First developed by Michel Foucault more than thirty years ago, "governmentality" has become an essential set of tools for many researchers in the social and political sciences today. What is "governmentality"? How does this perspective challenge the way we understand political power and its contestation? This new introduction offers advanced undergraduate and graduate students both a highly accessible guide and an original contribution to debates about power and governmentality.

The book aims to serve four main functions:

To situate governmentality as an intellectual development within Foucault’s thinking about the microphysics of power and his genealogical methods;

To reveal how research in governmentality has changed as the idea encounters new academic fields, political contexts and regional settings;

To examine one of the more recent encounters between governmentality and the social sciences - its interaction with international relations and global politics;

To offer researchers some methodological suggestions for undertaking studies in governmentality, stressing that its critical edge becomes blunted if it is detached from historical/genealogical modes of inquiry.

This book offers a set of conceptual and methodological observations intended to keep research in governmentality a living, critical thought project. Above all, it argues that the challenge of understanding the world calls for the addition of new thinking equipment to the governmentality toolbox. Governmentality: Critical Encounters will prove useful for students of social and political theory, international relations, political sociology, anthropology and geography.

This is a broad-based text on the fundamentals of explosive behavior and the application of explosives in civil engineering, industrial processes, aerospace applications, and military uses.

Governing Europe is the first book to systematically link Michel Foucault's hypotheses on power and 'governmentality' with the study of European integration. Through a series of empirical encounters that spans the fifty-year history of European integration, it explores both the diverse political dreams that have framed means and ends of integration and the political technologies that have made 'Europe' a calculable, administrable domain.

The book illustrates how a genealogy of European integration differs from conventional approaches. By suspending the assumption that we already know what/where Europe is, it opens a space for analysis where we can ask: how did Europe come to be governed as this and not that? The themes covered by this book include:

* the different constructions of Europe within discourses of modernization, democratization, insecurity and 'governance'
* the imprint of modernism, liberalism, ordoliberalism, neoliberalism and crime on the identity of the European Community/European Union
* the historical relationship between European government and specific technologies of power, technologies as diverse as planning, price control, transparency and benchmarking.