Governmentality

A focus on what Foucault identifies as counter-conduct can make an important contribution to the study of international practices. Counter-conduct offers a nuanced view of the relationship between practices of politics and resistance, and practices of the self. International practice theorists have paid very little attention to these practices of the self. They have not examined at length the way in which individuality and selfhood might themselves be the constituted effects of regimes of practice, and how such regimes relate to the practices of governing states, societies, international issues, and so on. Rather than directly transpose Foucault’s contextualized account of counter-conduct onto the present, I argue that counter conduct needs additional concepts and considerations if it is to be useful in analyzing contemporary practices of resistance. I develop this argument through a brief case study which examines the place of solidarity practices within migration struggles at Europe's borders.

This paper deals with the forms of governmentality emerging from various technological changes, particularly with projects related to smart cities and digital technologies. Firstly, the relationship between governmentality and digital technologies will be introduced and explored, looking at issues such as the possibility of an algorithmic governmentality and the role of technique and technology. The following section will provide a critical approach to current smart city projects, focusing on a contextualization and a genealogy of these projects, and on the forms of governmentality that they express. The paper ends with an exploration of the challenges and potential risks inherent to the forms of algorithmic governmentality present in smart cities, such as the possibility of spatial injustice.

Does philosophy have a critical task? What is the political role of critique and history in our present time? Is sovereignty a paradigm still helpful to interpret, code and re-negotiate power relations? These are some of the crucial questions that Sandro Chignola’s publication, Foucault’s Politics of Philosophy, addresses through an investigation of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Este trabajo analiza los contenidos discursivos de la Ley de promoción de la industria deportiva en la CABA, en el marco de una serie de documentos de planificación urbana producidos por la administración municipal 2007-2015. La indagación se centra en dos ejes: 1. la concepción de una racionalidad política enraizada en el modelo económico neoliberal, que comprende la incorporación de instrumentos metodológicos para el relevamiento y el planteo de las dinámicas de crecimiento; y 2. el concepto de sustentabilidad sobre el que se basan los instrumentos de la planificación territorial contenidos en dichos documentos y que se evidencia en la Ley. Palabras clave​ : sustentabilidad; neoliberalismo; distrito; planeamiento urbano; Ciudad de Buenos Aires.

The corruption perception index (CPI) compiled by Transparency International (TI) ranks countries by perceived levels of corruption. It is a reformist rather than a radical form of 'statactivism'. I use Rose and Miller's analytical framework to explain how corporate concerns come to dominate the CPI: how a neoliberal rationality is translated into a programme to govern corruption and then a technology-the CPI. A comprehensive survey of sources used to compile the CPI 2001-2016 shows that the vast majority were either produced for sale to corporate clients or were based on surveys of business elites. Secondly, I embed the index's production into a wider political economy: TI workers are Gramscian intellectuals who put forward an interpretation of corruption that is non-threatening to corporate capital. This Gramscian framework holds wider relevance for analyses of the politics of global benchmarking.

With increasing water consumption and pollution in cities and expanding urban areas, impacts on rural areas as water extraction and waste disposal zones are intensifying. To unravel these hydro-territorial dynamics, this paper studies the intersecting and overlapping Foucauldian 'arts of government' ('governmentalities') deployed to convey water from rural to urban areas in three Latin American cities: Lima (Peru), San Luis Potos ı (Mexico) and Bucaramanga (Colombia). We examine conventional (cemented) water transfers, broadly promoted payment

Resumen
Este es un ensayo interpretativo respecto a las coordenadas con las que desde el pensamiento militar se reflexionó sobre la cuestión política a inicios del siglo XX en Argentina. En contraposición al escenario político-militar decimonónico, se hipotetiza la formación progresiva de un "esquema de distanciamiento" en el pensamiento militar, que se habría alimentado de reflexiones sobre la revolución política, la función representativa y el voto de los militares, así como la relación puntual entre el ejército y el estado. La paulatina percepción de un espacio interno ávido de especialización técnica y organicidad institucional y un diagnóstico cada vez más crudo respecto a un clima local hostil, contribuyeron a esos gestos de retirada y desapego del mundo político y al fortalecimiento de un estilo y una ética singular de gobierno de sí mismos.

This paper draws on two current UK refugee resettlement schemes, the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme (VPRS) and Community Sponsorship, to consider the ways in which they borrow technologies from austerity and innovate ‘border-work’. On the global level, the paper considers how VPRS outsources the UK’s border management to UNHCR. On the national level, the paper considers how Community Sponsorship shifts the responsibility for the support of refugees from the state to local communities. Finally, on the local level, the paper discusses how the borrowed technologies between austerity and migration control (outsourcing, categorising, and individualizing responsibility) shape the experiences of social workers and migrants in a northern London borough. The paper contributes to understanding how the governmentalities of austerity and migration engage in shaping and re-shaping public space through the differential regulation of subjects who come to experience shared space in fundamentally different ways.

