Contributions are invited for a proposed panel on Foucault and World Politics: Re-thinking Security, Governmentality, & Political Economy to be convened during the International Studies Association Annual Convention in New York, February 15-18, 2009
International Relations (IR) theory is turning increasingly to Michel Foucault’s writings on governmentality and biopolitics for guidance on how to explore the complex discursive interdependencies between the globalization of neoliberal norms of governance and contemporary modalities of war. For some, Foucault is useful precisely because he talks about liberalism as a regime of security, building on his arguments concerning the architectonic role played by the concept of security in the genealogy of nineteenth century liberal government. Theorists following this approach eschew traditional categories of the critique of the imperial state and invite us to think anew about other possible scales and sites of security. For others, however, this is a flawed application of Foucault, prematurely assuming that the practices of governmental power can simply be ‘scaled’ without the interventions of specific state-imperial powers. Simply put, these critics suggest, theories of global biopower lack the historical nuance to recognize the constitutive role of imperialism in the foundation and reproduction of the international system.
This panel seeks to evaluate this emerging debate, and to determine what sort of contribution it makes to IR scholarship. It seeks to explore specifically the following problematic aspects of this literature: a lack of serious engagement with a large body of Foucauldian research in other disciplines, especially anthropology and human geography; a tendency to reproduce intra-disciplinary divisions, especially those that separate political economy from security studies; and a failure to adequately theorize contemporary global capitalism. Papers in the panel will also address the criticism that the understanding of the notion of ‘discourse’ in poststructuralist approaches obscures the workings of structural power and the role of agency in relations of power. While acknowledging that this shortcoming is present in much of Foucauldian IR, the paper argues that this need not be the result of employing a Foucauldian approach to the study of world politics.
Please send 400 word abstracts along with information about your institutional affiliation should by May 28th (final ISA deadline is May 30th).
Panels on this theme will be proposed to ISA under International Political Sociology & International Political Economy.
Submissions should be addressed to either Nicholas Kiersey at njk4y@virginia.edu or Jason Weidner at jweid001@fiu.edu.
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