ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we review three literatures related to our topic: the international peacebuilding literature, the normative-power-Europe scholarship and research on international police aid. The purpose of this critical engagement is to bring into focus a series of gaps in the treatment of power in these inquiries. In particular, power is either written out of them, framed as merely oppressive or thematized mainly as a discursive phenomenon. A very different understanding of power is advanced by Foucault. Modern power, he argues, is not flowing from a sovereign centre in the form of prohibitions but circulating through capillaries traversing the social body. Capillary forms of power operating in everyday social sites work primarily through the production of the normal and the abnormal, the desirable and the undesirable, the visible and the invisible. To analyse modern power, Foucault developed the twin concepts of political rationalities and political technologies in his later work on governmentality. We argue that governmentality theory, which, unlike in other fields, plays only a marginal role in research on international relations and the EU, can bring added value to the study of peacebuilding and the ESDP. Yet it also has a number of shortcomings that limit its intellectual and political reach. We identify three such limitations in relation to our concern with peacebuilding. Of particular importance is governmentality theory’s bracketing of the normative and its allied inability to contribute to a reformatory politics. Drawing on a number of political theorists, we elucidate a politico-ethical horizon in Foucault’s work and a correlated preference for an agonistic politics. We end by sketching out the political rationality embodied in the liberal politics of peacebuilding. This hybrid rationality creates a dilemma at the very centre of peacebuilding practices. While the dilemma cannot be resolved, we argue that by drawing on Foucault’s political ethics, one can device a strategy to reduce its harmful effects.
