Western IR and the rest of the world

It has become commonplace to question the degree to which IR is properly international or global, and to highlight the marginalisation or sidelining of certain regions of the world.Footnote ⁵ For example, Cornelissen, Cheru, and Shaw assert that ‘Africa is generally under-represented in the mainstream IR scholarship emanating from the North Atlantic world and is mostly left out of the theoretical debates that have animated this scholarship.’Footnote ⁶ There are a wide range of reasons why IR is often regarded as having little of interest to say about what Chatterjee calls ‘popular politics in most of the world’,Footnote ⁷ ranging from the sociological to the analytical.Footnote ⁸ Here I want to draw attention to three major problems, concerning the basic units of the discipline, the types of question asked and the values and norms consciously or unconsciously espoused, and the prevailing balance between theoretical generalisation and empirical analysis. In all of these areas, this article will argue that an analytics of government framework can provide a more productive approach to world politics.

The predominance of the state as the fundamental unit of the discipline is probably the most frequently cited reason for the alleged irrelevance of IR in some parts of the world.Footnote ⁹ This can take the form of the neorealist assumption that under conditions of anarchy all states are ‘like units’,Footnote ¹⁰ or the broader view prevalent in much IR scholarship that the central focus of the discipline are the relations between sovereign states and these relations constitute a distinct realm of politics. Both these positions seem questionable in places such as the Great Lakes region of central Africa, where transborder flows of weapons, money, goods, and people pass with often very little control or authority exercised by states.Footnote ¹¹ An extensive literature has accordingly sought to problematise, modify, or even entirely reject the concept of the sovereign Westphalian state in the African context, variously highlighting the porousness or lack of control over borders, the at-best partial rule of law, the existence of multiple armed centres of power, extensive international intervention or aid donor penetration, and so on.Footnote ¹² What is certain is that any attempt to understand and explain African politics, and its insertion into international processes and power relations, must be attuned to a wide range of potential actors and state formations.

A second reason for the commonplace assumption of IR's irrelevance in the rest of the world stems from a belief that the values and norms which IR serves consciously or unconsciously to promote are those of Western Europe and North America. This is manifested in the types of question IR literature commonly addresses, where it is suggested that scholarship has consistently marginalised questions of poverty, race, gender, and the environment in a prevailing focus on issues of international order, war, and Great Power politics.Footnote ¹³ Darby argues that ‘the construction of the political in contemporary Western discourse marginalises the struggle of non-European peoples for economic justice and racial equality and discounts their historical experience of dispossession’.Footnote ¹⁴ At its starkest this concern sometimes takes the form of strongly worded allegations that mainstream IR exhibits ‘a deep-seated belief that non-whites have nothing to contribute to the making of world history’.Footnote ¹⁵ Whilst this might be a rather unfair characterisation of contemporary IR, such a view is hardly surprising given the continued (and perhaps inadvertent) tendency of some IR theorists to echo Robert Kaplan's portrayal of life on the ‘Dark Continent’ as nasty, brutish, and short,Footnote ¹⁶ or Hans Morgenthau's description of Great Power expansion ‘into the political empty spaces of Africa and Asia’.Footnote ¹⁷ Any analytical framework with a genuinely global scope must be capable of illuminating how gendered, racial, class-based, and ecological categories are reproduced and challenged by prevailing power relations.

The third reason highlighted for some of the difficulties IR faces in ‘travelling well’ is connected to what many regard as an overly theoretical, dry and academic style of analysis, with little evident concern for, or contribution to, ‘real world’ concerns. This is a theme repeatedly highlighted by Tickner and Wæver and their contributors.Footnote ¹⁸ It stems in part from a frequently assumed division of labour in which ‘the Third World’ becomes little more than another source of primary material – ‘data’ – upon which the added value of theory-building is done elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet this frustration with theory can also stem from a form of anti-intellectualism in which abstract or critical theorising is seen as too divorced from grassroots problems or the scale of challenges like poverty, ethnic violence, or climate change. Rather than a demand to cease critical thinking, however, this should be seen as a broader indictment of ‘the inadequacy of the analytical equipment provided by established IR theory in capturing and explaining shifting processes’ in Africa and elsewhere.Footnote ²⁰ This is a challenge to which the next section seeks to respond.

Governmentality, Africa, and an analytics of government framework

I argue that Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality and the ‘analytics of government’ framework it has inspired can help overcome some of these issues, and in so doing provides a powerful tool for analysing power relations throughout the world, and particularly in Africa. Such a framework is designed to address rationalised and calculated regimes of government, which conduct the conduct of (at least partially) free and multiple subjectivities through specific techniques and technologies, within particular fields of visibility. In addition to addressing some of the problems identified above, it has three further specific strengths: it is designed to analyse concrete empirical power relations; it draws attention to similarities between power relations that cut across perceived binaries such as the domestic and international and public and private; and it shows how power works through practices of freedom as well as violence and coercion, and how these are combined and reciprocated in varying degrees in contemporary global politics.

