Showing papers in "International Political Sociology in 2013"

In the Name of Love: Marriage Migration, Governmentality, and Technologies of Love

Abstract: The past 10 years have seen an increase in legislation pertaining to marriage migration in Europe. Such attention betrays various concerns and anxieties that intersect not only with issues of risk management, rights, and citizenship, but also with less tangible dimensions such as emotions, which become embedded in legal as well as in surveillance practices. Emotions such as love are integral to the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculation, and tactics that Foucault identified as part of governmental processes; the latter should not necessarily be equated with (and limited to) rationalized technocratic processes detached from emotional components. Technologies of love are central to the governmentality of marriage migration; as modes of subjectification and governing practice, they connect intimacy with citizenship. More than the manifestation of the rationalization of a specific emotion, technologies of love allow for an exploration of what an engagement with emotions such as love does to governmentality. Illustrations of the “attachment requirement” in Denmark, and the case of “Catgate” in Great Britain, show that technologies of love play a significant role in stirring and disciplining specific migration flows (what kind of marriage migrants the state welcomes or keeps at bay), but also in challenging, even if inadvertently, those policies and practices designed to gauge “true” relationships.

The “Minor” Politics of Rightful Presence: Justice and Relationality in City of Sanctuary

Abstract: This article examines how historical and geographical relations of injustice are “made present” through the activities of the City of Sanctuary network in Sheffield, the UK In so doing, it exposes the limitations of conceptualizing and enacting sanctuary through the frame of hospitality, and proposes an analytics of “rightful presence” as an alternative frame with which to address contemporary sanctuary practices In contrast to a body of scholarship and activism that has focused on hospitality as extending the bounds of citizenship to “include” those seeking refuge, we consider how the “minor” politics of City of Sanctuary potentially trouble the assumptions on which such claims to inclusion rest Our emphasis on the “minor” politics of “making present” injustices is important in bringing to bear an account of justice that is grounded in concrete political struggles, in contrast to the more abstract notion of a justice “to come,” associated with some accounts of hospitality To explore sanctuary practices through a relational account of justice brings to bear a politically attuned account of rightful presence, which potentially challenges pastoral relations of guest–host and the statist framing of sanctuary with which relations of hospitality are intimately bound This is important, we conclude, in countering the assumption that including the excluded solves the “problem,” or relieves the “crisis,” of asylum

Davos Woman to the Rescue of Global Capitalism: Postfeminist Politics and Competitiveness Promotion at the World Economic Forum

Abstract: The World Economic Forum (WEF) is a global governance actor that has in recent years taken an increased interest in issues pertaining to gender equality and women's empowerment. The paper critically investigates the work of the WEF in this area, suggesting that WEF-produced gender and development discourse is profoundly compatible with the politics and practices of neoliberalism—not least in the way in which it aligns gender equality and women's empowerment with national economic competitiveness. This is, furthermore, a distinctly postfeminist reading of gender that rests upon the production of neoliberal-compatible female subjectivities—such as “rational economic woman” or “Davos woman”—who emerge as those in society best able to deliver fair and sustainable economic growth (effectively rescuing global capitalism from the excesses of hypermasculine crisis capitalism). The framing of the case for gender equality and women's empowerment in these terms is powerful and may well be an effective way for gender advocates to present their demands. But by analyzing not only how the WEF has framed/represented gender issues but also what has been left out of this representation, the paper points to the way in which simplistic representations concerning the contribution that women make to economic competitiveness disguise the double burdens and gendered structures of socioeconomic inequality that are central to the widening and deepening of the market into all spheres of social life under conditions of roll-back neoliberalism.

Private Detention and the Immigration Industrial Complex

Abstract: This study draws upon the insights of Michel Foucault to examine the contemporary immigration industrial complex in the United States. We focus on the involvement of private prison corporations in this complex, as well as the factors that have been essential to its creation and that perpetuate its continuance. We argue that four key aspects of the system (the legal apparatus, worldviews/ideas, private corporations, and webs of influence) converge to create an immigration industrial complex and that this complex functions as an economy of power that works to manage the existing system and discourages fundamental reform.

Interrogating the Neoliberal Biopolitics of the Sustainable Development-Resilience Nexus

Abstract: One of the defining features of post–Cold War international relations has been the correlation of development practices and rationalities with those of security and the emergence of what has been called the ‘development-security nexus’. While the development-security nexus remains relevant, semantic shifts in the conceptualization of both development and security are occurring. Demands for development are increasingly tied not simply to demands for ‘security’ but to a discursively new object of ‘resilience’. And this shift from security to resilience is tied likewise to a reconceptualization of development as ‘sustainable development’. Are these, then, merely semantic shifts, or do they signify changes in the rationalities that have shaped the ‘development-security nexus’ during the post–Cold War period? Are the rationalities that distinguish resilience different to those underpinning demands for security? And are those of ‘sustainable development’ different to what was once known simply as ‘development’? Does the weaving of a nexus of relations between ‘sustainable development’ and ‘resilience’ represent a departure from the ‘development-security nexus’ in some way? And, if so, what explains that shift and what are its political implications? This chapter answers these questions through an analysis of the neoliberal biopolitics of the sustainable development-resilience nexus’. While sustainable development deploys ecological reason to argue for the need to secure the life of the biosphere, neoliberalism prescribes economy as the very means of that security. Economic reason is conceived within neoliberalism as a servant of ecological reason, claiming paradoxically to secure life from economy through a promotion of the capacities of life for economy. This is the paradoxical foundation on which neoliberalism constructs its appropriation of sustainable development. Sustainable development and neoliberalism are not the same, nor is the former simply a proxy of the latter, but they do come into contact powerfully on the terrains of their rationalities of security, which, on account of the interplay between ecological and economic reason, is increasingly conceptualized as resilience. This surface of contact ought to make for a tense and political field of contestation but has instead made largely for a strategically manipulable relation between the two doctrines.

