Foucault and the Modern International

Philippe Bonditti holds a doctorate in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris, France, and is currently Lecturer at the European School of Political and Social Science (ESPOL-UCL), France. Previously, he was Assistant Professor at the Institute of International Relations of the Pontificial Universidade Catholica in Rio de Janeiro (IRI/PUC-Rio), Brazil, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute, Brown University, US. His research interests focus on contemporary discourses on violence, war, and security, the transformations of the modern state and the art of government, (critical) International Relations theory, (critical) security studies, contemporary French philosophy, and political theory.Didier Bigo is Associate Professor (tenure) at Sciences-Po, France and Professor of International Relations at Kings College London, UK. Bigo is Editor-in-Chief of the French quarterly journal Cultures & Conflits and launched, with R. B. J. Walker, the journal International Political Sociology. His research interests include security and liberty, biometrics identifiers and databases, antiterrorist policies in Europe after 9/11, the merging of internal security and external security, migrants and refugees in Europe, critical security studies, and international political sociology. Frédéric Gros is Professor of Philosophy at Sciences Po Paris, France. His research focuses on contemporary French philosophy—in particular the thought of Michel Foucault, whose writings, such as Subjectivity and Truth, he has edited—the foundations of the right to punish, issues of war and security, and the ethics of the political subject.

“Foucault and the Modern International is an intellectually dense and highly analytical text that contributes to the debate on the place of Foucault in the evolution of IR, both as a discipline and a reality to be studied. Its contribution is an important one … .” (Julien Pomarède, European Review of International Studies ERIS, Vol. 5 (1), 2018)

• 1. Introduction: The International as an Object for Thought.- 2. The Figure of Foucault and the Field of International Relations.- 3. Michel Foucault and International Relations: Cannibal Relations.- 4. Microphysics Of Power Redux.- 5. Political Spirituality: Parrhesia, Truth And Factical Finitude.- 6. Power as Sumbolon: Sovereignty, Governmentality and the International.- 7. Foucault and Method.- 8. Silencing Colonialism: Foucault and The International.- 9. Violence and the Modern International: An Archaeology of Terrorism.- 10. Foucault and the Historical Sociology of Globalization.- 11. On Liberalism: Limits, the Market and the Subject.- 12. On Bureaucratic Formalization: The Reality-Like Fiction of Neoliberal Abstractions.- 13. Too-Late Liberalism: From Promised Prosperity to Permanent Austerity.- 14. Biopolitics in the Twenty-First Century: The Malthus-Marx Debate and the Human Capital Issue.- 15. Mesopolitics: Foucault, Environmental Governmentality and the History ofthe Anthropocene.- 16. The Word and the Things: An Archaeology of An Amnesic Notion.- 17. Foucault and Geometrics.- 18. Conclusion.