Governmentality is a complex and contested bundle of concepts, approaches, and ideas, which have at their heart the notion that power can work through practices of freedom as well as simply domination or coercion.Footnote ²¹ For Nikolas Rose, ‘to govern is to presuppose the freedom of the governed’,Footnote ²² and Miller and Rose argue that ‘power is not so much a matter of imposing constraints upon citizens as of “making up” citizens capable of bearing a kind of regulated freedom’.Footnote ²³ However, as Hindess, Dean and others have made clear, this emphasis on freedom should not preclude the study of ways in which even liberal forms of rule mobilise and rely upon violence, coercion, and sovereign power: such as in prisons, detention centres, the policing of protest and immigration, and the power of social services to remove children from families, cut benefits, evict tenants, and so on.Footnote ²⁴

In order to understand this close interdependence between coercion and liberalism, we can turn to Foucault's emphasis on the mutual constitution of power and freedom: one cannot exist without the other, and power is only exercised over free subjects.Footnote ²⁵ In this sense freedom does not mean the absence of constraints (negative liberty) or even a fuller conception of control of one's life and the realisation of human potential (positive liberty).Footnote ²⁶ Rather freedom is both a condition of possibility for, and a product of, human subjectivity. A subject who exercises some kind of agency or free choice is amenable to forms of power working through practices of freedom, even in the face of violence. The presence of violence does not mean the absence of freedom, or the absence of government. War itself governs the conduct of free subjects in certain ways (through the creation of markets for goods and services, through the inculcation of certain types of behaviour or beliefs in citizens, and through the establishment of zones requiring international intervention, peace-keeping, policing, reconstruction, and peace-building).Footnote ²⁷ As such there is a place for the analysis of forms of violence and coercion – alongside more freedom-orientated forms of power relation – within an analytics of government framework.

However, this move requires further clarification of what exactly is meant by governmentality. The term is derived from mentalities or rationalities of government, with government understood in the broad Foucauldian sense of ‘the conduct of conduct’, rather than a state-centric or sovereign mode of political power.Footnote ²⁸ Foucault himself used the term in several different ways, sometimes simultaneously,Footnote ²⁹ and this ambiguity has been further exacerbated by different usages within the broader global governmentality literature. This broader literature has turned a governmentality lens onto the governance of international politics as well as domestic politics, and away from the particular historical European context of Foucault's work and onto experiences of colonialism and neo-colonialism in contemporary North America, Africa, Latin America, and Asia.Footnote ³⁰

Yet applications of governmentality to global politics, as well as to places such as Africa, have attracted a range of criticisms. Foucault has frequently been caricatured as a Euro-centric, inward-looking theorist obsessed with textuality, discourse, and representation, and having little of value to say to those outside metropolitan café culture.Footnote ³¹ More sympathetic IR theorists, on the other hand, have sometimes argued that some parts of the world (such as Africa) are too different from the social, economic, and political contexts Foucault's own work addressed to enable meaningful adaptation, and more particularly that the focus in the governmentality literature on power through freedom has limited applicability in non-liberal societies.Footnote ³² Jonathan Joseph, for example, suggests that rather than a world in which liberal governmentalities are hegemonic, there is a liberal core where power operates through freedom whilst ‘in other parts of the world the management of populations may have to rely on cruder disciplinary practices’.Footnote ³³ Africa, at least for Joseph, functions as a limit at which attempts to theorise global politics from a Foucauldian perspective start to lose their purchase. The argument in this article is first that such a division of the world into liberal regions and illiberal regions obscures the degree to which forms of power through freedom coexist and inter-relate with forms of violence and coercion throughout world politics; and secondly that broadening and clarifying our view of what governmentality means – beyond solely liberal or neoliberal forms of power – can render it a much more useful analytical tool.

In order to do this it is important to distinguish two crucially different ways in which governmentality has been used in IR, which stem from Foucault's own ambiguous and varied definitions. First, some have used it to describe a particular and historically specific rationality of rule, which Foucault argues emerged in the eighteenth century and was then expressed in the neo-liberalism of the Chicago School and Ordo-Liberals in the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁴ This use of governmentality is often deployed synonymously with liberalism, neo-liberalism, or advanced liberal rule. It is this usage to which many have primarily objected, arguing it risks seeing global politics as uniformly liberal, and overemphasising the success of the neoliberal project in places like Africa.Footnote ³⁵ In contrast, the second use of governmentality regards it more as a general approach, framework, or method for analysing mentalities or rationalities of government. The ‘analytics of government’ proposed by Mitchell Dean is symptomatic of this approach, which advocates examination of regimes of government through their fields of visibility, regimes of knowledge, techniques and technologies, and forms of subjectification.Footnote ³⁶ This distinctive way of asking questions can be applied to almost any considered, or rationalised, form of power relation, including authoritarian rule,Footnote ³⁷ and is in line with the way in which Foucault's own understanding of governmentality was developing in his later work into an ‘analytical perspective for relations of power in general’.Footnote ³⁸

In this article I regard governmentality in its broader sense as the (rationalised) ‘way in which one conducts people's conduct’,Footnote ³⁹ and propose Dean's analytics of government as a framework for studying the ways in which power relations are designed and implemented in order to conduct people's conduct in certain ways.Footnote ⁴⁰ This definition points toward the increasingly broad perspective on governmentality Foucault's later lectures reveal. In The Birth of Biopolitics lectures he remarks that governmentality should ‘be considered simply as a point of view, a method of decipherment’.Footnote ⁴¹ Here Foucault justifies his lengthy discussion of German neoliberalism in two ways, one methodological, one ‘a reason of critical morality’,Footnote ⁴² both of which are of interest and lend weight to my interpretation of Dean's approach.