Through an ethnography of “prior consultation” in Peru, this article looks at the ambivalent ethnicization of participatory devices targeting “indigenous” groups. First, it studies the place of prior consultation within the Peruvian system of social conflict management, which focuses especially on indigenous groups. It analyzes in particular how prior consultation involves the production of neutralized ethno-racial categories. The article then moves on to highlight the participants’ ability to repoliticize these categories, depending on their socialization in protest action. This level of socialization varies between individuals, which helps us to better understand the pacifying power of prior consultation, which eventually marginalized those most opposed to the categories prescribed by the consultative format.

When Eric Hobsbawm wrote about the rise of nations and nationalism in the 1980s, he envisioned it to be of decreasing significance as globalization continued to undermine the importance of nation-states (1992). Rather than waning in significance, the world has instead seen a "global rise in nationalism" (Bieber 2018, 520). The study of nations and nationalism, and its intersections with politics, economics, and aesthetics, remains a key subject for scholars who take seriously the implications of struggles over power, territory, and cultural practices. Dance studies has long cast light on how nations are reproduced through aesthetic and kinesthetic practices (Reed 2010, Shapiro 2004, McNeill 1997). Today, when nationalism and nationalist resurgences stand center stage in global politics, dance and performance scholars are compelled to examine the complex ways by which the nation impacts movement aesthetics. For this issue, we specifically challenged our contributors to search for narratives, spaces, and practitioners that could shed light on movement aesthetics in the context of the nation. The diversity of nations and stories that we present in this collection foregrounds how dance and performance become important projects of the nation, controlling memory, history, and populations-by linking geopolitics to the bodies of practitioners. In our call for essays, we chose two phrases, "the shadow of the nation" and "the umbra and penumbra of the nation" with deliberativeness, as we recognize that nations cast long shadows and act both in the umbra of cartographies and the penumbra of memory and ideas. The long shadow of the nation engenders dangers in how it unevenly confers rights and excludes unwanted subjects while holding a monopoly on violence. Our authors and their interlocutors describe how governments apply varying valences to art forms, marginalizing those deemed less civilized, impure, or scandalous, favoring instead "high" or "classicalized" art forms. Once again, the umbra and the penumbra are important, because when light shines on one art, another finds itself in the shadows.

From the Special Issue: Dance Under the Shadow of the Nation

This paper examines the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure in Canada as a public health legal response. The analysis begins outside the public health framework to relate the criminalization of HIV to broader shifts in the relationship between life and law in contemporary forms of governance. It does this by drawing on the concepts of biopower and biopolitics to explain how the intersection of medical and legal knowledge creates an accusatorial framework that has made HIV criminalization possible. This idea is explored by tracing the historical development of the legal principle out of which the phenomenon has emerged (" fraud capable of vitiating consent to sexual relations") and looking at how it has been applied in two contemporary HIV prosecution cases: R v. Aziga (2007) and R v. Ngeruka (2015). The second half of the paper examines the effectiveness of the criminal accusation of HIV non-disclosure as a public health legal response, focusing on its effect on advancing traditional public health goals. The discussion also points out how criminalization of HIV non-disclosure manifests broader tensions that have been recognized in public health legal responses to communicable disease, particularly the challenges of protecting the public while respecting individual rights. The paper concludes by arguing that control over blood blurs medical and legal forms of knowledge and power. This reflects a " seropolitical" landscape characterized by a criminal law accusatorial framework shaped by medical determinations of risk and harm.

How do people living in a company town come to desire to work for the firm that controls it? Based on an in-depth case study of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany, we make two principal contributions. First, drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality we investigate the mechanisms of power within which desired identities are shaped. Desired identities, we argue, are one means by which organizations exercise control over local populations. Second, we examine the multiple interlocking discourses by which Volkswagen sought to regulate the life of Wolfsburgers and to form their desired identities. In doing so, we contribute to identity research by demonstrating how biopower and discipline work in combination in neoliberal societies to make the governmentality of employee identity possible.  Our research underlines the importance of studying company towns for understanding the relations of power that shape the lives and the identities of employees.

Τα υπουργεία αποτελούν σύνολα δημόσιων υπηρεσιών, στις αρμοδιότητες των οποίων ανήκουν ο σχεδιασμός και η εφαρμογή αποτελεσματικών δημόσιων πολιτικών. Όλα τους απαρτίζουν την Κυβέρνηση μιας χώρας, η οποία, εκτός από φορέας της εκτελεστικής εξουσίας, είναι και η σημαντικότερη δημόσια οργάνωση κάθε σύγχρονου κράτους. Όπως και κάθε άλλη οργάνωση, πάντως, για την εξασφάλιση της αποτελεσματικότητας της λειτουργίας και του έργου του εκάστοτε κυβερνητικού σχήματος, απαιτείται η ορθολογική του συγκρότηση σε επίπεδο δομών και μελών.

