Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces Review

Overview and Structure of the Book

Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, edited by Wendy Larner and William Walters, was published in 2004 by Routledge and runs to 262 pages. The book engages with a series of novel concepts in global politics and is interesting in numerous ways — not least for the innovative positions it takes on a range of issues and for a writing style that makes it a valuable addition to the library of any politics specialist, as well as an accessible read for a non-specialist seeking to deepen their understanding of the contemporary world.

The book opens with an introductory section by Larner and Walters and is then organized into two parts and twelve chapters. Part One: Rethinking Key Concepts contains four chapters: (1) "Liberalism — What's in a Name?" by Barry Hindess; (2) "Nomos and the Politics of World Order" by Mitchell Dean; (3) "Global Networks, International Networks, Actor Networks" by Gavin Kendall; and (4) "The Security of Governance" by Michael Dillon.

Part Two: Problems, Practices, Assemblages, Regimes begins with chapter (5) "Governing through the Social: Representations of Poverty and Global Governmentality" by Cristina Rojas, and continues with: (6) "The International Government of Refugees" by Robyn Lui; (7) "The Clash of Governmentalities: Displacement and Return in Bosnia-Herzegovina" by Gearroid O. Tuathail and Carl Dahlman; (8) "The Political Responsibility of European Integration" by William Walters; (9) "Forms of Governance, Governmentality and the EU's Open Method of Coordination" by Roger Dale; (10) "Ethical Capitalism" by Andrew Barry; (11) "Global Benchmarking: Participating 'at a Distance' in the Globalization Economy" by Wendy Larner and Richard Le Heron; and finally (12) "Insecurity and the Dream of Targeted Governance" by Mariana Valverde and Michael Mopas.

Editors and Contributors

Before the main body of the book, the editors acknowledge all those who contributed to the volume. Each contributor is an established researcher, and the opening pages provide useful details on their academic backgrounds, current positions, and previous publications. Wendy Larner is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology, with specializations in globalization, gender, and governance. At the time of publication she was working on a book entitled After Neoliberalism?, and her previous work consisted primarily of articles in specialized academic journals. William Walters is an Associate Professor whose most notable earlier publication is Unemployment and Government: Genealogies of the Social. His primary areas of expertise include European Union integration, citizenship, and questions of borders, mobility, and immobility within the EU.

Introduction: Governmentality as a Framework

The introductory section previews the themes addressed in the subsequent chapters and situates the volume's novelty in its shared theoretical commitment: every contributor engages with the concept of governmentality, first introduced by Michel Foucault in 1978 and developed through lectures published in the early 1990s. As Larner and Walters put it, "Each chapter seeks to demonstrate how concepts and themes drawn from what has now become a wide-ranging debate on governmentality, often in combination with theories from other intellectual trajectories, offer new perspectives on the governing of international spaces" (Larner and Walters, 2004).

The introduction also explains the concept in its dual sense. At a generic level, governmentality refers to the involvement of representations, knowledge, and expertise in the governing process. At a more specific level, it translates into a "new way of thinking about exercising power" (Larner and Walters). The editors then survey how the term has been employed across the specialized literature, finding that, despite certain common elements, its interpretation and application vary considerably from one source to another.

Part One: Rethinking Key Concepts

Before the first chapter formally begins, Larner and Walters introduce Part One by arguing for a fresh approach to global governance — one that can respond to changes in the international environment, most notably the emerging forces of globalization.

Chapter one opens with an analogy drawn from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to illuminate the relationship between a concept's name and its essence. Extrapolating from Juliet's famous question, Barry Hindess identifies a direct linkage between the label "liberalism" and its historical applications in international politics, economics, and relations — specifically its cosmopolitan dimensions. To make this argument, Hindess first maps the relationship between liberalism and governance, asking what governmental role liberalism plays. His analysis yields a tension: viewing liberalism as a supra-state, cosmopolitan force makes it difficult to simultaneously regard it as a principle of everyday domestic governance. The author finds the two understandings to be, in important respects, mutually exclusive.

In "Nomos and the Politics of World Order," Mitchell Dean contends that the idea of world order holds appeal across political divides. He draws on historical references to the two World Wars — which made the prospect of global peace seem remote — as well as the instability that followed their conclusion, ongoing armed conflicts in various regions, and the universal threat of terrorism. Within this context, Dean introduces the concept of double standards as an analytical necessity. He argues that double standards are common in inter-state relations, where parties are differentiated by divergent norms and interests, but are less prevalent within intra-state relationships, where common principles apply. Given this situation, the pursuit of global peace raises questions that Dean works through by means of analogy and theoretical reasoning.

Gavin Kendall's chapter on global, international, and actor networks begins with an analysis of power and the drive for dominance characteristic of Western imperialism and colonialism. Kendall argues that the values animating that historical desire for power have been transformed into the values shaping modern society. He identifies a recurring error in the existing literature, however: other researchers have attributed too much autonomous agency to globalization itself. For Kendall, globalization is not more than a concept; it is the people and institutional structures behind it that give it force. He therefore develops a theory of how global networks are constructed and how they sustain themselves, drawing on examples from society and technology alike. His conclusion is that global peace and order can only be achieved through the full cooperation of all actors within the international system, and that both the will and the structural capacity to cooperate must be present for such goals to be realized.

The final chapter of Part One, "The Security of Governance" by Michael Dillon, departs from the premise that there is a direct and constitutive connection between population, government, and security — a conclusion derived from an earlier study that in turn raised new questions addressed here. Dillon argues that in an ideal world, peace would emerge from productive partnerships between public and private actors ensuring the safety of all populations and social classes. In practice, however, governmentality functions less as a straightforward cooperative arrangement and more as a "technological ontology that proceeds through reflexive epistemologies." Dillon elaborates: "Here the dialogical interplay of the ontological and the technological is in evidence. If it takes a metaphysic to imagine a technic, it takes a technic to realize a metaphysic. But even that rendition fails to do justice to the co-evolutionary dynamic that exists in the power relations between technology and ontology. This is a mutually disclosive relationship in which each seems propelled by independent dynamics as well: the technologist continuously to interrogate and refine systems, the ontologist to secure the meaning of being." Technology and ontology, in other words, validate and sustain each other in the pursuit of pre-established goals.

References

Larner, W. and Walters, W. (2004). Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces. Routledge.