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For the scholar, Foucaults work represents an act of liberation from complicity with managerial and depoliticizing programmatic epistemes, and an opening up of intellectual entrepreneurship. Of course, to be freed from the set texts of power and governance is then to be paradoxically enslaved by hidden, unknown, and uncertain texts, and knowledge beyond the liberal texts, and indeed any text. This is surely the point of research, on and for, peace if it is to speak at all to power and to help unravel the current paradoxes of the liberal peace. References
Boucher, David. (2006) Property and Propriety in IR. In Classical Theory in IR, edited by Beate Jahn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chandler, David. (2006) Empire in Denial. London: Pluto. Cox, Robert. (1981) Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 10(2): 126155. Foucault, Michel. (1984) History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. (1986) History of Sexuality. Vol. 3: The Care of the Self. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. (1991) Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Gaham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Jabri, Vivienne. (2007) Michel Foucaults Analytics of War: The Social, the International, and the Racial. International Political Sociology 1(1): 6781. Jahn, Beate. (2006) Classical Smoke, Classical Mirror. In Classical Theory in IR, edited by Beate Jahn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plant, Sadie. (1992) The Most Radical Gesture. London: Routledge. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (1988) Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

What Can Governmentality Do for IR?

Jonathan Joseph University of Kent

Two interesting things have happened recently that are relevant for this Forum. One has been the release of Michel Foucaults lectures at the College de France. ` The other is the increasing interest in governmentality among IR scholars. We could talk more generally about the use of Foucault in IR theory, but that is not particularly interesting. Instead this intervention will not only look at the potential that Foucaults work on governmentality offers to IR scholars, but also sound a warning based on how this has so far been done. There is certainly no possibility of being able to make any substantial claims here. Instead, this space allows the opportunity to raise some important questions for those looking to import the idea of governmentality into IR. The release of Foucaults lectures not only adds a lot to our understanding of what is meant by governmentality, but also increases our problems in trying to interpret this work. For one thing, Foucault has specic things to say about neoliberalism. It also becomes clear that the wide scope of Foucaults discussion, combined with the lack of any clear guidelines on how to apply the concept means that we have to decide for ourselves how best to use the idea of governmentality. When reading through Foucaults lectures, there are some crucial points for IR theorists to consider. Most signicant is the difference between a general sense of governmentalty and the specic liberal and neoliberal

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associations that the concept has. A general understanding of governmentality as the rise to prominence of a set of apparatuses that have population as their main target allows Foucault to trace developments from the sixteenth century (Foucault 2007). However, Foucault then talks of the emergence of new forms of governmentality and sets out its specically modern features like the principle of limitation (Foucault 2008:10), frugality of government (2008:29), government as the management of freedom (2008:63), the market economy as a general index for judging government (2008:121), and subjecting society to the dynamic of competition (2008:147), which all give governmentality a more liberal or neoliberal character. This is particularly important for IR because it is by no means clear what can be gained from employing a general concept of governmentality that can be applied to a wide range of situations, especially if this means interpreting the global as one single society rather than as a series of different societies with different social conditions. IR theorists should be interested in looking at the relationship between the dominant dynamics in the international system and the specic conditions in different places. Governmentality theorists in IR have to ask what it is that they want the concept to do. Is it to explain social relations in different countries, or to explain IR between countriesan altogether more difcult task? This would mean arguing that (global) governmentality is a dominant form of power in the international system. Then we have to remember that, for Foucault, governmentality is always part of an axis comprising sovereignty, discipline, and government. Which of these predominates? The uneven, power infused, nature of the international system makes this issue crucial. If governmentality does not work in some parts of the world, does it revert to disciplinary power? As well as this axis of three types of power, there is also the relationship between governmentality and biopower. The two concepts are often applied together, usually with reference to Agambem or Hardt and Negri. But biopower does not necessarily entail the techniques of governing from a distance, through the ideas of freedom, limited government and responsibilized individual conduct. My advice to the governmentality theorists is then: do not try and make it do too much. Distinguish between governmentality in a generic sense and neoliberal forms. Dene clearly how it works. Explain its limits and how it intersects with other processes. In particular, explain how governmentality connects with sovereignty and disciplinary power and how governmentality is to be distinguished from the more general working of biopower. What is it precisely that governmentality brings? Is it the idea of population regulated from a distance through the responsibilization of free conduct? If so, how much of the world can be explained in these terms? Having raised a few conceptual questions, let us look at how governmentality is applied. Above all else, if we are applying it to IR, we need to be clear about what we mean by the international. Leaving aside debates about who are the main actors, we ought to develop a sociological approach that sees the international as an uneven terrain made up of different societies each at different stages of development with different institutional features. This means that we need to consider the specic socio-historical conditions of each country. If the dominant expression of governmentality is the neoliberal one, then it is important to consider the difculties of bringing governmentality to the international given the big differences between the neoliberal centers of governmentality, and the very different social conditions in the rest of the world. Even if international organizations like the IMF wish to impose governmentality on developing counties, can such technologies ever work? The specic character of the international means that it enables combined as well as uneven development; that is to say, it exposes developing states to neoliberal techniques developed elsewhere and allows international organizations to

