Book

The diffusion of power in global governance

Stefano Guzzini co-edits book where International Political Economy meets Foucault

Together with Iver Neumann, Stefano Guzzini edited a volume in the Palgrave Studies in International Relations Series. The book presents a selection of revised papers originally presented at the ECPR Joint Workshop Sessions which took place in Lisbon in 2009. The workshop was intended to make scholars in International Political Economy meet Foucauldian studies around the analysis of power and political order or governance.

Its origins lie in a puzzle. On the one hand, many approaches, in IPE or transnational studies, have established a diffusion of power away from the state to private actors or impersonal forces (the market as legitimate mode of value distribution). Whether with regard to the governance of finance, the environment or indeed security, power is seen as "slipping away", diffusing from the state, but often not really captured by anyone or anything else. Here, power is diffused in the sense of being "shared", but it is also "dispersed", "diluted" or "dissipated".

On the other hand, and here Foucauldian approaches are prominent, this diffusion is seen as a new mode of governance itself, rather than its dispersion. Instead of seeing power moving between actors or "evaporating", to use Susan Strange's expression, power itself is reconfigured and the actors themselves are seen as part of a new way in which international political order or power is to be understood. Instead of concentrating on the King and whoever may have taken his place, this type of analysis sees a far more efficient way of rule operating, in which power is reaching into, and using the lever of, market actors and global civil society. Here, power is diffused but not diluted; it expands into every niche of world society and has, through this different mode, increased. Although, in this new mode of governance, more agents have been "empowered", this empowerment goes hand in hand with a widened and deepened system of rule that applies to and works through those very empowered agents.

This volume explores to what extent these two visions are really antithetical or whether they can be combined, and, if so, how.

For more information, and a free download of Guzzini's introductory chapter, see box.

The diffusion of power in global governance
International Political Economy meets Foucault