Deadline: 30.05.2007.

Panels to be proposed to the International Studies Association Annual Convention in San Francisco, March 26-29, 2008.
Deadline: 30th May 2007.In the series of lectures for the course at the Collège de France entitled  Sécurité, territoire et population  Foucault develops an understanding of security as a series of political rationalities and technologies with the aim of regulating circulation in order to manage contingency. With the obsolescence of walled cities in the face of economic development in the 18th century and the emergence of the liberal state, Foucault argued that the “insecurity” of cities in relation to the influx of “all forms of transient populations, beggars, vagrants, delinquents, criminals, thieves, assassins” was to be met  by technologies of security with the object of “organizing circulation, to eliminate its dangers, to apportion good from bad circulation, to maximize the good circulation while minimizing the bad.” In this sense, security, as Foucault notes, is oriented towards a future that is “not exactly controlled or controllable, not exactly, measured or measurable” and good management means “to account for what can happen.”

We can draw from this analysis of security two key dynamics:
A)    That security in the liberal order operates on a plane of circulation where the aim is to manage contingency;
B)    That this management of contingency implies the deployment of political rationalities and technologies of security within a context marked by the impossibility of eliminating insecurity altogether.

How can this Foucauldian understanding of security shed light on the conceptual transformations to security in the discipline of International Relations that we have witnessed over the past few decades and catalyzed by such world events as the end of the Cold War and 9-11? What is the connection between broader (environmental, economic, social, developmental) and deeper (human, global, emancipatory) understandings of security to the emergence of a global liberal order? How does this understanding of security as a form of management of contingency allow us to apprehend emerging patterns of global governmentality? How do the deployment of rationalities and technologies of security and their attendant conceptual manifestations help to shed light on the connections between sovereign power and biopower?

The main interest of this call for paper is to organize panels and/or roundtables that will address the themes above in either broad theoretical or case based analyses. We envision the common thread of the panels as tied to an understanding of security in terms of circulation and contingency and operating via the rationalities and technologies of global governmentality. While the papers need not necessarily be associated directly with the work of Foucault, the frame of analysis should follow the lines outlined above. 

Abstract proposals of approx. 400 words should be sent to:

marc.doucet@smu.ca or mlarrina@uottawa.ca

The deadline for proposals is the 30th May 2007.

Panels on this theme will be proposed to ISA under International Political Sociology.