Similar
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.
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.