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Sovereignty and sovereign powers in global governmentality
DOI link for Sovereignty and sovereign powers in global governmentality
Sovereignty and sovereign powers in global governmentality book
Sovereignty and sovereign powers in global governmentality
DOI link for Sovereignty and sovereign powers in global governmentality
Sovereignty and sovereign powers in global governmentality book
ABSTRACT
Poststructural and other critical and nonfoundational approaches to International Relations have embraced governmentality as an analytical perspective to understand emergent problems in the international sphere. The possibility of understanding various forms of power that are more mundane and granular than sovereign power has been valuable to our understanding of how states and societies are governed. In this chapter, we discuss the analytical, and possibly historical, displacement of sovereignty in Foucault’s narrative of the governmentalization of the state. Drawing on different sources and interventions, this chapter discusses the importance of sovereign power for understanding the governmentality approach within the state. In a similar vein, when governmentality is used to analyze globality, or global oneness, we think it is important to account for the presence sovereign states outside individual states if we wish to understand how global governance and globality is imagined, conducted and not least contested. We need in other words to be able to answer how sovereign states (as actors), state sovereignty (as principle) and sovereign powers (as state functions) are entangled in global governance and globality.