The first reason is methodological, and aims to deploy governmentality as an analytical framework. Foucault clarifies that ‘what I have proposed to call governmentality, which is the way in which one conducts the conduct of men, is no more than a proposed analytical grid for these relations of power’.Footnote ⁴³ He goes on to suggest that

The second reason, which Foucault describes as a critical morality, takes issue with the neoliberal attack on the state which tended to locate welfare statism on the same continuum as the authoritarian statism of Nazism and Communism.Footnote ⁴⁵ Foucault's critique distinguishes between the governmentality underpinning the Keynesian welfare state, which he describes as a ‘statified governmentality born in the seventeenth and eighteenth century’, and the governmentality underpinning fascism and the totalitarian state. The latter he describes as a ‘party governmentality’.Footnote ⁴⁶ He goes on to argue that twentieth-century governmentalities have been characterised by the ‘reduction of state governmentality’ through two alternative trajectories: ‘through the growth of party governmentality, and … an attempt to find a liberal governmentality’.Footnote ⁴⁷ What emerges here is therefore an approach to governmentality as a framework for distinguishing and differentiating between competing rationalities of rule. Foucault identifies liberal, state, and party governmentalities; in a similar vein Nadesan identifies laissez-faire, social-welfare, neoliberal, and neoconservative governmentalities.Footnote ⁴⁸

Such an approach to governmentality illustrates how it relates to, but also differs crucially from, other familiar Foucauldian schemas of power relations, such as sovereign, disciplinary, pastoral, neoliberal, and biopower.Footnote ⁴⁹ Whilst in some of his earlier work we sometimes get the impression that one form of power is being replaced by another (sovereign by disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish; or discipline by biopower in The History of Sexuality, for example), in the later lecture series he is clear that they are rather combined and recombined in different ways, and justified according to different rationales.Footnote ⁵⁰ For example, in the emergence of the statist governmentality of the eighteenth century ‘we have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management, which has population as its main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism’.Footnote ⁵¹ This statist governmentality is not the same as other governmental rationalities, such as laissez-faire, social-welfare, neoliberal, or neoconservative. The deployment of governmentality as a way of approaching the analysis of world politics does not therefore imply the redundancy of sovereign, pastoral, or disciplinary modes of power, but rather it provides a framework designed to examine how such power relations are combined and rationalised in different forms of rule. Biopower, for example, is a form of power relation which works on and through a population or species; in contrast an analytics of government is a framework for exploring various different subjectivities through which power relations are produced: not simply the population but also individuals, civil societies, states, communities, corporations, etc. The approach deployed in this article is therefore to regard an analytics of government as a way of making sense of how the world is ordered and governed, rather than treating governmentality as a description of a particular form of power or way of ordering the world.

As such an analytics of government framework operates at a different level of analysis to other typologies of power, whether Foucauldian categories of sovereign, disciplinary, pastoral, liberal, and biopower, or more familiar IR schemas such as Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall's categories of compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive power.Footnote ⁵² Barnett and Duvall set out a matrix consisting of relations of interaction (compulsory and institutional power) and relations of constitution (structural and productive power) on one axis, and direct (compulsory and structural) and diffuse (institutional and productive) forms of power on the other. They suggest that Foucauldian and poststructuralist understandings of power relations best fit within the productive category: the ‘socially diffuse production of subjectivity in systems of meaning and signification’.Footnote ⁵³ However, the analytics of government approach advanced here is not so much a particular type of power, but an analytical framework for all rationalised attempts to govern power relations. It sets out to map the ways in which compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive forms of power (to use Barnett and Duvall's terms) are combined and overlap, working through particular calculated rationalities, visibilities, knowledges, technologies, and subjectivities.

This is not to claim, however, that all forms of power are equally amenable to a governmentality analysis. An analytics of government is designed for particular types of rationalised power relation. For Dean, the ‘study of government does not amount to a study of politics or power relations in general; it is a study only of the attempts to (more or less) rationally affect the conduct of others and ourselves’.Footnote ⁵⁴ What is significant about liberal rationalities of rule is their tendency to justify or rationalise themselves through reference to freedom (even if they mobilise violence and coercion to this end, such as by fighting a war to spread democracy). On the other hand there can also exist power relations that are barely rationalised (arbitrary rule, random violence, some forms of criminality), as well as rationalities of rule which rely upon certain practices of freedom, without justifying themselves in the name of liberty (for example, even authoritarian regimes will seek to conduct their subjects through propaganda, religion, and economic incentives, rather than pure or total coercion). Whilst barely rationalised power relations are not amenable to the analytics of government framework proposed here, I suggest that authoritarian rationalities are.Footnote ⁵⁵

Dean's work on governmentality has provided a framework for analysing these programmatic forms of power in terms of their regimes of knowledge, forms of subjectivity, techniques and technologies, and fields of visibility.Footnote ⁵⁶ The first step in utilising this framework is to identify a specific field of government or problem-area: health, the environment, crime, terrorism, the economy, peacebuilding, etc. As Nadesan states, ‘what sets governmentality apart from other methodological approaches to understanding social governance is that governmentality takes governance's problem-solution frames as its object of analysis’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The central question an analytics of government seeks to answer within this problem-area is ‘how are we governed?’Footnote ⁵⁸ Specific sub-questions that follow on from this include: What are the political consequences of the forms of government adopted? What forms of resistance are produced through these forms of government (counter-conducts)? Where are the gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions within these forms of government?Footnote ⁵⁹ The analytics of government also relies upon focussed empirical analysis of the regime of government in four key respects:

Forms of knowledge: An analytics of government is particularly attuned to the rationalities and mentalities at work in regimes of government. It focuses upon power relations that are calculated, weighed up, planned and justified, rather than more arbitrary, subconscious or unconsidered power relations, and asserts that forms of verification, truth-making, legitimation, and relations of power/knowledge are central to the way in which contemporary regimes of government operate. As Rose describes it, ‘to govern, one could say, is to be condemned to seek an authority for one's authority’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Subjectivities: Regimes of government produce and work through plural and multiple free subjects. A state-centric or sovereign perspective is not able to capture the constitutive and productive element of power relations, as Barnett and Duvall illustrate in their description of productive power.Footnote ⁶¹ These subjectivities could be the familiar rational homo economicus of neoliberal orthodoxy, but other subjectivities such as non-governmental organisations, private corporations, states, international organisations, scientific bodies, and experts, civil societies, populations, protestors, and social movements are also brought into being through particular governmental rationalities.Footnote ⁶²

