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... Within the political science perspective of the OMC, some scholars have already pointed to the ability of the mechanism to foster learning. This is due to the content of the mechanism itself, which entails tools such as the establishment of guidelines and directions, qualitative and quantitative indicators, specific goals and periodical monitoring (Dale, 2006). The OMC, along with its features of benchmarking, ranking and good-practice sharing, are by design presented as a form of non-coercive process. ...
... Some authors also raise the question of actor subjectivity and agency, which is especially salient with regards to indicator-based policymaking and its ability to 'govern at distance' (Dale, 2006). A closer look upon the actors participating within the policymaking processes of the OMC shows, that these processes are rather limited to the government and national administration, as they are indeed highly politicised on the level of the policymakers who take part in the deliberations. ...
Recent developments of European Union policymaking in the area of gender equality, including the area of ‘violence against women’, led to the adoption of indicator-based tools of policymaking, such as benchmarking, ranking, and good-practice sharing. The shift towards these tools aimed to strengthen the role of the European Union within the area subsumed under the principle of subsidiarity by appealing to the concept of ‘evidence-based policymaking’. While a considerable body of theoretical literature has already been developed in this regard, empirical studies observing the real impact of these tools within EU Member State policymaking have so far been scarce. Relying on a discursive-sociological institutionalist approach tracing processes and practices, this case study aims to study such impact. It more particularly investigates the impact of indicator-based tools upon a variety of public sector and non-governmental actors in the Slovak policymaking environment. It studies these tools with the aid of theories on (non)learning, and governmentality, and the broader setting of Europeanisation studies.
... Čeprav obstaja kar nekaj študij odprte metode koordinacije, ki kot analitično okvir uporabljajo kritični pristop governemntality (glej Porte, 2002;Dale, 2004;Haahr, 2004), pa želimo v našem prispevku pokazati, da so omenjene prakse vladovanja (v okviru odprte metode koordinacije in strukturiranega dialoga) zgolj del celovite strukture delovanja in racionalnosti oblasti ter konkretnih praks, prek katerih se področje oziroma polje mladine ter mlade kot individuume (ob) 70 Mladi v akciji gotovo ni edini EU-program ali pobuda, ki naslavlja mlade posameznike. Med drugim so takšni programi tudi pobuda Mladi v gibanju, pobuda Priložnosti za mlade, Tvoja prva EURES-služba, kampanja Mladi na delu. ...
... Čeprav obstaja kar nekaj študij odprte metode koordinacije, ki kot analitično okvir uporabljajo kritični pristop governemntality (glej Porte, 2002;Dale, 2004;Haahr, 2004), pa želimo v našem prispevku pokazati, da so omenjene prakse vladovanja (v okviru odprte metode koordinacije in strukturiranega dialoga) zgolj del celovite strukture delovanja in racionalnosti oblasti ter konkretnih praks, prek katerih se področje oziroma polje mladine ter mlade kot individuume (ob) 70 Mladi v akciji gotovo ni edini EU-program ali pobuda, ki naslavlja mlade posameznike. Med drugim so takšni programi tudi pobuda Mladi v gibanju, pobuda Priložnosti za mlade, Tvoja prva EURES-služba, kampanja Mladi na delu. ...
... EU mental health governance's grounding in soft law derives in part from its emerging at the same time as the OMC, a collection of practices that the EU formally embraced at the 2000 meeting of the Council of European Ministers in Lisbon, although it had adopted some of the soft law practices constituting OMC long before (Dale, 2004). The EU is unusual if not unique in its purposeful and overt pursuit of soft law mechanisms (Greer and Vanhercke, 2010) and the EU consistently has adopted them in its health initiatives (European Parliamentary Research Service, 2014). ...
Over the last three decades, a system of European Union mental health governance (EUMHG) emerged, via instruments including strategies for action, joint actions, pacts and high-level expert groups. It sponsored multiple projects, initiatives and research, and involved state, non-state and European institutional actors. This paper attempts to understand how EUMHG operated and the structure of political relations within it, attending especially to opportunities for citizen participation. It adopts a global governmentality approach that focuses on practices and discourses. It finds that EUMHG practices including benchmarks, best practices and risk-thinking reinforced larger EU policy goals of market-optimisation, and that the central discourses of de-institutionalisation (DI) and community mental health (CMH) shifted meaning over time, first apprehending mental health as a public-health goal, then targeting mental ill-health as a burden to states. Finally, it finds that non-governmental organisations' (NGOs) work within EUMHG rendered them both objects and subjects of government. Through these dynamics, citizens usually were positioned outside governance, and NGO identities were altered, though CMH's transformative potential remained. Citizen participation in EUMHG was heavily conditioned. NGO and citizen power will need vigilant protection in any future EUMHG.
