UN reform, biopolitics, and global governmentality

Abstract

Commentary on the United Nations (UN) reform efforts of 2004–05 has broadly followed two different trajectories. International lawyers and political theorists have focused on the implications of reform for sovereignty as a fundamental principle of international law and international relations. International Relations (IR) scholars have discussed reform focusing on state power and the UN’s institutional authority. Against the background of these debates and drawing on Foucault’s political theory and related IR scholarship, this article argues that UN reform discourse indicates a biopolitical ‘reprogramming’ of contemporary sovereignty and global governance. The analysis ‘displaces’ the concerns with sovereignty, state power, and institutional authority by demonstrating that UN reform (also) constitutes the UN as a project of managing and regulating the global population through a variety of securitizing, economizing, and normalizing rationalities and techniques. The article illustrates this by pointing to the biopolitical rationales of reform conceptions of human security and collective security, and to (neo)liberal governmentalities of risk and responsibility, contractualism, benchmarking, and networks. It thereby challenges the conceptual and normative priority accorded to juridical sovereignty in international law, and to state- and institution-centric accounts in IR theorizations of UN-relayed global governance.