change and their relationship to change at the international level. Revolutions, social protest and new forms of political activism are both products of complex uneven international changes and contribute to those changes
Displacing the Anthropocene: Colonisation, extinction and the unruliness of nature in Palestine
Full text linkRecent ‘Anthropocene’ commentaries have argued that as humans have become decisively entangled in natural systems, they collectively became a geological species-agent potentially becoming aware of its own place in the deep history of planetary time. Through this, the argument goes, a pre-political collective consciousness could emerge, paving the way for a progressive construction of a common world, beyond particularistic justice-claims. The reverse case is made in scholarship of settler colonialism: the Anthropocene is rooted in histories of settler colonial violence and is deeply tied up with the dispossession and ‘extinction’ of Indigenous life-worlds. In this article, we foreground nature–human entanglement as crucial for understanding the operations but also the instability of settler colonialism in Palestine. We suggest that fractures and openings become legible when paying attention to the ‘afterlife’ of nature that was erased due to its enmeshment with Indigenous people. We provide a historical and ethnographic account of past and emerging entanglements between Palestinians refugees and their nature, ultimately arguing that indigeneity is recalcitrant to obliteration. With that in mind, we return to the Anthropocene’s focus on universal human extinction and ethical consciousness by critically engaging with it from the standpoint of colonised and displaced Indigenous populations, like the Palestinian refugees. We conclude by arguing that only when the profoundly unequal access to Life entrenched in settler colonialism is foregrounded and addressed, does a real possibility of recognising any common, global vulnerability that the species faces emerge
International Relations as if the Earth mattered
No full textThis book set out to examine how International Relations has begun to come to terms with the entwinement of social and natural systems. In a sense it is mysterious that this entwinement ever disappeared from view. Natural features of the world were originally the central focus of 19th century thinking about geopolitics (e.g. Mackinder 1904), and world politics is by definition a spatial and geographically located affair. Still, the modern discipline of IR, like many social sciences, almost lost sight of nature, rediscovering it gradually from around the 1960s in the form of ‘environmental problems’. In this concluding chapter, we first summarise the contribution of this volume to IR and the field of Global Environmental Politics. We also draw attention to additional themes and theories that define the field while lying beyond the scope of this volume. We then summarise what we see as the most prominent shifts in the study and practice of international environmental politics over the past two decades. We conclude the book with some reflections on the challenges that remain for the discipline of IR to fully appreciate the implications of the natural world and planetary singularity. <br/
International climate politics between pluralism and solidarism: An English School perspective
No full text
- …
