‘Global Disordering’: Practices of Reflexivity in Global Economic Governance

Abstract

Abstract In this article, I offer a reinterpretation of late 20th-century ‘neo-liberal’ transformations of global economic governance. My argumentative foil is a macro-institutional interpretation of the post-1980s period in which neo-liberalism appears as programmatic institutional form and disciplinary formation. I argue that a second, and complementary, dynamic also needs to be taken into account – namely, the emergence and operationalization of a set of critical technologies for embedding practices of reflexivity within the state. I suggest, moreover, that attention to this dimension of neo-liberalization provides a new perspective on the present. I offer an interpretation of the current moment of transition as one in which a similar repertoire of neo-liberal techniques of reflexivization is, in a second iteration, being trained on the architecture of global economic governance itself.