Engaging Foucault: Discourse, liberal governance and the limits of Foucauldian IR

International Relations

Volumn 21, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 324-345

  Selby, Jan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Bio politics; Discourse; Foucault; Governance; Governmentality; Marxism; Poststructuralism

Indexed keywords

EID: 34548175997     PISSN: 00471178     EISSN: 17412862     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0047117807080199     Document Type: Article

References (104)

1. An earlier draft of this article was presented at the annual convention of the International Studies Association, Montreal, 17-20 March 2004. Thanks to Jonathan Joseph, Nicholas Kiersey, Julian Reid, Julian Saurin, Colin Wight, Peter Wilkin, the editors of International Relations, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
2. Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 45-6.
3. Randall Germain and Michael Kenny, 'Engaging Gramsci: International Relations Theory and the New Gramscians', Review of International Studies, 24, 1998, pp. 3-21.
4. Ronen Palan, 'A World of their Making: An Evaluation of the Constructivist Critique in International Relations', Review of International Studies, 26(4), 2000, pp. 575-98.
5. Beatte Jahn, 'One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Critical Theory as the Latest Edition of Liberal Idealism', Millennium, 27(3), 1998, pp. 613-41.
6. Overviews stressing the influence of Foucault include Steve Smith and Patricia Owens, 'Alternative Approaches to International Theory', in John Baylis and Steve Smith (eds), The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 271-93; Richard Devetak, 'Postmodernism', in Scott Burchill and Andrew Linklater (eds), Theories of International Relations, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 181-208; James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro (eds), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, MA: Lexington, 1989); Jenny Edkins, Post-structuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999); Kimberley Hutchings, International Political Theory: Rethinking Ethics in a Global Era (London: Sage, 1999); and Richard Ashley, 'The Achievements of Post-structuralism', in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 240-53.
7. See footnotes 94-101 below.
8. R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 23.
9. Richard Ashley, 'The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space: Toward a Critical Social Theory of International Politics', Alternatives, 12(4), 1987, pp. 403-34; Richard Ashley, 'Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique', Millennium, 17(2), 1990, pp. 227-62; Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker, 'Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty in International Relations', International Studies Quarterly, 34(3), 1990, pp. 376-416; Ashley, 'The Achievements of Post-structuralism'.
10. Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994), pp. 191, 224, 104, 207.
11. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 162.
12. See, for example, David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 19; and Jenny Edkins, Whose Hunger? Concepts of Hunger, Practices of Aid (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2000), p. xix.
13. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Tavistock, 1967).
14. Michel Foucault, The Biof the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London: Tavistock, 1973).
15. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
16. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978); vol. II: The Use of Pleasure (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1986); vol. III: The Care of the Self (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1988).
17. Michel Foucault, 'Governmentality', I & C, 6, 1979, pp. 5-21.
18. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980).
19. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge.
20. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1974).
21. Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983).
22. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 195-228.
23. Jacques Derrida, 'Sending: On Representation', Social Research, 49, 1982, p. 304; Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 106.
24. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158.
25. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 114.
26. Michel Foucault, Essential Works, vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 416.
27. Foucault, Essential Works, p. 416.
28. James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro (eds), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, MA: Lexington, 1989).
29. Michel Foucault, 'Space, Knowledge and Power', in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 252.
30. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 102.
31. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, pt. 5; and Foucault, 'Governmentality'.
32. Walker, Inside/Outside, p. 25.
33. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 121.
34. As Walker tacitly recognises: Inside/Outside, p. 25.
35. Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
36. Bartelson, Genealogy, p. 18.
37. Bartelson, Genealogy, p. 8.
38. Bartelson, Genealogy, p. 12.
39. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 130; Weber, Simulating Sovereignty, p.
40. Weber, Simulating Sovereignty, p. 123.
41. For an extended critique see Jan Selby, 'Water, Power and Politics in the Middle East: An International Theoretical Analysis of the Palestinian Water Crisis' (PhD thesis, Lancaster University, 2000), chapter 1.
42. Weber, Simulating Sovereignty, p. 29.
43. Weber, Simulating Sovereignty, p. 80.
44. Ashley and Walker, 'Reading Dissidence', p. 381.
45. Kimberley Hutchings, 'Foucault and International Relations Theory', in Moya Lloyd and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Impact of Michel Foucault in the Social Sciences and Humanities (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 102.
46. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
47. Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1.
48. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 26, 139.
49. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991); Andrew Barry, Thomas Osbourne and Nicolas Rose (eds), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government (London: UCL Press, 1996).
50. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 4.
51. Michel Foucault, 'Afterword: The Subject and Power', in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), pp. 220-1.
52. Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 83.
53. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation; Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
54. Foucault, History of Sexuality, vols. II and III.
55. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 31.
56. Foucault, History of Sexuality; Michel Foucault, 'Society Must Be Defended', in Essential Works, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 59-65. Foucault did of course use the language of 'war' frequently in his analyses, reflecting his Nietzschean understanding of conflict and power struggles as lying at the heart of the social process. But this is quite distinct from a focus on war understood as physical coercion in its classic military, inter-state (or even civil) sense, on which Foucault said very little.
