ABSTRACT
Building on insights from Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality, this chapter explores the evolution of international politics and how this social realm is affected by governmentality understood as a pervasive form of power that hinges on technologies of indirect rule “from above” and technologies of the self “from below.” Building on Foucault’s advice to creatively use his conceptual tools, this chapter enriches the concept of governmentality through theoretical inspirations drawn from alternative, yet related research traditions that have modern society and its indirect forms of political power as a main focus of observation. This brings in the concepts of world society in modern systems theory and sociological neoinstitutionalism associated, as well as the concept of social fields in field-theory. The core argument of this chapter is that such a conjoined reading of Foucault and related theories of modern society offers a historically and sociologically informed framework for the study of the evolution of international politics as a social system and field of power relations under the condition of “globality.” The chapter commences with a general introduction into the overarching topic of the evolution of international politics as a subsystem. It then addresses the concept of governmentality – thereby highlighting its double dimension of constraining and engendering individual conduct through indirect power – while then discussing how (global) governmentality can be enriched through insight from other theories of modern society.