... It is a system of rule that uses mobilizing techniques and agents other than those of the state capacitating 'governing at a distance' (Brøgger, 2016b, p. 79;Lawn, 2011;Rose & Miller, 2009;Pasias & Roussakis, 2012;Rosenau, 1992). This type of governance is based on the production of devices designed to compare, measure, and monitor implementation and progression of established goals (Brøgger, 2014(Brøgger, , 2016bDale, 2004;European Council, 2000, article 7 and 37;Gornitzka, 2005;Henckel & Wright, 2008;Keeling, 2006). It is also characterized by distributed management in the sense that management is conducted by managers as well as co-workers across organizational hierarchies and boundaries (Brøgger & Clausen, 2017;Jakobsen, Kjeldsen, & Pallesen, 2016). ...
This study demonstrates the ways in which discourses in a state-sponsored volunteer program incited transformations of individual subjectivities, focusing on a group of Japanese language teacher volunteers training in Japan to become teachers of Japanese as a heritage language for the country’s diaspora (Nikkei) population in South America. As teachers of heritage Japanese at Japanese language schools in these Nikkei communities, their work was central to Japan’s diaspora strategies, which reframe the Nikkei population as Japan’s “diplomatic assets” connected to Japan through their Nikkei identity. Focusing on these language teachers as important actors in Japan’s diaspora strategies, this study illustrates how their encounter with the institutional discourses resulted in the transformations of their subjectivities. Such transformations occurred during the volunteer training sessions hosted by Japan’s international cooperation agency to conceptualize their roles as teachers of Japanese as someone’s heritage language. By illustrating the ways in which these volunteer individuals’ transformations fit within state diaspora strategies, this article underscores the role of state actors in the process of subjectification, which has tended to be overlooked in previous studies of governmentality.
Academic freedom constitutes an integral part of traditional university values that ensure the proper functioning of universities in pursuing truth and inculcating civic values. In a globalized world where Higher Education (HE) policy is the result of the interaction of local, national, and international levels, the positions of international organizations on questions of academic freedoms deem significant. Within global discourses on HE, literature contrasts the World Bank’s human capitalist to UNESCO’s humanistic approach. Through Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of both organizations’ documents, the paper presented a genealogical analysis of academic freedom that challenged the existence of static, opposite, and binary positions. Transformations, ruptures, juxtapositions as well as gaps, limits, and exclusions were detected within and across International Organizations’ discourses. Juxtaposition of economic and humanistic rationales as well as academic freedom protection and neoliberal policy interventions have muted discursive conflicts and inherent contradictions. The failure of UNESCO to address contemporary threats to academic freedom emerged from the appearance of neoliberal transnational governmentality as an inevitable social regularity that delimits what can be said and cannot be said about academic freedom. Through coercive funding schemes and technologies of differentiation, surveillance, and monitoring, the WB created the space for such transnational governmentality, and placed faculty members under its gaze resulting in undermining academic freedoms and de-professionalization of academics.
La década de 2010, iniciada con la crisis financiera, continuada con la de los refugiados y culminada con la del coronavirus en 2020, ha consolidado los enfoques teóricos en torno al campo político europeo como algo más que un entorno diplomático en el que gobiernos nacionales negocian políticas comunes. Sin embargo, la crisis del coronavirus ha dado lugar a una respuesta más rápida y decisiva que las anteriores, movilizando una cantidad de recursos sin precedentes y construyendo nuevos consensos a un ritmo no contemplado anteriormente. El artículo plantea desde la sociología política que las recientes crisis europeas revelan una transformación en las formas de ejercicio de la política que llamamos «intergubernamentalidad», un proceso compatible con la transformación de los campos políticos nacionales a través de la politización de la UE.
Although Earth observation (EO) is considered a universal scientific technique with a hegemonic gaze, national sociotechnical imaginaries shape its practice. Historically established and organized by national governments, EO, which is commonly pursued via satellite remote sensing, depends on domestic perceptions of the technique's scope and applications. EO is also a political technology with the capacity to mediate and potentially regulate life on Earth at a range of scales. In China, the state and scientists endeavor to transform EO into a data-driven, inductive, and predictive method with a focus on social coordination, especially in cities—a key scale for scientific study and the organization and reproduction of state power. Contributing to China's reimagining of EO as a governance and governmentality tool are advances in social sensing, which leverages big data continuously generated by individuals’ devices. By analyzing big EO and social data, rather than only observe past and present changes to the Earth's surface, the Chinese state and scientists seek to predict future social events. While these changes are narrated as a popularization of remote sensing enabling more responsive, human-centric governance, they may augur the rise of antipolitical technologies that attempt to prevent dissent by determining and even guiding future behavior. As China, a satellite power, aims to export its services for observing and predicting Earth and upscale them through global governance, critique of their associated sociotechnical imaginaries is crucial. Such research reveals the heterogeneity of the satellite gaze and may identify where and how people hold power within EO systems.
Governmentality, a concept which originates from the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, primarily relates to an analytics of power which highlights the artificiality of government. The term refers to a way of understanding the functioning of power as that which emanates from diverse societal institutions rather than one centralized, top‐down source, such as the sovereign state. Over the last 20 years studies in governmentality have gained impetus and have led to the development of a variety of approaches across multiple disciplines, all of which use the concept in some way as a theoretical tool. Understood as such, governmentality can be viewed as a bundle of useful methods for understanding and unraveling how power functions in different social and historical contexts, and how different societies think about power. This entry discusses developments in the field.
