The International and the Global. Global governmentality: Analytics and practice of government

Abstract

Objective/context: This paper is the result of Colombia Internacional’s call to reflect on Global Studies from the South. It is a critical theoretical contribution aiming at putting aside the binary opposing the global and the international. Instead, it seeks to think about them as mutually constitutive. Methodology: Through a bibliographical revision that inquires into its most important texts, it argues that Global Studies has as raison d’être a narrow conception of International Relations and of the international. The article holds that the latter is conceived as equal to interstate. This way, the global emerges in opposition to the state and linked to global civil society. The paper proposes Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality as a tool to elude this binary. Governmentality is globalised and presented both as an analytical framework and as a liberal government practice. This way, it allows to think a power decentred from the state, as well as exercised in multiple directions, and not in opposition to civil society but through it. Conclusion: It concludes that governmentality allows conceiveing both the governmentalised state and civil society as products of liberalism understood as a globalised govermental practice, thus erasing the binary on which the emergence of Global Studies is based. Originality: The paper is a contribution from the Foucauldian perspective on governmentality to the debate between International Relations and Global Studies.