57. See, classically, Martin Wight, 'Why Is There No International Theory?' in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), pp. 17-34.
58. David Campbell's work provides a good example of this, since, while he claims to be inspired by Foucault above all (Writing Security, p. viii), his analyses, illuminating as they often are, concentrate exclusively on 'narratives' and the 'writing' of foreign policy. As Mark Laffey writes in critique, Campbell gives undue privilege to 'the social logic of signification', and neglects to analyse the ways in which signifying practices become materialised and sedimented within 'a landscape of institutions, apparatuses, and social relations': Mark Laffey, 'Locating Identity: Performativity, Foreign Policy and State Action', Review of International Studies, 26, 2000, pp. 444, 441.
59. James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Blackwell: 1987).
60. James Keeley, 'Toward a Foucauldian Analysis of International Regimes', International Organization, 44, 1990, pp. 83-105.
61. See, for instance, Arturo Escobar, 'Discourse and Power in Development: Michel Foucault and the Relevance of his Work to the Third World', Alternatives, 10(3), 1984, pp. 377-400; Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Marc DuBois, 'The Governance of the Third World: A Foucauldian Perspective on Power Relations in Development', Alternatives, 16, 1991, pp. 1-30; Morgan Brigg, 'Post-development, Foucault and the Colonisation Metaphor', Third World Quarterly, 23(3), 2002, pp. 421-36; James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: 'Development', Depoliticisation, and Bureaucratic State Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Edkins, Whose Hunger?
62. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, pt. 5.
63. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), p. 99.
64. Foucault, 'Governmentality', p. 20.
65. Foucault, 'Governmentality', p. 19.
66. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 40; see also pp. 22-3.
67. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, 'Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War', Millennium, 30(1), 2001, pp. 41-65; Michael Dillon, 'Global Liberal Governance: Networks, Resistance and War', in Feargal Cochrane, Rosaleen Duffy and Jan Selby (eds), Global Governance, Conflict and Resistance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 25-6. See also Michael Dillon, 'Sovereignty and Governmentality: From the Problematics of the "New World Order" to the Ethical Problematic of World Order', Alternatives, 20(3), 1995, pp. 323-68; Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, 'Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency', Alternatives, 25(1), 2000, pp. 117-43; Michael Dillon, 'Culture, Governance and Global Biopolitics', in F. Debrix and C. Weber (eds), Rituals of Mediation (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2003).
68. Wendy Larner and William Walters (eds), Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge, 2004).
69. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 167.
70. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 14.
71. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 39, 181.
72. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 180.
73. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. xiii-xiv.
74. A similar point is made by Alex Callinicos, 'Marxism and Global Governance', in David Held and Anthony McGrew (eds), Governing Globalization: Power, Authority and Global Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), pp. 249-66.
75. Dillon and Reid, 'Global Liberal Governance', pp. 44-5.
76. Dillon, 'Networks, Resistance and War', pp. 25-6.
77. Dillon, 'Networks', p. 26.
78. Michael Hardt, 'Folly of our Masters of the Universe', The Guardian, 18 December 2002.
79. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. xiv.
80. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 20, 31.
81. Michel Foucault, 'Afterword: The Subject and Power', in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), pp. 216-17.
82. For Marxist critiques of this idealisation, see especially Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994); and Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1948: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003).
83. Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, 'Retrieving the Imperial: Empire and International Relations', Millennium, 31(1), 2002, pp. 109-27.
84. Robert Cox, 'Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory', Millennium, 10(2), 1981, pp. 126-55.
85. Julian Saurin, 'International Relations as the Imperial Illusion; or, The Need to Decolonise IR', in Branwen Gruffyd Jones, Decolonizing International Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), pp. 23-42.
86. Karl Marx, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1968), p. 64; Saurin, 'International Relations as the Imperial Illusion', p. 30.
87. Walker, Inside/Outside; Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society.
88. Der Derian, On Diplomacy, p. 83.
89. I say Foucault is 'for the most part' Nietzschean in emphasis because his work can also be interpreted as a radicalisation of the Kantian Enlightenment tradition. Foucault himself interprets his work this way in 'What is Enlightenment?' in The Foucault Reader. Moreover, his claim that 'if I had been familiar with the Frankfurt School... I would not have said a number of the stupid things that I did say' also points to the convergences between Foucault and the radical Enlightenment, and specifically Marxist traditions: Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 26. I explore Foucault's Nietzscheanism in relation to the work of Edward Said in Jan Selby, 'Edward Said: Justice, Truth and Nationalism', Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 8(1), 2006, pp. 40-55.
90. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 122.
91. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 105.
92. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 99.
93. Richard Marsden, The Nature of Capital: Marx after Foucault (London: Routledge, 1999).
94. Jan Selby, Water, Power and Politics in the Middle East: The Other Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003).
95. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left, 1978).
96. Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place (Cambridge: Polity, 1990).
97. Barry Smart, Foucault, Marxism and Critique (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
98. Tony Woodiwiss, Social Theory after Postmodernism: Rethinking Production, Law and Class (London: Pluto, 1990); Tony Woodiwiss, The Visual in Social Theory (London: Athlone, 2001).
99. Marsden, The Nature of Capital.
100. Jonathan Joseph, 'Foucault and Reality', Capital and Class, 82, 2004, pp. 143-60.
101. Nancy Fraser, 'Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions', Praxis International, 1(3), 1981, pp. 272-87.
102. Nancy Fraser, 'From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization', Constellations, 10(2), 2003, p. 166.
103. As Thomas Lenke argues in an excellent reply to Fraser: 'Comment on Nancy Fraser: Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization', Constellations, 10(2), June 2003, pp. 172-9.
104. See, for instance, Stephen Gill, 'Globalisation, Market Civilisation, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism', Millennium, 24(3), 1995, pp. 399-423; Stephen Gill, 'The Global Panopticon? The Neoliberal State, Economic Life, and Democratic Surveillance', Alternatives, 20(1), 1995, pp. 1-49.