The Cambridge Companion to International Organizations Law illuminates, from a legal perspective, what international organizations are, what makes them 'tick' and how they affect the world around them. It critically discusses such classic issues as the concept of international organization and membership, as well as questions of internal relations, accountability and how they make law, set standards and otherwise affect both their member states and the world around them. The volume further discusses the role of international organizations in particular policy domains, zooming in on domains which are not often discussed through international organizations, including disarmament, energy, food security and health. Eventually, a picture emerges of international organizations as complex phenomena engaging in all sorts of activities and relationships, the operation and authority of which is underpinned by the rules and regulations of international law.
Legitimacy has long been perceived through a Westernized lens as a fixed, binary state. In this book, Kathy Dodworth offers an exploration of everyday legitimation practices in coastal Tanzania, which challenges this understanding within postcolonial contexts. She reveals how non-government organizations craft their authority to act, working with, against and through the state, and what these practices tell us about contemporary legitimation. Synthesizing detailed, ethnographic fieldwork with theoretical innovations from across the social sciences, legitimacy is reworked not as a fixed state, but as a collection of constantly renegotiated practices. Critically adopting insights from political theory, sociology and anthropology, this book develops a detailed picture of contemporary governance in Tanzania and beyond in the wake of waning Western dominance.
The 2015 Paris Agreement is often depicted as a turning point for global climate governance. Following years of diplomatic gridlock, it laid the foundations for a new global climate regime that invites states to partner with nonstate actors in the transition to the low-carbon society. This article critically examines the political rationalities that inform the pluralization of climate politics after Paris and the turn toward cooperative modes of governing. Drawing on an analysis of initiatives led by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that were launched to engage nonstate actors in the evolving Paris regime, we identify a global governmentality that mobilizes nonstate actors as active and responsible partners in the quest for rapid and deep decarbonization. In its search for cooperative and efficient forms of problem management, we argue, this form of rule nurtures a global space free from friction and opposition where businesses, investors, and industry are elevated as the real partners of government.
There is a robust literature on the World Bank's shift toward participatory development in the 1990s but scant attention to the specific way in which participation was defined in terms of “stakeholder” inclusion. Rather than the poor, NGOs, or some other constituency, participation was framed in terms of stakeholders, or all affected parties. Thus, there are two related outcomes to explain: a shift in institutional practice and the formation of a novel subject of development governance. Drawing on pragmatist and object-oriented international relations, I develop a model of how institutions become objects of sustained and collective reflection, at once opening the possibility for institutional change and new political subjectivity. In the case of the Bank, I specifically argue that out of a period of crisis, actors inside and outside the Bank reflected on the problem of development, borrowing from past experiments with systems managerialism to define the contours of the problem and pose solutions. Using Bank documents, I show how the logic of systems managerialism helped define the problem of development in terms of complexity and pose stakeholder inclusion as an effective solution. The result was not only new practices but the articulation of the stakeholder as a novel political subject.
Existen muchas publicaciones sobre el giro del Banco Mundial hacia el desarrollo participativo en los 90, pero escasa atención a la manera específica en la que la participación fue definida en términos de inclusión de las “partes interesadas”. En lugar de referirse a las poblaciones más vulnerables, las organizaciones no gubernamentales (ONG) u otros sectores, la participación se enmarcó en términos de las partes interesadas o todas las partes afectadas. Por lo tanto, hay dos resultados relacionados para explicar: un cambio en la práctica institucional y la formación de un tema novedoso sobre la gobernanza del desarrollo. Basándome en las relaciones internacionales (International Relations, IR) pragmáticas y orientadas al objeto, elaboro un modelo de cómo las instituciones se convierten en objetos de reflexión sostenida y colectiva, abriendo, a la vez, la posibilidad de un cambio institucional y una nueva subjetividad política. En el caso del Banco, sostengo específicamente que, a partir de un periodo de crisis, los agentes dentro y fuera del Banco reflexionaron sobre el problema de desarrollo y tomaron prestados los experimentos del pasado con el gerencialismo de sistemas para definir los perfiles del problema y plantear soluciones. A través de los documentos del Banco, muestro de qué manera la lógica del gerencialismo de sistemas ayudó a definir el problema de desarrollo en términos de complejidad y a plantear la inclusión de las partes interesadas como una solución efectiva. El resultado no fueron solo prácticas nuevas, sino también la articulación de las partes interesadas como un tema político novedoso.
