Search Results

This chapter outlines the key aims of the book: first, to explore what it is like for young people to undergo employability training as a pathway into work in the UK; second, to investigate the strategies and motivations of local policymakers and training providers, whose mission it is to achieve employability skills development indifferent regions of the UK; and third, through the lens of a Post-Foucauldian governmentality approach, to contribute theoretically to understanding of both policy and practice of youth employability training in the UK context. Each of these aims is introduced and the structure of the book’s chapters is presented.

This chapter explores the rise of the concept of employability and how it has influenced policy and practical interventions to address unemployment. It explores how the concept has been understood as a threshold for labour market readiness or as a process of continual skills development necessary in a flexible labour market. It argues that employability is frequently utilised in neoliberalising forms of governmentality, shifting responsibility of gaining work onto the individual, rather than considering the various external and structural factors that affect employment prospects. A case study of an employability programme in the North East explores the practices through which the discourse of employability acts upon individuals.

Over the past few decades governments worldwide have developed youth policies, encompassing diverse measures to address the problems and potentials of their younger populations. These policies have not emerged independently in diverse countries; intergovernmental organisations and international discourses are involved. In this chapter we use Foucault's concepts of governmentality and biopower to analyse a UNESCO (2004) publication designed to guide youth policy development, and the recently formulated youth policies of Malawi and Lesotho. We examine how youth policies perform as technologies of power, enabling states to exercise control over individuals and populations; and how such technologies produce individual subjects that are valuable to neoliberal economies. More significantly, we investigate whether youth policies represent a form of transnational governmentality through which the agendas of global capital contribute to the production of neoliberal subjects for a globalising market. We show that while this is, to an extent, true, the transnational exercise of power is far from all-encompassing, and we conclude by emphasising the unevenness and incompleteness of the exercise of neoliberalising power through youth policies in these two countries.

This chapter examines the ways in which bottled water manufacturers work to redeem and positively reposition bottled water in the face of public attack and market contestation. It discusses techniques of ‘ethicalisation’, particularly ethical branding and cause-related marketing. These techniques are employed to re-qualify bottled water as a force for good particularly amongst various communities of ‘need’. The ethicalisation activities of one Australian bottled water brand, Mount Franklin, are analysed in detail. These activities range from cause-related marketing such as associating bottled water with breast cancer research and environmental advocacy, to more complex interventions into remote Indigenous Australian communities where uneven access to cool safe water and consumption of sugary drinks were causing major health problems. In these communities the company ran a ‘Choose Water’ campaign to encourage bottled water consumption as a healthy alternative. This was both a PR strategy and an act of governmentality.

This chapter diagnoses how humanitarian non-governmental organizations are filling a vacuum created ironically by governments outsourcing their governing functions that marks a transformation of the Westphalian order of states by neoliberalism. The proliferation of non-state actors facilitates the politicization of human rights around how to recognize who or what is a human being endowed with natural rights, and who is a terrorist, outlaw, or posthuman. By tracing the connections between human rights and governmentality, human rights advocates must acknowledge their cozy relationship with powerful militaries, which has resulted in humanitarian interventions using the language of rights to justify neocolonial projects that often intensify human suffering. Humanitarianism may function as a deterritorialized form of governmentality that offers a theatrical illusion of protection and security, while undermining their possibilities structurally. Powerful states not only use human rights and humanitarian legitimations for their particularist geopolitical and economic ends, but also direct humanitarian NGOs strategically by proxy for their own interests. In the process the very idea of securing humans becomes instrumentalized as a form of outsourced governance that can be a model eventually for “expendable people” within nation-states.

This chapter describes the cultural techniques of interrogation, registration, and licensing on the boundary between land and sea, that produced in sixteenth century Spain the legal passenger to “The Indies” in contrast to the illegal passenger, the vagabond, the parasite. The invention of a bureaucratical apparatus and notational techniques of state control over the migration of individuals across the border between Europa and America, land and sea, made those who otherwise would have disappeared without a trace into historical darkness speak of themselves. The chapter analyzes the discourse of the interrogations of witnesses, the petitions of the passengers, and the passenger registers in the Archive General de Indias in Seville, and demonstrates how the bureaucratic procedures that produce the legal passenger prdicue at the same time the problematic difference between fact and fiction, truth and fake. It demonstrates, too, how closely the problem of distinguishing between fact and fiction in the registers and the problem of producing fictitious identities by what Foucault called governmentality is connected to the early modern problem of distinguishing between true and false poor and the emergence of a discourse on a parasitic ecomomy of false beggars and vagabonds.

This introduces the reader to the argument in this monograph. It outlines the need for this project by locating it within the existing literature on corporate and white-collar crime and regulatory jurisprudence. Finally, it briefly summarises the structure of the monograph.

The article discusses post-politics in relation to the contemporary ‘return’ of religion. I start with considering some of the paradoxes that are visible in the horizon of post-political society. The pivot around which this discussion is organized is the sovereignty-governmentality-visibility nexus. In this context I am especially interested in the relationship between sovereignty and governmentality, which takes the form of a disjunctive synthesis. Then, to articulate the religious motives that are constitutive of this paradoxical relationship, I turn to political and economic theology. To end with, I discuss capitalism as religion, linking this back to the concept of post-politics.

Kevin Stenson discusses Wacquant concept of neo-liberal governance and also the resistances it encounters. Resistance is a key theme which he elaborates from the perspective of a ‘realist governmentality theory’ which yields a more general view of the neoliberal state (by comparison with that of Wacquant) comprising a variety of rationalities of liberal governance of which “governance from below” is a key ingredient. Stenson echoes the contributors who focus on resistance when he argues that the new urban precariat must be seen, not just as the victims of advanced marginality and penalisation but as actors, with racial and ethnic identities, globally mobile whose ‘governance from below is a challenge to contemporary “elite statecraft”.