Techniques and technologies: Methodologically, an analytics of government begins from the bottom-up, in the sense of investigating manifestations of power relations at their point of application. These techniques and technologies – auditing and benchmarking processes, ratings systems, public-private partnerships, development plans, sustainability strategies, and so on – bring into being particular subjectivities. In this vein Miller and Rose argue that it is only through the ‘little instruments’ of psychologists, accountants, town planners, educators and so on that rule can actually occur.Footnote ⁶³ However, in an important departure from the approach of Miller and Rose, I argue that an analytics of government can also encompass more violent and coercive practices. Whilst these might be minimised within liberal governmentalities (although not absent, as the examples of prisons or the ‘War on Terror’ demonstrate) they are more clearly present and openly justified within neoconservative and authoritarian governmentalities.Footnote ⁶⁴

Fields of visibility: Finally, a governmentality approach is attuned to the clashes between competing rationalities, the gaps, fractures, and inconsistencies between governmental rationalities, and the creation of particular visible fields of government alongside other invisible, ungoverned spaces. As Rose notes, ‘to govern, it is necessary to render visible the space over which government is to be exercised’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Specific governmental rationalities will also be in competition with other rationalities, and they will rarely be completely smooth or successful processes. It is in these liminal spaces between competing rationalities and alternative visibilities that the possibility of resistance emerges most clearly.Footnote ⁶⁶

These distinctive features of a governmentality approach are illustrated in the following sections, which show how a governmentality analysis can produce original re-readings of African politics with respect to globalisation, aid relationships, and violent conflict.

Africa and globalisation

The work of Jean-François Bayart is an excellent illustration of how an analytics of government approach can be used to illuminate the ways in which processes of economic globalisation are deeply immersed in African power relations, in contrast to the prevailing ‘global cognitive landscape in which “globalisation is passing Africa by”’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Bayart begins by rejecting the assumption of African marginality or irrelevance which characterises a great deal of Western history and social science (not just IR)Footnote ⁶⁸ by showing how Africa is, ‘in its way, a player in the process of globalisation’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Africa exports vast quantities of primary resources essential for the global economy (including, increasingly, oil); it receives substantial quantities of aid; it imports large quantities of consumer goods; it sends out migrants and receives remittances; it is central to the world's illegal narcotics trade; and events such as 9/11, the Iraq war, Chinese investment and hunger for resources, and geopolitical influence have given the continent a new strategic significance.Footnote ⁷⁰ Africa has played an important role in European, American, and Middle Eastern history, and for African societies and elites the external environment is and has been ‘a major resource in the process of political centralisation and economic accumulation’.Footnote ⁷¹ An analytics of government approach can be used to systematically highlight the extraverted power relationships which characterise the way in which African societies are located within globalised politics.

The concept of governmentality is central to Bayart's approach, and is used to distance himself from the dependency theory-inspired arguments of authors like Walter Rodney and Basil Davidson, and to show that dependency, subjectivity, and autonomy can be related and co-constitutive categories, rather than analytical opposites, as can resistance and complicity.Footnote ⁷² Governmentality is employed by Bayart as an approach to the study of forms of rule, rather than as a synonym for neoliberalism. He focuses upon the practices, technologies, and mentalities of government, in which government is understood as rule through the creation of autonomous subjects, rather than domination or coercion – an ‘action upon other actions’.Footnote ⁷³ He states clearly that a governmentality approach should ‘consist of identifying, in any given society, the principal discursive registers of politics’, and resisting the dichotomy between dominators and dominated.Footnote ⁷⁴ Thus his central thesis – that power relations in Africa are characterised by the politique du ventre (the politics of the belly) – is described in terms of a particular governmental rationality. It is possible to use the analytics of government framework proposed above to systematically showcase Bayart's argument, and identify the forms of knowledge, subjectivities, techniques and technologies, and fields of visibility through which the politics of the belly operates.

Forms of knowledge: The extraverted, privatised African state, in Bayart's analysis, operates according to its own particular rationalities of patronage, grandeur, and reciprocity. Power and wealth exist within moral economies in which it is expected that good things will be passed on to friends, relatives, clients, and protégés. Footnote ⁷⁵ These are quite different governmental rationalities to those promoted by the liberal ‘good governance’ discourse of the World Bank and aid donors.Footnote ⁷⁶ Bayart claims that in many African countries ‘both politicians and their fellow citizens share a particular governmentality together with the imaginary figures of power that are part and parcel of it … a system of power-through-eating’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This system of ‘power-through-eating’ has its own rules, standards of truth, norms and values, and expert authorities.

Subjectivities: Bayart describes a pluralised world of multiple sources of authority and legitimacy, including patrons and clients, transnational actors, kinship networks, religious groups, and political parties. His account of party politics in Cameroon is an excellent example of the ‘reciprocal assimilation’ of traditional chiefs and educated transnational elites who share similar discursive registers and political practices, and therefore produce a blurred zone of interaction between the state and society and between the international and the domestic.Footnote ⁷⁸ The implications of this are to complicate and problematise our usage of these categories when seeking to explain African politics, as well as drawing our attention to multiple other significant subjectivities.