On dispose à ce jour de plusieurs ouvrages traitant de la tendance de la Banque mondiale à privilégier le développement participatif dans les années 90, mais on ne prête pas suffisamment attention à la concrétisation de la participation en ce qui concerne l'inclusion des « parties prenantes ». Contrairement aux pauvres, aux ONG ou à d'autres groupes d'intérêt, la participation a été définie en fonction des parties prenantes, ou de toutes les parties concernées. Par conséquent, il convient d'expliquer deux effets complémentaires : un changement dans la pratique institutionnelle et la naissance d'un nouveau concept de gouvernance du développement. En m'appuyant sur la RI pragmatiste et objectiviste, je propose un modèle montrant comment les institutions deviennent des objets de réflexion durable et collective, offrant à la fois des opportunités d'une réforme institutionnelle et d'une nouvelle subjectivité politique. Pour le cas de la Banque mondiale, je soutiens en particulier que suite à une période de crise, les acteurs internes et externes à la Banque se sont penchés sur le problème du développement, en s'inspirant des expériences passées concernant la gestion des systèmes pour en définir les grandes lignes et proposer des solutions conséquentes. En me basant sur la documentation de la Banque pour démontrer comment la dynamique de la gestion des systèmes a contribué à définir le problème du développement par sa complexité et à présenter l'inclusion des parties prenantes comme une solution efficace. Il en résulte non seulement de nouvelles pratiques, mais également la mise en place d'un nouveau sujet politique pour les parties prenantes.
The aim of this paper is to investigate the administration of the Duchy of Parma under Maria Louise and analyze, based on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, the development of accounting documents and rules, providing insights into how accounting may have facilitated the rationalities of government in a critical period for public, administrative and financial organizations due to the new administration enforced in Parma by Duchess Maria Louise after the period of French occupation. The research considers primary sources, such as the Comprehensive Framework of Parma State Laws (regarding accounting laws) and documentation in the Parma State Archive (regarding accounting reports), as well as secondary sources to form a detailed picture of the duchy’s income and expenditure in the period.
Initiatives to prevent and counter “violent extremism” (P/CVE) are often highly individualised and individualising, and function to reinforce negative racialised and gendered stereotypes. Recently, some feminist and other critical scholars have argued that sexist and misogynistic beliefs are inter-related with other drivers of “radicalisation” and “extremism”, which may lead to the securitisation of forms of sexist and misogynistic violence. There has not yet been, however, a systematic examination of the ways in which even some of these critical and feminist interventions are complicit in the reproduction of the logics of gender and race that structure the oppression and violence they take as their target. In this paper I argue that there is a powerful brand of governance feminism informing P/CVE global governance initiatives that has little consideration of the distributed effects of this move on the operation of racialised and gendered power. I position governance feminism as a sub-category of white feminism and show that it is specifically white feminism that is dominant in the institutions of liberal governance relevant to P/CVE. I draw on Black, decolonial, and intersectional feminist theory to show how the gendered subjects of P/CVE governance are often presented as race-neutral, in deeply problematic and limiting ways.
The article investigates the production of decent work indicators within the ILO, to demonstrate that developing measurement infrastructures in global policymaking requires political work. The concept of decent work responds to the perceived marginalization of the ILO in social and labor policy and was supposed to provide a new unifying normative framework for the organization. The article shows that creating decent work indicators encountered challenges due to its highly politicized production process. Proponents of quantification (mostly workers’ representatives) and opponents (mostly employers’ representatives) disagreed about the function of indicators: should they be country-specific or allow for universal assessment of progress from above. In effect, although indicators of decent work have been integrated into the Sustainable Development Goals—mostly as part of goal no. 8, many are still incomplete. As a result, the indicators did not establish a “framework of assessment,” which would have been guided by universal standards of progress allowing the ILO to “govern at a distance,” and could not initiate a paradigmatic policy shift, impeding the infrastructuralization of measurement. Theoretically, the article advances our understanding of policy formulation and design on the transnational level by showing the political foundation of knowledge-based instruments. Empirically, it rests on a Grounded Theory-based analysis of key ILO documents, including Governing Body minutes, conference and expert meeting reports, and official publications, mainly from the period from 1998 to 2015.
Drawing on the conceptual-methodological framework of assembling urbanism, the paper sheds light on the strategies, actors and labors of mobilization of the integrated approach to urban development in Ukraine in the late 2000s, its further consolidation after the Euromaidan Revolution of 2013–2014 and transformation into a dominant policy assemblage with discursive and normative power for strategic socio-spatial changes at the national and municipal levels. The research findings deepen the understanding of the complexity of mobilization––assembling––translation processes, revealing the dynamic and affective dimension of relations between heterogeneous actors and underscoring the role of political and politics in assembling urbanism studies.
Global governance has come under increasing pressure since the end of the Cold War. In some issue areas, these pressures have led to significant changes in the architecture of governance institutions. In others, institutions have resisted pressures for change. This volume explores what accounts for this divergence in architecture by identifying three modes of governance: hierarchies, networks, and markets. The authors apply these ideal types to different issue areas in order to assess how global governance has changed and why. In most issue areas, hierarchical modes of governance, established after World War II, have given way to alternative forms of organization focused on market or network-based architectures. Each chapter explores whether these changes are likely to lead to more or less effective global governance across a wide range of issue areas. This provides a novel and coherent theoretical framework for analysing change in global governance.
