Hidden politics of power and governmentality in transitional justice and peacebuilding:The problem of ‘bringing the local back in’

This paper examines ‘the local’ in peacebuilding by examining how ‘local’ transitional justice projects can become spaces of power inequalities. The paper argues that focusing on how ‘the local’ contests or interacts with ‘the international’ in peacebuilding and post-conflict contexts obscures contestations and power relations amongst different local actors, and how inequalities and power asymmetries can be entrenched and reproduced through internationally funded local projects. The paper argues that externally funded projects aimed at emancipating ‘locals’ entrench inequalities and create local elites that become complicit in governing the conduct and participation of other less empowered ‘locals’. The paper thus proposes that specific local actors—often those in charge of externally funded peacebuilding projects—should also be conceptualised as governing agents: able to discipline and regulate other local actors’ voices and their agency, and thus (re)construct ideas about what ‘the local’ is, or is not

Universal but not truly ‘global’: governmentality, economic liberalism, and the international

This article responds to issues raised about global governmentality studies by Jan Selby, Jonathan Joseph, and David Chandler, especially regarding the implications of ‘scaling up’ a concept originally designed to describe the politics of advanced liberal societies to the international realm. In response to these charges, I argue that critics have failed to take full stock of Foucault's contribution to the study of global liberalism, which owes more to economic than political liberalism. Taking Foucault's economic liberalism seriously, that is, shifting the focus from questions of natural rights, legitimate rule, and territorial security to matters of government, population management, and human betterment reveals how liberalism operates as a universal, albeit not yet global, measure of truth, best illustrated by the workings of global capital. While a lot more translation work (both empirical and conceptual) is needed before governmentality can be convincingly extended to global politics, Foucauldian approaches promise to add a historically rich and empirically grounded dimension to IR scholarship that should not be hampered by disciplinary admonitions

Mic Check/Reality Check

Over the past couple of months history has been unfolding with dizzying speed. The #occupy model of leaderless, demandless direct action, which in the beginning no one with only a slim understanding of how capitalism works thought could become anything more than a facile if charming jab at anti-corporate activism, has gone viral. Every morning we wake up to new reports about ‘occupying X’, where X can be anything from cities, campuses, boardrooms, buildings, highways, and public events, all the way to academic disciplines. What originally seemed like a romantic fantasy about temporary autonomous zones now feels like history. And no one likes to find themselves on thewrong side of history, especially not intellectuals, let alone intellectuals in the business of explaining global politics

No Good Deed Goes Unrewarded: The Values/Virtues of Transnational Volunteerism in Neoliberal Capital

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Global Society in 2014, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13600826.2014.900738.This paper focuses on the value of volunteering in producing, sustaining, and legitimising forms of subjectivity and social relations congruent with the ethos of neoliberal capital. Rather than treat it as a spontaneous act of virtue, we insist that volunteerism is a carefully designed technology of government the purpose of which is to align individual conduct with neoliberal capital’s double injunction of market rationality and social responsibility. To this end we investigate two complementary case studies of transnational volunteerism, one dealing with Chinese international students volunteering in Vancouver seeking to obtain Canadian citizenship, the other looking at Western university students and graduates volunteering in Ghana to gather relevant professional skills and experience. In both cases we find that transnational volunteerism helps participating individuals assume cultural skills, affective competencies, and citizenship prerogatives they could otherwise not have claimed through nationality or employment.This research was made possible through funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada