Governmentality and international relations: critiques, challenges, genealogies

Abstract

This chapter reviews and expands the governmentality debate in International Relations (IR). The first part addresses critiques of ‘domestic analogy’ and liberal analytic and normative biases in International Governmentality Studies. While these charges are largely untenable, the debate indicates six challenges for the field. These include questions over the theoretical status of Foucault’s approach, empirical overemphasis of (neo-)liberalism vis-à-vis other governmentalities, state-centric conceptions of the international, oversight of coloniality and race, reification of Foucault’s categories as opposed to conceptual innovation, and proper theorization of the political. The second part of the chapter offers illustrative responses to these challenges through a genealogical displacement of Foucault’s account of international liberalism. Drawing on the historiography of late-Victorian imperialism, it outlines other international governmentalities co-existing with liberalism, in part beyond a state-centric frame of reference. It also highlights the centrality of colonialism and race in the rationalities, practices, and technologies of liberalism’s ‘differential’ international governmentality.