This chapter examines the phenomenon of climate consulting, a new and rapidly growing field of professional services. Presenting findings from an in-depth investigation of climate adaptation consulting in Australia, it draws on John Allen’s three spatial vocabularies of power—territorial, networked, and topological—to highlight three different ways in which private sector advisors are shaping public policymaking. The chapter shows how the work of consultants has been critical to rendering the complex public policy problem of adaptation governable, largely through the unproblematic translation of pre-existing technical and managerial approaches to decision-making under uncertainty for new existential risks posed by climate change. The use of consultants in this way reconfigures public policymaking in ways that simultaneously stimulate new economies of expertise and a crisis in expertise. This has profound implications for the ability of public policy to effect the transformational changes required to tackle pressing environmental issues like climate change.
The European Union’s partnership with China has received significant academic attention. Experts have focused on both parties’ economic and political objectives and have made efforts to grasp the dynamics of the institutionalisation of EU-China cooperation. However, little has been said about how this collaboration affects the lives of citizens, especially in China. Adopting a Foucauldian epistemology, this article’s key contention is that EU-China cooperation imposes a joint form of post-liberal governmental power on
the Chinese population, which socially constructs empowered but not liberal political subjectivities for Chinese citizens. The article first reviews Foucault’s approach to governmentality. It then explores Sino-EUropean collaboration after 2013, when the two partners established the ‘EU-China 2020 Strategic Agenda for Cooperation’. We illustrate how the institutionalisation of the partnership has been consistent with a governmentalised political rationality, and how policy implementation has allowed
a post-liberal form of governmental power to flow from both EU and Chinese policymakers towards the Chinese population, triggering processes of political subjectivisation.
Our focus is placed on the interplay between the broader policy context and the content of postgraduate studies in educational administration and leadership in an effort to understand how it influences the conscience of future school administrators about their role and mission. Specifically, the socio-cultural theory of Basil Bernstein is used for analysing the process of symbolic control regulated by the notions of classification, framing and meaning orientation which operate simultaneously for establishing dominant practices and forming individual consciences through postgraduate studies. The analysis is based on a sample of postgraduate programmes in school administration and leadership in two countries, Greece and UK, which represent two polar cases as regards the degree that new forms of educational management have permeated into their educational systems.
We propose a geography that pluralizes the sites, practices and politics of authority. We defend an approach that tracks less perceptible forms of authority emerging through everyday micropolitics and experimental practices. In contrast to dominant definitions of authority as institutionalized legitimate power, we define authority as a relation of guidance emerging from recognition of inequalities in access to truth, experience or objectivity. Analysing four intersecting areas of authority (algorithmic, experiential, expert and participatory authority), we propose analyses grounded in political aesthetics that trace authority’s affective force, and its role in disclosing and contesting the common.
Die »Geschichte der ›Gouvernementalität‹« (VL 1977/78, 162), die Foucault in den Vorlesungsreihen von 1978 und 1979 am Collège de France vorstellt, wurde erst ein Vierteljahrhundert später in Buchform veröffentlicht. Zunächst lagen nur die unter dem Titel »La gouvernementalité« publizierte Vorlesung vom 1. Februar 1978 (DE III, 796–823) sowie die von ihm besorgten Zusammenfassungen der Arbeitsergebnisse vor (DE III, 900–905 bzw. 1020–1028). Trotz dieser außerordentlich schwierigen Rezeptionslage und Foucaults skizzenhafter Ausarbeitung des Konzepts der Gouvernementalität hat diese »Forschungsrichtung« (DE IV, 196) seit den 1970er Jahren eine große Zahl von historischen und sozialwissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen inspiriert.
This paper asks how international political sociology (IPS) can articulate its criticality so that it can continue to engage with lineages that privilege processes and practices emerging from the always fluid and multiple entanglements of fragments without resorting to totalizing logics. IPS and IR more generally have experienced an intensified interest in situated and micro analyses. Engaging the fragmentation of the international, however, has gone hand in hand with pulls towards thinking big and wholes as a condition for critical analysis. We share the position that critical thought needs a conception of the structural if it does not want to remain locked in simply describing un-connected fragments of life. However, the challenge is to do so without making the meaning of fragments derivative of conceptions of wholes that reinsert horizons of totalization. Drawing on Deleuzian thought, the paper opens towards a conception of the structural and its relation to fragments that embraces heterogeneity, multiplicity, and fluidity with the express intent of vacating lingering totalities and foregrounding creativity in life. In a context of fragmenting international relations, we see re-engaging the question of how to separate structural thought from horizons of totalization as a contribution to ongoing debates on the nature and limits of critique.