Techniques and technologies: Power relations in their concrete and immediate manifestations are visible through practices such as public demonstrations and audiences, patron beneficence and munificence, and routinised acts of kindness and cruelty. In a similar manner Achille Mbembe draws attention to the ‘aesthetics of vulgarity’ and the ‘banality of power’ in the postcolony, and the reliance on spectacle, theatre, grandeur, and ‘the systematic application of pain’.Footnote ⁷⁹ These acts and practices can be observed operating in frequently similar ways across a whole range of privatised relations between African and international/transnational actors: private security firms, aid agencies, warlords, non-governmental organisations, drug smugglers, transnational corporations, private foundations, and many others.

Fields of visibility: The politics of the belly works through the creation of particular visible realms of government – the nation, the court, the city – which are paralleled by the creation of informal and invisible realms, such as the black market, transborder trade, and the inner circle of the ‘big man’. Light and dark, shadow and shade have become crucial metaphors for accounts of African power relations.Footnote ⁸⁰ In just one example, Pal Ahluwalia describes how the ubiquitous East African petrol station can be seen as islands of the West, of modernity, of light and energy, architecture, and smooth lines; yet they are also places of convergence for informal traders, taxi ranks, an unofficial market-place, and a site of the illicit shadow economy.Footnote ⁸¹ An analytics of government approach to the political economies of capital penetration in East Africa, for example, would draw attention to the particular spaces and power relations created by these petrol stations, and the ways in which they are created and governed by visible and invisible networks that cut across corporations, states, local elites, entrepreneurs, traders, and the particular community in that area.

As illustrated above, Bayart's work demonstrates the utility of an analytics of government approach in illuminating the regimes of knowledge, subjectivities, techniques, and fields of visibility through which African involvement in globalisation is conducted. It provides a powerful response to some of the critiques levelled at global governmentality studies. To take one example, Jonathan Joseph and Jan Selby, whilst both broadly supportive of the use of governmentality in certain ways, have suggested a governmentality analysis must be inserted within broader structural perspectives on global politics.Footnote ⁸² Joseph ‘draws on a broadly Marxist account of international relations in order to put governmentality in its proper place’.Footnote ⁸³ The central charge by Joseph and Selby is that governmentality is primarily descriptive, and cannot explain, for example, ‘why the Turkish state is more governmentalised than the Syrian one, [or] why there is so much “bad governance” in Africa specifically’.Footnote ⁸⁴

Yet, as shown above, an account such as Bayart's provides a nuanced and rich explanation for how the historical sociologies of the African state have been produced. As if anticipating this, Joseph argues that ‘[w]hile Foucauldians will reply that the aim is to explain the how, not to get caught up in the why, without the causal why, the range and limits of how governmentality works are impossible to explain.’Footnote ⁸⁵ He fears that without an explanation for why liberal governmentality works in some places but not in others, a global governmentality analysis leads to a portrayal of a flat, featureless world.

The problem with these critiques is that they – like some governmentality analysts – have unduly restricted the concept to a narrow equation with neoliberalism.Footnote ⁸⁶ In contrast, the analytics of government framework set out here is exactly designed to compare and contrast different governmental rationalities (whether classical liberal, neoliberal, neoconservative, disciplinary, authoritarian – or the ‘politics of the belly’) through their regimes of knowledge, subjectivities, techniques, and fields of visibility. Such an approach may not provide an underlying causal driver (that is, neoliberalism, international anarchy, or relations of production) for why some countries are more integrated into economic markets than others, but this is not the only form a conversation about causality has to take. More sophisticated and nuanced discussions of causality can involve a mixture of proximate as well as underlying causes, necessary and sufficient causes, context, meaning, understanding and explanation, as well as the weighing of various factors, explorations of context, portrayals of discursive framing, highlighting the role of key actors, and asking both how and why questions.Footnote ⁸⁷ Bayart's work relates the form of postcolonial power relations in Africa to the character of the African state and the extraverted relationship between African elites and transnational actors. Whilst this is not the only plausible explanation of Africa's role in processes of globalisation, it is provides a far more nuanced and variegated analysis than reliance on core IR concepts such as neoliberalism, core-periphery, strong states and weak states, and Great and minor powers – all of which tend to lead to the marginalisation of Africa within IR theory.

Africa and aid partnerships

The strength of an analytics of government framework in differentiating between alternative power relations, and showing how particular objects and subjects of governance are created, can also be seen in an analysis of contemporary development and aid partnerships. Rita Abrahamsen draws on the concept of governmentality to show how these partnerships work through practices of freedom, significantly advancing polarised debates over whether they represent true ‘African ownership’ or continued neocolonial donor dominance.Footnote ⁸⁸ She argues that whilst new aid partnerships such as Poverty Reductions Strategy Papers (PRSPs) or the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) do not represent either African emancipation or the removal of power relations, ‘the power of partnerships does not lie primarily in relations of domination, but in techniques of cooperation and inclusion’.Footnote ⁸⁹ This identification of a particular problem area (aid relationships) can be used to demonstrate the illuminatory potential of an analytics of government framework.

Regimes of knowledge: Despite the stress on ‘African ownership’ and ‘country-driven’ development, the presence of pervasive global discourses of development planning, such as the ubiquitous logical framework (or ‘log-frame’) approach, are clearly evident in contemporary aid partnerships.Footnote ⁹⁰ With the World Bank rebranding itself as a global ‘knowledge bank’, and the hegemony of particular forms of development economics across Washington and developing country finance ministries, the existence of semi-formalised internationally acceptable forms of knowledge for development are identifiable, through which new truths about African development are produced.Footnote ⁹¹ An example of these regimes of knowledge in practice is Tanzania's recent experience with ‘environmental mainstreaming’, which has been widely lauded as best practice and held up as an ‘inspiration to other developing countries, especially in Africa’.Footnote ⁹² It was funded and supported by foreign donors such as DFID and UNDP, produced according to international norms on participation, transparency, project management and sustainable development, and relied on advice from international consultants.Footnote ⁹³ This process is best understood not either as the provision of neutral and objective forms of technical knowledge, nor as simple neocolonial Western domination, but rather as the operation of rationalised and calculated regimes of government, which conduct the conduct of (at least partially) free African aid recipients in particular ways to produce new truths and new subjectivities.