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impose governmentality on non-neoliberal areas even when highly inappropriate. There are two ways to understand this. The rst is as a variant of the exercise of dominant power in the world system. We could say that global governmentality, combined with more coercive forms of disciplinary power aims not at improving the health, wealth, and well-being of populations but at regulating the behavior of states and their governments. Some governmentality theorists in IR have done this through the idea of global governmentality and good governance. They suggest that governmentality aims at regulating the behavior of states by setting targets, benchmarks, goals, and other means of measuring and responsibilizing state behavior (Merlingen 2003; Fougner 2008; also Joseph 2009). However, this work has not really developed the macro picture to explain why this is being done; only that it reects a particular rationality. To complete the picture we need to turn to those working within more Marxist frameworks such as Chandler (2006) and Kiely (2007) who link the strategies of good governance to the integration of states into networks of external regulation that shift responsibility for development by empowering local actors to do the right thing. Another way of understanding the imposition of good governance practices on developing counties is to say that the actors within the international organizations are so much within their episteme that they are incapable of seeing the world except through a neoliberal lens. To make this argument work, we need to follow Miller and Rose (2008:32) in distinguishing between the rationalities or programmes of government and the technologies of enactment. This allows us to see how international organizations are unable to break from a particular way of seeing things even if this does not work in practice. In terms of power relations, we need to distinguish between the process that leads to the imposition of neoliberal programmes that reect the dominant rationality of advanced liberal societies, and the inappropriateness of these technologies at a local level due to very different social conditions. I conclude, therefore, with the combined questions of governmentalitys necessary conditions of possibility and its social and international limitations. It is impossible for IR theorists to deal with the question of the appropriateness of governmentality either as an explanation or in practice without examining macro questions to do with governmentalitys conditions of possibility. What type of society does it emerge in? What social forces does it involve? How does it relate to economic factors and institutional structure? Not only do many IR governmentality approaches not raise these issues; they often explicitly oppose such questions as ontological or why questions (Walters 2005:157). But governmentality theory does not have to be conned to the surface level of technologies and rationalities. Rather, these can be seen as a middle layer of a wider social ontology that helps explain the complex and contradictory workings of capitalist social relations in the twenty-rst century. Of course one can ask, why try and do so much? But this is no different from asking, why do IR? References
Chandler, David. (2006) Empire in Denial. London: Pluto. Foucault, Michel. (2007) Security, Territory, Population. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fougner, Tore. (2008) Neoliberal Governance of States: The Role of Competitiveness Indexing and Country Benchmarking. Millennium 37(2): 303326. Joseph, Jonathan. (2009) Governmentality of What? Populations, States and International Organisations. Global Society 23(4): 413417. Kiely, Ray. (2007) Poverty Reduction Through Liberalisation? Neoliberalism and the Myth of Global Convergence. Review of International Studies 33(3): 415434.

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Merlingen, Michael. (2003) Governmentality: Towards a Foucauldian Framework for the Study of NGOs. Cooperation and Conict 38(4): 361384. Miller, Peter, and Nikolas Rose. (2008) Governing the Present. Cambridge: Polity. Walters, William. (2005) Political Rationality of European Integration. In Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, edited by Wendy Larner and William Walters. London and New York: Routledge.

Forget Foucault, Forget Foucault, Forget Foucault

David Chandler University of Westminster

It is a mantra, doomed to be repeated. It is not a plea. It is not an injunction. We cannot forget Foucault in the same way as, in another era, Marx could only repeat his distance from Marxists and the defeats of that other era turned Marxism into a dogma. In our era, the transformation of Foucault into the dogmas of Foucaultians and post-Foucaultians cannot be ended by the work of academics; it is not an academic problem. In the same way, the bloating of the discipline of IR, and the boom of dogmatic Foucaultianism within this, have nothing to do with academia per se, but how the world impinges upon and is reected within disciplines, overdetermining the transformation of both what we call IR and what we call political theory and their inter-relationship. As Marxists, it is possible for us to understand how the transformation of Marxist thought into dogma was a necessary reection of the degeneration of the liberatory political project of The Communist Manifesto, and, as Foucaultians, it is possible for us to understand how, in our era, the disciplining or colonizing of Foucault, within IR, is not a contradiction or a puzzle or an occasion for the allocation of blame but is a necessity. Why has IR colonized Foucault so easily, and yet found Marx so indigestible that he has been a constant mystery to the discipline itself? What is it about IR today that facilitates an appropriation of Foucaults epistemological framework in ways which have been much more problematic within political theory (which, of course, had no difculty institutionalizing Marx in the academy)? Foucault tells us the answers (and they are replayed in discussions of the possibility or impossibility of scaling up Foucault in investigations of global governmentalism). IR was not amenable to liberal frameworks because there was no sovereign and no society, no political or legal eld of relationships between government and governed: IR lacked a sovereign. As Foucault states, IR was preliberal, it was Mercantilist, a sphere of zero-sum relations. In this pre-liberal world, the pursuit of individual interests did not lead to the collective good, on the contrary the only thing at stake was life itself: collective destruction. The pre-liberal nature of IR, its lack of a sovereign, meant that, as long as we lived in a liberal world, IR would always play the country cousin in relation to the discipline of liberalism, the discipline shaped and bounded by the sovereign: political theory. We asked, as if we did not know: Why is there no IR theory? We answered that in IR, as we knew it then, there was no history, no progress, no ethics, no community, no sovereign, and so on and so on. We said that IR was dened precisely by its lack of content, its emptiness, in contradistinction to the fullness of the world bounded by the sovereign state.