Cet article étudie la manière dont la criticité de la sociologie politique internationale (SPI) peut être articulée afin de continuer à impliquer des lignes qui privilégient les processus et pratiques émergeant d'intrications de fragments toujours plus fluides et multiples sans avoir recours à des logiques totalisantes. D'une manière plus générale, l'intérêt porté aux analyses ciblées et aux micro-analyses dans la SPI et dans les relations internationales s'est intensifié. L'implication d'une fragmentation de l'international est cependant allée de pair avec des enclins à penser grand et à adopter une vision d'ensemble qui conditionnent l'analyse critique. Nous partageons l'avis qu'une conception du structurel est nécessaire à la pensée critique pour éviter qu'elle ne se cantonne à décrire des fragments de vie déconnectés. Le défi est toutefois de le faire sans faire dériver la signification des fragments des conceptions d'ensemble qui réintroduisent des horizons de totalisation. Cet article puise dans la pensée deleuzienne pour s'ouvrir sur une conception du structurel et de sa relation avec les fragments qui englobe l'hétérogénéité, la multiplicité et la fluidité avec l'intention expresse d’évacuer les totalités persistantes et de mettre la créativité au premier plan de la vie. Dans un contexte de fragmentation des relations internationales, nous voyons le réengagement de l'interrogation sur la manière de séparer la pensée structurelle des horizons de la totalisation comme une contribution aux débats actuels portant sur la nature et les limites de la critique.
En este artículo se plantea cómo la sociología política internacional (SPI) puede articular su criticidad para poder seguir interactuando con los linajes que privilegian los procesos y las prácticas que surgen de los cambiantes y múltiples entrelazamientos de fragmentos sin recurrir a lógicas totalizadoras. En términos más generales, la SPI y las RR. II. han adquirido un interés más profundo en los análisis situados y los microanálisis. La fragmentación de lo internacional, por su parte, ha ido acompañada de las presiones para pensar en grande y en conjunto como condición para el análisis crítico. Consideramos que el pensamiento crítico necesita una concepción de lo estructural para no quedarse encerrado en la simple descripción de fragmentos de la vida que no están conectados. Sin embargo, el desafío es lograr esto sin que el significado de los fragmentos derive de ideas integrales que reinserten perspectivas de totalización. A partir del pensamiento deleuziano, el artículo se abre hacia una concepción de lo estructural y su relación con los fragmentos que abarca la heterogeneidad, la multiplicidad y la variabilidad con el claro objetivo de dejar de lado las persistentes totalidades y dedicar especial atención a la creatividad en la vida. En este marco de fragmentación de las relaciones internacionales, creemos que volver a plantear la cuestión de cómo separar el pensamiento estructural de las perspectivas de totalización supone un aporte a los debates actuales sobre la naturaleza y los límites de la crítica.
Amid and unpredictable change globally, indigenous peoples are frequently referred to as prime examples of resilience. The peoples’ proven track record of persevering and ability to adapt have attracted attention worldwide. Previously deemed in need of ‘development’, the peoples are being called upon to provide what is now an invaluable contribution. Resilience holds out a promise of a (better) future for us all, and for the peoples suggests a greater role in impacting the future. This article dissects the promise of change engendered through the call for indigenous resilience. By drawing on critical discussions on adaptation, indigeneity and contemporary colonialism, it offers an account of the ways in which resilience cements time-tried expectations that indigenous peoples always adapt. Even though the international community would have us believe that colonial practices are a thing of the past, this article argues that the global call for indigenous resilience signals a resurgence of those practices.
This article argues that ‘border-crossers' — those still in the process of crossing borders — might not be governable. It suggests to move away from the Foucauldian perspective and investigate border-crossers not through the prism of power relations but through their capacity to dream another future. It argues that we should integrate “how questions” — “how to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others” — with ‘who questions' – that is ‘who is the subject to be governed?' In other words, technologies of control should be discussed together with analyses that investigate the subjects upon whom those technologies operate. Which practices, power relations and institutional settings ‘make up' border-crossers? What if border-crossers are more than the result of power relations? What if what drives mobility is not power relations but by the dream of another future? What if border-crossers are not the liberal subjects of governmentality but the ‘dreaming subjects of mobility’?
Using an analysis of development discourse in and about São Tomé and Príncipe (STP), this article aims to trace the relationship between sociocultural constructions of difference and socio-economic structures of exclusion in the global development project. Using ethnographic data from a rural fishing village and from development professionals, I show how development discourse constructs STP as a place that is perpetually marginal and assigns essentialist traits to the islands and their people. In response, Santomeans imagine their society as one that is isolated and insular from global processes, even though they have historically always been incorporated into global networks of capital, labour, culture and commodities. I argue that this process, whereby Santomeans imagine and reproduce their own marginality, has an under-appreciated impact not only on their collective identity but also on their action and potentiality. I reflect on how the construction of marginality serves the global political, economic and social inequalities upon which the development project depends.
Since more than a decade, the EU is confronted with a number of crises that significantly changed the environment under which the EU operates in the field of gender equality. Evidence shows, that in many European countries, the different crises have led to a deprioritisation of gender equality policies. However, the way in which the new Gender Action Plan for External Relations 2015–2020 of the European Union addresses and operationalises gender equality suggests in contrast a policy shift towards an intensified commitment and more comprehensive understanding of gender. Against this background, this article analyses, first, how the content and the conceptual orientation of gender equality policies in European Union’s external relations have changed in the light of post-crisis recommendations. Second, the article scrutinises the ways in which the European Union tries to tackle the credibility crisis through increasingly intensified and operationalised policy procedures. The argument put forth is that the gender-related indicators in the Gender Action Plan translate complex societal processes into a technical data-based framework and thereby depoliticise gender equality by simulating a technocratic, evidence-based and quantified form of politics.