Subjectivities: Tanzania is also a prominent example of the emergence of new aid partnerships in the broader spheres of development and poverty eradication, especially after a period of donor-recipient tension in the 1990s.Footnote ⁹⁴ These partnerships have served to internalise norms and practices of good governance, self-monitoring, accountability, and transparency in African policymakers, which Abrahamsen describes as the production of ‘modern, self-disciplined citizens and states that can be trusted to govern themselves according to liberal democratic norms’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Importantly these do not merely govern recipient states, as Joseph suggests,Footnote ⁹⁶ but a whole range of quasi-governmental institutions, political actors, NGOs, community partners, and even international agencies. Furthermore, whilst other analysts have interpreted this emphasis on partnership dialogues and post-conditionality as actually diminishing African control and agency,Footnote ⁹⁷ Abrahamsen argues that they represent ‘both new forms of agency and new forms of discipline’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Similarly, Harrison describes how such governmental technologies are producing new forms of state formation in Africa: transnationalised ‘governance states’ in which external and domestic actors are so interlinked it is virtually impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.Footnote ⁹⁹

Techniques and technologies: Donors have increasingly targeted their support on improving standards of data collection, analysis and assessment processes, and evaluation and reporting systems.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This flood of data, arising from surveillance, surveys, and monitoring, is driven by and reciprocally fuels the proliferation of reviews, plans, strategies, and policies that are required from developing countries. These include PRSPs, Human Development Reports, National Strategies for Sustainable Development, National Environmental Plans, Millennium Development Goals progress reports, climate change vulnerability and capacity assessments, integrated development plans, rural and urban land planning frameworks, and many more, each with demands for quantifiable, verifiable, auditable data.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The Tanzanian public services were at one point producing around 2,400 quarterly reports for external donors.Footnote ¹⁰² This bureaucratisation and technologisation of poverty (which can be a distraction from the political causes of poverty) can also be observed in many other spheres of world politics, such as war, peace-keeping, urban security, healthcare, education, and many others.

Fields of visibility: Harrison's analysis of the production of ‘governance states’ in Tanzania, Uganda, and Mozambique also illustrates how different governmentalities are at work in different places and at different times. Certainly, the ‘good governance’ strategies of the World Bank and other donors are not uniformly successful in producing disciplined and responsible states across Africa. For every Tanzania and Ghana there is a Zimbabwe and a Somalia. The new aid politics of post-conditionality partnerships relies upon cherry-picking successful and exemplary performers and broadcasting best practice.Footnote ¹⁰³ Where problems exist within these cases (such as the continued proliferation of public sector corruption in Tanzania)Footnote ¹⁰⁴ they tend to be hidden, and examples of ‘failed’ interventions in other countries are also removed from the reports of the international development institutions. An analytics of government approach provides a framework for assessing when and where the ‘shadow economies’ of the politics of the belly and the ‘cloistered’ spheres of neoliberalism are in operation, and how they relate.

These examples of aid partnerships – such as the Tanzanian experience with environmental mainstreaming and poverty reduction – show how liberal rationalities of rule establish boundaries between those for whom freedom and autonomy is appropriate, those who need tutelage and civilising, and those who need disciplining or pacification. An element of coercion is always present, as there is the ultimate possibility of the withdrawal of donor funding.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As Miller and Rose note, contemporary liberal governmentalities entail ‘obligations of responsible self-government for the majority, and the expert management or frank control of those marginalised anti-citizens [or ‘failed’ African states] unwilling or unable to accept those burdens’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In this respect, the critique that ‘the globalisation of a Foucauldian model of power ends up inspiring a quintessentially liberal, rather than realist, reading of international politics’ appears to be seriously mistaken.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In drawing attention to the power relations at work within liberal forms of rule, and the centrality of struggle between different governmental rationalities, a governmentality perspective shares far more with critical realist readings of global politics.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

This attention to the stratifications, distinctions, and boundaries drawn by prevailing liberal rationalities of government does raise certain questions about the places in which they appear to fail, or limits beyond which they cannot operate. For Joseph, Africa in general is used to demonstrate the inadequacy of governmentality-inspired engagements with international politics, and he concludes that ‘[i]f we are concerned with how techniques of governmentality build lasting social cohesion, then clearly areas such as sub-Saharan Africa are currently non-starters.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Joseph is of course correct here, in that activities of the World Bank,Footnote ¹¹¹ World Economic Forum,Footnote ¹¹² UN,Footnote ¹¹³ NEPAD,Footnote ¹¹⁴ and many development or humanitarian NGOs,Footnote ¹¹⁵ can often be regarded as having ‘failed’ according to the ‘programmer's’ criteria of having established Western-style liberal civil societies, human rights, and free markets.Footnote ¹¹⁶ But I would disagree with his suggestion that most governmentality analyses are unable to explain governmentality through its failure.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Indeed, one of the questions at the heart of an analytics of government framework is to ask ‘what else might these failures be doing?’

