Foucault and the modern international: silences and legacies for the study of world politics

Abstract

Michel Foucault is undoubtedly among the most influential thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century, and there seems to be no end to (re)engagements with his work across the humanities and social sciences. In the study of world politics, scholars began drawing on Foucault's writings in the early 1980s, to question different aspects of International Relations (IR) as a field of study. This work has been more recently supplemented with a vast body of research inspired by his lectures on ‘biopolitics’ and ‘governmentality’ in particular. Published within Palgrave Macmillan's Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy, the present volume originated in a conference organized at the Centre for International Studies at Sciences Po in 2014. The organizers’ original intention was to bring together two disconnected groups of scholars—prominent ‘critical IR scholars’ located primarily in the Anglo-American world and ‘those known as foucaldians in France and in the field of Contemporary French Philosophy’—and ‘work toward the emergence of a critical and reflexive knowledge that would constitute the International as an object for thought’ (p. 3). A good idea, though it seems few from the second group have contributed to the book, which also includes several articles by scholars from other fields of study.