This article disentangles how empire, emotion and exchange intersect and work to orient and disorient processes of identity formation within post-9/11 US cultural diplomacy. Focusing on everyday cultural exchange practices, it challenges the particular cosmopolitanism embedded in these programmes that hinges upon the affective and the colonial. It reflects on how this entanglement of empire, emotion and exchange operates through modes of governmentality that produce energized, more governable subjects and masks such operations of power. Analysing one particular exchange – YES – this article disorients colonial logics of subjectification by exploring affective exchange encounters that are always already (dis)orienting. It then serves as a disorienting encounter with cultural diplomacy through four provocations, illustrating how empire is (always) (dis)orientating, can (dis)orient, can be disoriented, and must undergo disorientation. First, post-9/11 US cultural diplomacy and its logic of cosmopolitanism suggest empire is always (dis)orientating via its manifestation in ‘unusual’ sites; while exchange programmes’ onus on celebrating difference appears to conflict with ‘where’ empire ‘normally’ orients itself, as post/decolonial scholarship reveals, it is in the seemingly benign/unquestionable where empire does its work most profoundly. Second, the entanglement of emotion, empire and exchange can (dis)orient exchange subjects through how they are governed to perform and oscillate between ever-shifting ‘ideal’ subjectivities (familiar national/cosmopolitan global/enterprising neoliberal). Third, tracing colonial echoes and spectres in these exchanges reveals empire as disoriented, as that which is analytically ‘less conventional’. An arguably ‘conventional’ analysis oriented around a neo-colonial logic and an imperialistic ‘America’ while seductive in its simplicity obscures the governmental and performative complexities operating within these programmes. Finally, disorientation enables empire to be challenged and disrupted, opening up possibilities for post-9/11 US cultural diplomacy, and the self-Other relations comprising it, to be reimagined. In short, this paper’s analytical disorientation can lead to a reorientation of cultural diplomacy.
Objective/context: This paper is the result of Colombia Internacional’s call to reflect on Global Studies from the South. It is a critical theoretical contribution aiming at putting aside the binary opposing the global and the international. Instead, it seeks to think about them as mutually constitutive. Methodology: Through a
bibliographical revision that inquires into its most important texts, it argues that
Global Studies has as raison d’être a narrow conception of International Relations
and of the international. The article holds that the latter is conceived as equal to
interstate. This way, the global emerges in opposition to the state and linked to global
civil society. The paper proposes Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality as a
tool to elude this binary. Governmentality is globalised and presented both as an
analytical framework and as a liberal government practice. This way, it allows to
think a power decentred from the state, as well as exercised in multiple directions,
and not in opposition to civil society but through it. Conclusion: It concludes that
governmentality allows conceiveing both the governmentalised state and civil society
as products of liberalism understood as a globalised govermental practice, thus
erasing the binary on which the emergence of Global Studies is based. Originality:
The paper is a contribution from the Foucauldian perspective on governmentality to
the debate between International Relations and Global Studies
International organisations' (IOs) legitimacy in global educational governance is commonly seen as a function of their regulative or normative power. By contrast, this paper stresses the increasing importance of scientific research and policy-relevant knowledge and its strategic production, dissemination and transfer by IOs The article examines knowledge work at OECD, UNESCO and World Bank based on novel data from publication analyses, archival work and a number of interviews. Drawing on sociological institutionalism and constructivist international relations scholarship, this study is interested in the rationales, resources and capacities for knowledge production, the strategies of dissemination and transfer as well as the implications of science production for IOs' position and relevance in global governance. Findings emphasize the authority of science as the primary source of legitimacy-and even survival-in an increasingly crowded and competitive field of global education governance.
https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2019.1702503
This article explores how, in the quest for new global order, global governance might acquire greater sociological legitimacy. What are the sources of legitimacy in global governance? In other words, what conditions generate confidence and trust in global-scale authorities? To explore this question, the article first elaborates on the general concept of legitimacy as it relates to global regulation. Thereafter the discussion considers, under three main headings, a broad range of possible drivers of legitimacy beliefs vis-à-vis global governance. First, some of these sources are institutional, relating to features of the global regulatory organisations, such as their procedural inputs and their performance outputs. Second, other sources of legitimacy are individual, relating to the characteristics of the subjects of global governance, such as their identity orientations and their levels of social trust. Third, further sources of legitimacy in global governance are societal, relating to the general ordering patterns of world politics, such as prevailing norms, capitalism, and a hegemonic state. The article concludes by urging that researchers break from past habits of treating institutional, individual and societal sources of legitimacy separately and in isolation from each other. Instead, legitimacy in global governance can be more fully understood – and more effectively promoted in practice – if one examines these various forces together, and in terms of their mutual constitution.
This book grew out of the unrest felt by scholars that the globalization process was
reshuffling educational structures around the world and that a renewal of theoretical
perspectives was necessary.