Foucault famously suggested in Discipline and Punish that one should ask ‘what is served by the failure of the prison?’Footnote ¹¹⁸ Similarly, in his analysis of development projects in Lesotho, James Ferguson notes their failure to achieve their own targets, and he focuses instead on their ‘unintended outcomes’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The promotion of ‘good governance’ has identifiable effects and structures global politics in particular ways in terms of certain mentalities, institutions, and practices; regardless of whether or not specific states actually ‘succeed’ or change their practice as a result of the good governance discourse.Footnote ¹²⁰ Furthermore, it is precisely in terms of what might be called the borderlands of global politics, sites in which dominant liberal governmentalities do seem to fail or are replaced by other governmental rationalities that the framework set out here potentially has the most to contribute.

Africa, civil war, and violence

The final example discussed raises this question of where potentially violent, coercive, and ‘sovereign’ power relations fit into an analytics of government approach. Much of the governmentality literature draws a clear distinction between governmental power relations which work through freedom and the conduct of conduct, and sovereign power relations which work through extraction, violence, and domination. However, more recent contributions have stressed the close relationship between liberal rationalities and practices of government, and markedly illiberal, authoritarian, and coercive forms of politics.Footnote ¹²¹ The following sections examine these themes through a number of examples, particularly the conflicts in Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the broader literature on African civil wars.Footnote ¹²²

Regimes of knowledge: It is often assumed that African civil wars are irrational, barbaric, and fundamentally chaotic.Footnote ¹²³ This is perhaps the suggestion underlying Joseph's claim that ‘the concept of governmentality does not necessarily bring anything new to an analysis of lawlessness in Sierra Leone, the displacement of populations by war or the role of guerrilla movements and village chiefs’.Footnote ¹²⁴ The assumption here seems to be that Africa is marked by an absence of rationalised attempts to conduct the conduct of free individuals. However, scholars and ethnographers of these warzones have shown that there are political economies of conflict, there are formalities of action involved in the displacement of populations and the management of refugees, and there are calculative and rationalised forms of conducting conduct even in mass atrocities committed against civilians.Footnote ¹²⁵

Danny Hoffman's anthropological research, for example, has detailed the particular considered rationalities at work during the civil war in Sierra Leone and Liberia, in which fighters made calculations about the expectations of international intervention and peacebuilding processes in an attempt to secure a greater share of postconflict resources.Footnote ¹²⁶ He argues that ‘humanitarian interventions have led combatants to employ atrocities against civilians increasingly as a military tactic, making the bodies and futures of non-combatants a crucial terrain of the frontline’.Footnote ¹²⁷ He argues that in these contexts violence (even when as extreme as the amputation of civilian limbs) is political, rationalised, and communicative – an attempt to influence the conduct of international agencies.Footnote ¹²⁸ In a similar manner Carolyn Nordstrom's ethnography of warzones in Angola and Mozambique shows that these conflicts have cultural and political codes of conduct; ‘they are governed by social principles, not merely the jungle law of tooth and claw’.Footnote ¹²⁹

Subjectivities: Just as liberal forms of rule have relied upon the differentiation of populations into the responsible, the mad, the criminal, barbarians, savages and so on, so sovereign and coercive power relations also produce forms of subjectivity.Footnote ¹³⁰ As Chatterjee argues, ‘the real space of modern life consists of heterotopia’, in the sense that prevailing forms of liberal governance produce a multiple, cross-cutting, shifting classification of populations, a heterogeneous conception of the social.Footnote ¹³¹ Civil wars and conflicts bring into being a whole range of new actors: warlords, militias, peacekeepers, refugees, civilian victims, genocidaires, insurgents, guerrillas, freedom fighters, and so on. In Sierra Leone the distinction between legitimate private military forces (such as Executive Outcomes) and illegitimate forces (the RUF), as well as those in between (such as local civil defence groups), became of paramount importance during the conflict, as did categories such as civil society and traditional chiefs in the postconflict peace-building phase.Footnote ¹³² These subjectivities are intensely political. As Neumann and Sending argue, global politics ‘is increasingly organised around debates and struggles over what [or who] should be governed through liberal forms of government and what [or who] should be governed through police forms of government’.Footnote ¹³³

Techniques and technologies: As Mark Duffield's work has shown, the ‘borderlands’ of global politics – a metaphor for ‘an imagined geographical space where, in the eyes of many metropolitan actors and agencies, the characteristics of brutality, excess and breakdown predominate’ – are governed through a multiplicity of partnership agreements, auditing, subcontracting, global compacts, public-private networks and logics of marketisation, privatisation, and liberal techniques of governance.Footnote ¹³⁴ There are similarities here to the techniques used to manage aid relationships. Coercive interventions, wherever they take place – whether peacebuilding in Sierra Leone, air strikes in Libya, or arms embargos in Sudan – are also weighed according to cost-benefit calculations, risk assessments, probability scenarios, and legal codes of conduct. Through such calculations certain spaces and certain populations are constructed and defined as requiring liberal order, whilst others can be isolated or quarantined.

Fields of visibility: Conflicts depend upon the management of visibility and information – from individual camouflage to control of regional maps and surveillance data. The creation of particular visibilities and invisibilities has produced ‘borderland’ regions of world politics: in no-go inner-city districts or protesting townships in South Africa,Footnote ¹³⁵ slums such as Kibera in Kenya,Footnote ¹³⁶ stateless regions like South Kivu in the DRC,Footnote ¹³⁷ or enclave oil refineries or offshore rigs in Angolan and Nigerian coastal waters.Footnote ¹³⁸ The many ways in which these are created, policed, governed, and resisted – through maps, cameras, walls, restricted zones, graffiti, and razor wire – are calculated, rationalised, and amenable to an analytics of government approach.Footnote ¹³⁹ For example, the highly significant construction of ‘the forest’ in Sierra Leonean popular culture and RUF propaganda during the civil war – as a zone of danger and chaos, but also a refuge for guerrillas and a place for youth to be initiated into manhood – relied upon the creation of spaces of visibility and invisibility, and the mobilisation of various mechanisms of rationalised government.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

