The evolving world economy: some alternative security questions for Australia

Australia's position in the global economic order has undergone a process of dramatic transition over the last decade of so. This transition has implications with both economic and politico-strategic dimensions. Yet the linkage between these two dimensions has not been as well understood by scholars or practitioners as it should have been. This monograph attempts to provide a partial correction to this inadequacy. It details three key issues in contemporary international economic relations: (i) the nature of structural as opposed to relational power; (ii) the 'New Mercantilism'; (iii) the growth of Strategic Trade Policy; and considers their policy implications for Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The monograph concludes that the 'golden years' of the economic stability from the end of World War II to the early 1970s need to be seen as an historical deviant rather than the norm and that Australian foreign policy makers need to plan for a system which, whilst not devoid of multilateral trading instruments, will continue to evolve towards the more aggressively mercantilist end of a liberal mercantilist spectrum, and in which the saliency of the economic dimension of Australia's foreign relations will continue to rise

Governance to governmentality: analyzing NGOs, states, and power

Studies of global governance typically claim that the state has lost power to nonstate actors and that political authority is increasingly institutionalized in spheres not controlled by states. In this article, we challenge the core claims in the literature on global governance. Rather than focusing on the relative power of states and nonstate actors, we focus on the sociopolitical functions and processes of governance in their own right and seek to identify their rationality as practices of political rule. For this task, we use elements of the conception of power developed by Michel Foucault in his studies of “governmentality.” In this perspective, the role of nonstate actors in shaping and carrying out global governance-functions is not an instance of transfer of power from the state to nonstate actors but rather an expression of a changing logic or rationality of government (defined as a type of power) by which civil society is redefined from a passive object of government to be acted upon into an entity that is both an object and a subject of government. The argument is illustrated by two case studies: the international campaign to ban landmines, and international population policy. The cases show that the self-association and political will-formation characteristic of civil society and nonstate actors do not stand in opposition to the political power of the state, but is a most central feature of how power, understood as government, operates in late modern society