Philippe Fournier, Foucault and International Relations, E-International Relations, May 12 2014
Extract
Michel Foucault’s name will be familiar to most IR scholars and his influence on the discipline appears to be beyond doubt. The work that Foucault inspired in International Relations is invariably associated with the post-structuralist approach and includes theoretical interventions as much as detailed genealogies. This is not to say that tracing Foucault’s influence on IR is an easy task. Indeed, the fact that he had very little to say about international politics in his own work, that many IR scholars refer to him only parsimoniously, and that his thought is ever-dynamic, elusive, and occasionally frustrating presents some challenges. Nonetheless, it can be traced in the different phases of poststructuralist inquiry in International Relations. First, Foucault’s influence can be found in the early critiques of reigning paradigms in IR theory; second, in discourse analysis; and third, in global governmentality studies. In this short piece, I revisit some of Foucault’s philosophical inclinations, methods, and concepts, and relate them to a series of significant currents and authors in the discipline. Needless to say, the scholars mentioned here do not constitute an exhaustive selection.
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