The inclusion of relations of violence and coercion within an analytics of government approach is a key step. For some critics of global governmentality, such as Jonathan Joseph, this is the only way that governmentality could be applied to certain parts of the world. He asks ‘can the idea that power is exercised over “free” subjects really be applied to Afghanistan? Do we find in sub-Saharan Africa the exercise of power through free and autonomous individuals? Can the rationality and ethos of liberalism really be applied to the Middle East?’Footnote ¹⁴¹ There are two crucial points to make in response here. First there is the empirical point that decades of neoliberal social engineering, and over a century of the promotion of liberal education, have not been entirely ineffectual in Africa.Footnote ¹⁴² There are plenty of places where populations vote, wait in lines, debate politics in cafes, organise into unions and watchdogs to check the power of the state, and respect the rule of law. Similarly the many similarities between Onitsha market in Nigeria and the London or New York Stock Exchanges are not that hard to see. Africa is not a uniformly illiberal zone, untouched by markets, and lacking free and autonomous individuals.Footnote ¹⁴³ Harrison concludes that ‘after over twenty years of repeated neoliberal reform efforts, something like a stable realm of neoliberal practice has been established in many African states. But this realm of practice is neither extensive nor entirely stable and settled.’Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Second, however, is the crucial theoretical point that even in contexts of violence and coercion we can observe and analyse governing rationalities, calculated attempts to conduct conduct, and the deployment of particular knowledges. ‘The exercise of power through free and autonomous individuals’ – to quote Joseph again – can be identified in Africa, even in African warzones. One of the strengths of an analytics of government approach is to show how the exercise of power can involve both practices of violence and freedom, at the same time. This can be seen both in terms of the rationalised deployment of violence against civilians by combatants in Sierra Leone in order to secure lucrative international intervention, as well as closer to ‘home’ (the home of IR) in the existence of torture, coercive public order policing, international interventions, and assassinations in or sanctioned by Western liberal regimes. Such a move radically problematises the apparent conceptual opposition between violence and freedom, as well as giving an analytics of government framework an impressive potential breadth and scope.

From IR to world politics

Having presented these three examples of an ‘analytics of government’ framework in action we can return to the question of how well such a framework can overcome some of the problems IR theory has struggled with in travelling to other parts of the world. The three problems for mainstream IR identified above comprised taking the state as the basic unit of analysis, the values espoused and questions asked, and an overly theoretical approach. In terms of the first of these, an analytics of government framework represents a considerable advance on much state-centric IR theory. Whilst it certainly does not seek to replace or ignore the state as a central actor, it is concerned with the constitution of political subjects rather than simply their interaction.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Thus it does not take the sovereign, Westphalian state as an a priori subject, but rather examines the ways in which states – along with civil societies, populations, transnational actors, illegal networks, international organisations, and so on – are brought into being, transformed and ‘governmentalised’ by particular power relations.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ This is an important step, not merely in enabling IR to engage with more diverse forms of transnational politics on the African continent, but also in comprehending broader transformations in states and other political subjects elsewhere in the world.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Rather than remaining within an analytical framework which has unduly emphasised the distinctiveness of states and inter-state relations as a discrete realm of politics, the approach set out here echoes Abrahamsen and Williams’ call for ‘the abandonment of the public-private and the inside-outside dichotomies, in favour of a perspective on world politics and governance as one analytical field connected by a multitude of mutually constituted relationships’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ As Bayart suggests with thinly veiled sarcasm, ‘we are forced to admit that the analysis of politics in Africa opens the door to a wider reflection on the nature of politics’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Secondly, in terms of the values and priorities adopted, an analytics of government has certain advantages. As it does not have a disciplinary preference for questions of war and Great Power politics, it is better able to focus on questions of social governance, healthcare, criminality, environmental change, poverty, migration, etc. Indeed, these are the sorts of topics on which governmentality scholars have broken new ground. Majia Nadesan's work, for example, is able to explain ‘homologies’ in power relations across different social domains in the arts of government: from the market to public schools, and from corporate employee relations to World Bank economic strategies, and her work illuminates the government of the market, healthcare, and the human brain, as well as US global security policies.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Part of the reason for this is the fact that an analytics of government approach takes its focus as the problem-areas of contemporary governance, rather than the historic preoccupations of a discipline founded in the aftermath of the First World War.

Thirdly, however, few would recommend Foucauldian governmentality literature to a theory-jaded researcher wrestling with overwhelming social and policy issues. There is no easy way around this – much academic work (especially critical and theoretical work) is ill-suited to providing quick and easy policy solutions. However, a major advantage of an ‘analytics of government’ approach is its avowedly empirical element. It is designed to interrogate power relations by focusing on their point of application – the particular practices, techniques, and technologies implemented in a particular problem-field.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Although this is only one element, and consideration of the forms of knowledge, subjectivities, and fields of visibility which underpin and overlay those practices is also essential, the focus on specific concrete practices means that this framework is designed to produce grounded empirical research.Footnote ¹⁵² As such it has what Pal Ahluwalia, drawing on Edward Said, describes as the ‘worldliness’ of theory.Footnote ¹⁵³ This embeddedness in specific empirical settings can also work to ensure that an analytic of government does not become too entranced by what Dean and others have called the ‘programmers view’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Rationalities of government are not always translated into practices, and practices do not always work as they are intended. The presence of resistance and counter-conducts within regimes of government militates against a tendency to remain too abstract and un-worldly.