The project leading to this book began in June 2006, with the international
workshop “Globalization and Education: Constructing New Frames of Research and
Thinking” chaired by Julia Resnik and held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The initiative was supported by the School of Education and the European Forum,
both of the Hebrew University, and has been possible thanks to the helpful and
strategic advice of Erika Goldenstein.
Special thanks go to our international participants Robert Arnove, Aaron Benavot
and Susan Robertson who made extensive and insightful comments throughout the
workshop. Thanks, also, to the other workshop participants, scholars from Israeli
universities who contributed to the excellent discussions. I am greatly indebted to
my colleagues of the School of Education at the Hebrew University: Edna Lomsky-
Feder, Tamar Rapoport and Philip Wexler, who were engaged tirelessly in the
organization of the International Workshop and in the resulting book.
Most of the chapters in this volume developed from the papers presented at the
workshop and have been improved thanks to generous and insightful comments
Tamar Rapoport, as well as Michal Frenkel and Adriana Kemp and the helpful editing
of many of the chapters by Jennifer Ashkenazi.
I am grateful to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for the financial support
for the publication of this book.
According to the Regional Complex Security Theory (RSCT) external involvement in regional security can take either the form of penetration or overlay. We theorise governmentality as the third form of external involvement aimed to responsibilise regions in order to govern them indirectly and at a distance. We illustrate our argument in a study of NATO’s role in the Western Balkans since the dissolution of Yugoslavia. In particular, we posit that the predominant role of NATO in the region has evolved over time from penetration in the 1990s, through overlay in the early 2000s, to today’s governmentality.
The discourse of the European Commission plays a central role in the process of political cordination in Europe. In the field of education, the discourse of the “learning society” introduces the relevant problems, the main characteristics of the reform and the new functions for the actors who should implement it. On the one hand, current economic and technological trends would call for a major adaptation of educational and training systems. On the other hand, the reform of the “traditional systems” would entail the transformation of the public arena: (i) roles and responsibilities of the actors are redefined; (ii) the actors are deemed to share the same objectives.
In this special issue, we explore child rights governance as the intersection between the study of governance and the study of children, childhood, and children’s rights. Our introduction puts forward a set of theoretical points of departure for the study of child rights governance, engaging with scholarship on human rights, international relations, history, and governance. It links the individual contributions to this special issue with four central dimensions of child rights governance, namely: temporality, spatiality, subjectivity, and normativity.
In this chapter, I examine the inchoate articulation of rights in two recent texts about refugees: Martínez’s The Beast, a work of investigative journalism and a compelling account of the journey of Central American refugees across Mexico, and Rosi’s film, Fuocoammare, a record of those who, seeking refuge, attempt to make the treacherous crossing from North Africa to the island of Lampedusa. I suggest that though these narratives are deeply moving they place insufficient emphasis on a radical analysis of the conditions that lead to migration in the first place: for instance, they fail to explore how refugees’ rights can be negotiated within a larger imperial global narrative that is inextricably linked to the production and regulation of surplus populations. I conclude that the two texts relegate human rights issues to a mode of storytelling that leaves little room for the sort of understanding and analysis necessary for effecting structural change.
The role and activities of national advisers engaged in the translation of globally mobile ideas on effective teacher education has received little attention. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews, this article explores how government-appointed advisers acted as intermediaries in the translation of policy ideas in national reviews of teacher education in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (2010–2015). Three themes are addressed: (1) the localisation of international good practice; (2) the significance of time and temporality in local policy deliberation; and (3) the autonomy–engagement dynamic in government-commissioned reviews of public policy fields. The article reports how advisers exhibited transgressive competence in the re-assembly of policy ideas in local spaces. With attention to time, space and positionality, the article concludes by emphasising the significance of localised political strategies in shaping policy choices and prospects for enactment.
This chapter explores how the Bologna principles were part of an early EU agenda on European growth and how the Bologna Process and the EU Lisbon Agenda have become virtually indistinguishable since they have almost converged into one policy framework process. The chapter investigates the relation between the Bologna Process and the European Union and, in particular, it focuses on the role of the European Commission in relation to European higher education It provides the reader with suggestions as to why standardization initially became a mode of European governance and which interests, rationalities and smooth policy operations underlie the shift from government to governance in Europe. The negotiations between the EU and the Bologna Process can be perceived as a potential solution to an inconvenience within the EU; namely, that education falls within the scope of the subsidiarity principle and thus makes the EU-‘rule of law’ impossible. This calls for alternative ways of governing education, which gives rise to the voluntary intergovernmental Bologna Process.
This article argues that EU social policy has weakened the long established bond between economic citizenship and the nation-state yet is unable to establish a fully-formed European replacement model. Part of the explanation lies within the unstable institutional design of EU social policy. At first a fairly pragmatic style of policy-making was used in response to this problem, but over time a new institutional architecture has evolved which is called deliberative governance. While the author welcomes this development, he is cautious whether or not it will produce greater organizational coherence for economic citizenship in the EU.