Governmentality, the global and Russia

Abstract

The applicability of governmentality within International Relations (IR) — a discipline whose hard core consists of ‘the international’ or, more recently, ‘the global’ — has come under criticism over the past several years. Additionally, it has been argued that governmental practices and techniques are distributed unevenly within the international arena and that governmentality is ill-suited for the study of those parts of the world where the social base of advanced liberalism is lacking. This article takes issue with those claims. First, it insists on the character of Foucauldian governmentality less as a self-contained theory and more as an analytical perspective focused on empirical enquiry. Second, it argues that governmentality invites us to challenge IR’s insistence on the ontological specificity of the international. Third, the article argues that governmental arrangements are characteristically impure, as the techniques of (neo)liberal governmentality commonly receive support from non-liberal arrangements. These arguments are illustrated with an analysis of a case that engages simultaneously with the global and the illiberal: a set of proposals centring on the vision of the Russian capital Moscow as a ‘global city’.