Deadline: 30.05.2008.

The recent addition of Foucauldian notions of governmentality to the theorization on global governance within IR has sought to shed light on the multiple ways in which biopolitical rationalities...

International Studies Association Annual Convention
New York City, N.Y., February 15-18, 2009
Panel organizers
Miguel de Larrinaga and Marc G. Doucet
  
PANEL ABSTRACT :
The recent addition of Foucauldian notions of governmentality to the theorization on global governance within IR has sought to shed light on the multiple ways in which biopolitical rationalities and technologies render problematic conventional understandings and patterns of power and subjectivity centered on the nation-state and the international order. A host of areas of inquiry around regulatory mechanisms in fields such as labor standards, policing, security, border management, disease control, banking regulation, environmental regulation, and counterterrorism have been explored in terms of the formation of transnationalized channels of global governmentality and the multiplicity of transnationalized force relations. At the same time, and most notably since 9-11, we have also seen increasing interest in understanding sovereign power as a modality of power centered on the exception. Exceptional times, it is argued, have required exceptional measures that in turn have brought about in various forms the suspension of international law. In doing so, the exception brings to the fore a view of sovereign power as a form of power which is a) constituted on the terrain of the juridico-political order; and b) bounded to the moment of a decision. This then leads to a problématique that can be summarized as follows:
 
Does a focus on governmentality render anachronistic the deployment of sovereign power? Do acts of sovereign power constitute a limit to biopolitical rationalities and technologies?  Does sovereign power become merely tactical, and secondary, embedded in a field of governmentality; or, conversely, must we understand sovereign power as instantiating the conditions of possibility of such fields? How are we to understand the coexistence of these two forms of power? What types of assemblages, if any, are produced?
 
The main interest of this call for papers is to organize panels and/or roundtables that will address the problématique above in either theoretical or case based analyses. Paper abstracts of approx. 400 words along with ISA required information regarding institutional affiliation should be submitted by May 27th with the aim of meeting the ISA deadline of May 30th. Panels on this theme will be proposed to ISA under International Political Sociology. Abstracts should be submitted to: marc.doucet@smu.ca or mlarrina@uottawa.ca