'Playing by Foucault’s rules: Golder’s Foucault and the politics of rights' [Review] Ben Golder (2015) Foucault and the politics of rights

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Governmentality, rights and EU legal scholarship: a Foucauldian analysis

The Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) of the European Union came into being on 1 March 2007 and represents a new institution for human rights protection in the EU. This thesis undertakes a critical analysis of the FRA from a governmentality perspective. Governmentality refers to a particular critical standpoint, inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, which is concerned with power relations as processes of government. The features of the FRA, its structure and functions, are framed using "governance talk". The particular features which this thesis is interested in analysing are: the multiplicity of actors which make up the network structure of the Agency, their classification as experts, and the collection of information and data as statistics. The thesis demonstrates that these features, conceptualised as governance in institutional discourse, are actually features of governmentality. I therefore suggest that the rights discourse of the FRA is a discourse of governmentality. Moreover, I show how governmentality necessarily involves self-government: the actors and experts in the FRA's rights discourse govern themselves. This has significant implications for rights discourse: it reveals processes of governing (through) rights. On the one hand, we witness processes of the government of rights through experts and statistics. On the other, we are alerted to government in the name of rights. The thesis therefore intervenes within the EU's rights and governance discourses: it exposes the relations of power (as governmentality) that conventional "governance talk" tries to hide. It highlights the elusive novelty of theorising, and of critique, in EU legal scholarship on rights. By presenting a new perspective on the rights discourse of the FRA using governmentality, this thesis seeks to contribute to EU legal scholarship on rights, filling a glaring and significant gap in the literature

Governmentality, rights and EU legal scholarship: a Foucauldian analysis

The Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) of the European Union came into being on 1 March 2007 and represents a new institution for human rights protection in the EU. This thesis undertakes a critical analysis of the FRA from a governmentality perspective. Governmentality refers to a particular critical standpoint, inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, which is concerned with power relations as processes of government. The features of the FRA, its structure and functions, are framed using "governance talk". The particular features which this thesis is interested in analysing are: the multiplicity of actors which make up the network structure of the Agency, their classification as experts, and the collection of information and data as statistics. The thesis demonstrates that these features, conceptualised as governance in institutional discourse, are actually features of governmentality. I therefore suggest that the rights discourse of the FRA is a discourse of governmentality. Moreover, I show how governmentality necessarily involves self-government: the actors and experts in the FRA's rights discourse govern themselves. This has significant implications for rights discourse: it reveals processes of governing (through) rights. On the one hand, we witness processes of the government of rights through experts and statistics. On the other, we are alerted to government in the name of rights. The thesis therefore intervenes within the EU's rights and governance discourses: it exposes the relations of power (as governmentality) that conventional "governance talk" tries to hide. It highlights the elusive novelty of theorising, and of critique, in EU legal scholarship on rights. By presenting a new perspective on the rights discourse of the FRA using governmentality, this thesis seeks to contribute to EU legal scholarship on rights, filling a glaring and significant gap in the literature

Legal research methodologies in European Union and international law: research notes (part 2)

This is the second part of a series of three 'research note' articles looking at an AHRC funded project on the various research methodologies used by European Union and International Law researchers. The first part was published in the JCER (Volume 3: Issue 2 - 2007) third part will be published in September 2008

Your teachers are researchers: changing research culture [weblog article, 18 December 2020]

This post reflects upon the event ‘Your Teachers are Researchers’, held as part of Sussex Law School’s Research Seminar Series on 26 November 2020. It is written by Verona Ní Drisceoil (co-organiser and chair) and Bal Sokhi-Bulley (co-organiser and panellist) with input from the panel of staff (Neemah Ahamed, Matt Evans, Sabrina Gilani and Lucy Welsh) and from the student voices (Henry Bonsor, Jasmine Bundhoo, Ayo Idowu-Bello and Tyrone Logue) who participated in and facilitated the event

Performing struggle: parrhēsia in Ferguson

‘The enigma of revolts.’ You can almost hear the sigh at the end of this sentence. Foucault is making a statement here, published under the title ‘Useless to Revolt’, on that ‘impulse by which a single individual, a group, a minority, or an entire people says, “I will no longer obey”’. In this short piece, I question the two sides of the enigma – how to label the revolt – is the act of rioting, such as what we witnessed in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 ‘proper resistance’ – and, how to understand the ēthos of the rioter. The label of counter-conduct, I argue clarifies the enigma as it allows us, challenges us even, to see the event as political. Counter-conduct provides a new framework for reading spontaneous and improvised forms of political expression. The rioter can then be seen as political and rational, as demonstrating ethical behavior. The ēthos of this behavior is represented as an ethics of the self, a form of parrhēsia where the rioter risks herself and shows courage to tell the truth, the story of her community

The political import of deconstruction—Derrida’s limits?: a forum on Jacques Derrida’s specters of Marx after 25 Years, part I

Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. Maja Zehfuss, Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo and Dan Bulley and Bal Sokhi-Bulley offer sharp, occasionally exasperated, meditations on the political import of deconstruction and the limits of Derrida’s diagnoses in Specters of Marx but also identify possible paths forward for a global politics taking inspiration in Derrida’s work of the 1990s

Rights as a distraction from 'Belonging': a response to the Shamima Begum ruling. Critical Legal Thinking [weblog article, 28 May 2019]

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Learning law differently: the importance of theory and methodology

'I like the word [curiosity] ... . It evokes “care”; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilised before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.' (M Foucault, 'The Masked Philosopher') I recently gave a paper where, explaining that I was adopting a ‘Foucauldian perspective’, I mentioned rather flippantly that my methodology was ‘governmentality’. I took for granted that my audience would know what I meant – govern/mentality is,2 as it says in the word itself after all, a mentality of government and hence a way of thinking about the processes of governing. I have always understood this process of thinking as a methodology. However, I was challenged on this and pushed to explain my viewpoint. Surely governmentality is not a methodology but a ‘theory’? I do not agree but it made me think more deeply about what a methodology is, how if at all it differs from theory and also how – given I was in a room full of non-lawyers – it is relevant to the study of law.3 How can we teach our students to think, or learn, law differently – by making use of a variety of methodological perspectives that ‘throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way’? I aim to tackle these questions in this chapter and begin with an attempt to differentiate ‘theory’ from ‘methodology’. I then go on to focus, in Part II, on what I call ‘alternative methodologies’, so-called because they take a break from the dominant and traditional approach of legal positivism. In Part III, I attempt to outline how we might adopt ways of learning/teaching law differently; I describe some exercises that promote the skills of interrogation (curiosity) and application (putting the curiosity into practice) that could form part of a wider pedagogical project to encourage students and researchers to be curious about the law; to look at it in a different way, to challenge its traditional hierarchies, all in a bid to be less governed (as students, teachers and researchers) by its supposed neutrality and apolitical character