In the first chapter, the author provides a picture of the current state of contemporary Foucauldian interpretations of law. The author claims that Foucauldian scholars – notwithstanding recent important contributions – have not been able to properly debunk the thesis that Foucault “expelled” law from the locus of power. The author proposes to overcome this impasse by considering law as a proper sui generis apparatus of subjectivation and by undertaking a geneaology of the modern discourse of law in order to discover its generative syntax. The author’s goal is to demonstrate that in developing towards its modern form, law moved from being an order based upon the paradigm of sovereign commands to one based on the paradigm of socially constructed norms (understood in a Foucauldian way). The author identifies the formal features of generality, abstraction, and the substantive features of equality and freedom as key for this purpose.

This chapter interrogates Chantal Mouffe’s discussion of cosmopolitanism and multipolar order with reference to the global governance projects of the European Union (EU) and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) group. Prima facie, the EU’s commitment to a post-sovereign world of multilateral cooperation contrasts with BRICS’ call for a multipolar world order, much like cosmopolitanism and multipolarity in Mouffe’s analysis. Taking an agonistic and pluralist perspective, Mouffe criticizes cosmopolitanism for depoliticizing global governance and advocates a multipolar world order giving due recognition to competing political aspirations and identities as an alternative. Drawing on Foucauldian governmentality analysis and Jacques Rancière’s political theory, this paper deconstructs Mouffe’s position and develops an alternative agonistic approach. In a first move, it challenges the ostensible opposition between the EU’s cosmopolitanism and BRICS’ multipolar approach by highlighting the EU’s cosmopolitan ‘ambiguities’ and BRICS’ ‘bricolage(s)’ of governmentalities beyond multipolarity. In a second move, it suggests that Rancière’s conception of a politics of equality that creates political subjects through ‘disagreement’ provides a more promising avenue than Mouffe’s multipolar approach to theorize the political in the BRICS-EU dyad.

Chapter 2 provides a theoretical introduction to the study, addressing the puzzling status of Soviet socialism more generally in the canonical theories of biopolitics, where it has been largely ignored at the expense of liberalism and Nazism. We address the scant dossier of the remarks on Soviet biopolitics by the three key authors in the field – Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. We begin with Foucault’s influential move of subsuming Soviet biopolitics under Western rationalities of government, rejecting the existence of anything like a properly socialist governmentality of life. We then proceed to Agamben’s theory of biopolitics, which was produced at the time of the collapse of the USSR and was understandably less interested in the socialist case. Agamben’s famous claim about the ‘inner solidarity’ of democracy and totalitarianism in biopolitical terms leads him to deny any specificity to the Soviet case. Finally, we address Esposito’s attempt to differentiate between totalitarianism and biopolitics as two paradigms for grasping the 20^th century. In the conclusion we propose to approach the question of socialist biopolitics by addressing the problematization of life at work within the governmental rationality of Stalinism: how does life function in the mode of political reasoning that defines the Stalinist project?

Chapter 1 discusses the relationship between governance and conflict resolution in India and the EU. It finds a lot of similarities between the two entities especially in terms of their concern for democratic credentials and institutional design, increasingly based on neo-liberal principles. Both India and the EU give primacy to statebuilding in their conflict resolution strategies and emphasise the importance of development and bureaucracy in the process. The authors find that one of the main differences between the two entities is in the security measures they undertake. While the EU has a more relaxed approach to security policy, India puts emphasis on the use of hard security measures, seeing itself as a unitary sovereign actor rather than a quasi-federal entity (as with the EU). This is also one of the most common critiques of India’s efforts in producing conflict resolution, along with the inefficiency of its governance and the corruption that surrounds it. The EU can be partly criticised for its selective approach to conditionalities in accession/association process which in some cases even resembles the colonial past of some of the most prominent members of the EU. The authors conclude that the two entities achieve a certain level of governmentality while their success in producing conflict resolution in a purer form of reconciliation and social justice is relatively limited.

This chapter examines inmate life inside the Anglo-Boer War concentration camps. Native African refugees were segregated into a system of labor camps while British officials developed a form of governmentality that sought to educate, anglicize and rehabilitate Boer refugees by inculcating British cultural ideals and industrial habits, thereby transforming them into imperial citizens and willing partners of a British South Africa. The medical techniques of quarantine and segregation were adapted to inmates suspected of political subversion, who were detained in undesirable camps. Ultimately, both African and Boer camps suffered from the spread of epidemic diseases like measles, which resulted in staggering mortality rates in the camps and created a damaging political scandal in Britain. The humanitarian reformer Emily Hobhouse noted that scenes of suffering and death in the concentration camps could only be matched by similar sights during plague and famine in India.

This chapter critically investigates the welfare-to-work ‘ethics’ in the UK in the context of the Big Society, using the example of the Pathways Ltd case study to show how FBOs work with government policy to suppress regimes tackling social justices in European cities.

This chapter responds to the call for green state theories which challenge the neo-Weberian assumptions of ecological modernisation. This entails revisiting the question of ‘what is the state?’ Weberian, Marxist, and International Relations (IR) theories of the state are evaluated, particularly in terms of their adequacy in understanding and explaining states in Africa. Postcolonial theorists, such as Achille Mbembe and Jean-François Bayart, influenced by Michel Foucault, are introduced to provide a perspective on the state which starts from diverse practices and governmental rationalities (or governmentalities), rather than a core unity. This enables a framework of analysis which conceives of states as the effects of a variety of forms of governance and contestation, particular over land, populations, economies and international relations. This chapter accordingly provides the analytical structure and questions which drive the four subsequent more empirically-orientated chapters. It is an intervention into, and contribution to, contemporary debates over state theory in Africa.