Οι λόγοι και οι παράγοντες, που συμβάλλουν στη διαμόρφωση των δομών και του αριθμού των μελών ενός κυβερνητικού συνόλου, ποικίλλουν. Μεταξύ αυτών συγκαταλέγονται κριτήρια διοικητικής αποτελεσματικότητας, κοινωνικοί παράγοντες, σχετιζόμενοι με την αύξηση των αναγκών των πολιτών, καθώς και αμιγώς θεσμικοί, που καθορίζουν τα όρια της κρατικής παρέμβασης στο δημόσιο γίγνεσθαι. Παράλληλα, στους λόγους, που προωθούν μεταβολές στην οργανωσιακή διάταξη της Κυβέρνησης ενός κράτους, περιλαμβάνονται ο διοικητικός μιμητισμός, αλλά και αμιγώς οικονομικοί και συγκυριακοί παράγοντες, που αφορούν, ως επί το πλείστον, την αντιμετώπιση των συνεπειών μίας έκτακτης περίστασης. Οι τρεις (3) τελευταίες κατηγορίες παραγόντων, άλλωστε, μαζί με τον ύψιστο στόχο της επίτευξης διοικητικής αποτελεσματικότητας διαμέσου του εξορθολογισμού της λειτουργίας της Κυβέρνησης, κυριάρχησαν στις τροποποιήσεις του ελληνικού κυβερνητικού συστήματος κατά τη δεκαετή περίοδο της αυστηρής δημοσιονομικής προσαρμογής (2009-2019). Ωστόσο, σε ορισμένες περιπτώσεις, αντί για τους προεκτεθέντες «αντικειμενικούς» παράγοντες, υπερίσχυαν αμιγώς κομματικοί, ιδεολογικοί, συμβολικοί, ακόμα και προσωπικοί λόγοι. Όλοι οι προεκτεθέντες σχετίστηκαν, κατά κύριο λόγο, με τον πολλαπλασιασμό των έτερων των υπουργών κυβερνητικών μελών, ο οποίος παγίωσε στο ελληνικό διοικητικό σύστημα το φαινόμενο του υπουργειοπληθωρισμού, ήτοι της πλασματικής αύξησης του συνολικού αριθμού των υπουργικών δομών, μέσω της ανάθεσης αρμοδιοτήτων, που αντιστοιχούν σ’ ένα υπουργείο, σε μεμονωμένους αναπληρωτές υπουργούς και υφυπουργούς.

Κοντολογίς, η περίοδος της σοβαρής δημοσιονομικής κρίσης, με την οποία ήρθε αντιμέτωπη η ελληνική πολιτεία, διακρίθηκε από τις προσπάθειες εξορθολογισμού της κυβερνητικής της οργάνωσης, οι οποίες όμως αναιρούνταν εν τη γενέσει τους από τις ταυτόχρονες τάσεις υπουργειοπληθωρισμού. Οι λόγοι και οι τρόποι εκδήλωσης της συγκεκριμένης διοικητικής παραδοξότητας, που λειτούργησε εν τέλει εις βάρος της κυβερνητικής αποτελεσματικότητας, πρόκειται να παρουσιαστούν αναλυτικά στην παρούσα εισήγηση.

Актуальность темы исследования обусловлена наличием ряда нерешенных правовых проблем в рамках системы уполномоченных государственных органов и иных субъектов, осуществляющих расходы бюджета. В числе таких проблем отсутствие должной ответственности представителей государства в части повышения эффективности бюджетных расходов, несоответствие миссии государства целям и задачам уполномоченных им субъектов, противоречивость, пробельность, нестабильность правового регулирования отношений по поводу бюджетных расходов.
Цель статьи состоит в выявлении причин отсутствия стройной системы представителей государства в рассматриваемой сфере и выработке предложений по устранению недостатков законодательства, негативно влияющих на функционирование данной системы.
Основными методами исследования послужили анализ, синтез, абстрагирование, формально-юридический и историко-правовой.
Результатами исследования стали выводы о необходимости совершенствования бюджетного законодательства с целью развития системной связи между всеми уполномоченными государством субъектами, осуществляющими бюджетные расходы, а также введения личной ответственности руководителей этих коллективных субъектов за достижение общественно полезного результата, измеримого в конкретных количественных и качественных показателях, с учетом миссии государства как единого целостного субъекта, осуществляющего расходы бюджета.
Практическая и теоретическая значимость полученных результатов заключается в том, что они могут использоваться для подготовки нормотворческих инициатив, в учебной работе со студентами и аспирантами, а также для расширения и углубления научных знаний в затронутой сфере.