Resilience and the autotelic subject: toward a critique of the societalization of security

Abstract: In discourses of resilience, there is a clear assumption that governments need to assume a more proactive engagement with society. This proactive engagement is understood to be preventive, not in the sense of preventing future disaster or catastrophe but in preventing the disruptive or destabilizing effects of such an event. In this sense, the key to security programs of resilience is the coping capacities of citizens, the ability of citizens to respond, or adapt, to security crises. The subject or agent of security thereby shifts from the state to society and to the individuals constitutive of it. In many ways, this shift away from a sovereign-based understanding to a social or societal understanding of security, under the guidance or goal of resilience, could be understood as a deliberalizing discourse, one which divests security responsibilities from the level of the state down to the level of the citizen. This article seeks to consider some of the genealogical aspects of discourses of resilience as a societal or agent-based understanding of security (particularly focusing on the work of Friedrich von Hayek and Anthony Giddens) in order to work through some of the consequences of the state's divestment of security responsibilities for traditional liberal framings of state–society relations.

“Actor‐Network Theory” and International Relationality: Lost (and Found) in Translation

Abstract: Like any multiplicity, “actor-network theory” is many things: an influential current within the sociology of science and technology; a relational and anti-essentialist form of materialism; an insistence that notions of agency not be confined to human subjects but embrace objects, devices, and other non-human entities; and much else besides. Actor-network theory was initially developed as a way of making sense of the social life of the laboratory and the complex paths that scientific knowledge takes from untidy practice to incontestable “fact.” Its founders, including Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and their collaborators, have since sought to apply these initial insights to a wide range of other arenas of social and political life. In the process, actor-network theory (ANT) has given us a wealth of concepts. The idea of the actor network itself embodies a productive tension, putting structure and agency into an intimate relationship in which the network is made up of actors who are, in turn, the effects of the network. In their attention to the concrete and contested ways in which knowledge is produced and circulated, ANT scholars have also pointed to the centrality of what Callon and Latour have called inscriptions , the various pieces of paper, devices, graphs, and computer programs through which actors seek to translate the messiness of the world—the laboratory, the battlefield or the market—into usable, mobile knowledge. The ultimate goal …

“Things of Networks”: Situating ANT in International Relations

Abstract: We come to this forum not to advocate for actor-network theory (ANT) but to raise friendly questions about its role in International Relations (IR). As outsiders to ANT, we recognize that these issues may be addressed within that broader literature. But since we are proponents of the use of frameworks that share with ANT a commitment to the analytical priority of processes, relations, and practices, we also have a particular interest in its development within our field. This forum arrives at an interesting moment for IR. Scholars working within a broadly social-constructionist framework increasingly draw upon relational and practice-theoretical approaches. Relational theories, ranging from those using the methodology of social network analysis (SNA) to post-structuralist modes of analysis, are recasting how we think about levels of analysis, actors, and the importance of social position. Practice theory revisits basic dichotomies that organize IR theory, including rationality and practicality, subjectivity and objectivity, and the ideal and the material. Relationalism and practice-theoretical accounts have demonstrated their utility in overcoming analytical problems involving, for example, the agent-structure problem and the relationship between continuity and change (Jackson and Nexon ⇓; Hafner-Burton, Kahler, and Montgomery ⇓; Adler and Pouliot ⇓). Actor-network theory shares many of the sensibilities of these two approaches. If anything, it pushes their criticisms of the process-reduction fallacy further. We read ANT as, in part, arguing that common analytic moves associated with other forms of relational and practice-turn theory effectively reify processes. This is certainly a danger for some kinds of social network analysis, practice-analytic theories, and discourse analysis. Specific studies deploying these frameworks risk designating their units of analysis as “real, solid, proven, or entrenched” (Latour ⇓:28). Consider the growing body of IR work on social networks and practices that treats them as static things rather than an …

Politics of Disappearance: Scanners and (Unobserved) Bodies as Mediators of Security Practices

Abstract: In 2008, debates over the deployment of body scanners in EU airports gave rise to imbroglios of technologies, bodies, law, and policies. Eventually, these entanglements appeared to be undone and resolved by the concealment of bodies from the screens of the machines—which had, meanwhile, been renamed security scanners. Using the concept of setting, this article describes the processes of disappearance operating among a vivid multiplicity of actants and connections and identifies three main paradoxical features characterizing them. Based on this analysis, the article advances the notion of the politics of disappearance, where heterogeneous elements—both material and immaterial, visible as well as invisible—actively contribute to the making of a security practice and, potentially, to the opening of political landscapes.

Actor‐Network Theory, Methodology, and International Organization

Abstract: Since its initial formulation in science and technology studies, actor-network theory (ANT) has spread like wildfire throughout the social sciences. Wildfires are fueled by dry and flammable vegetation as well as hot, gusting winds. ANT finds flammable vegetation among those frustrated with many of the conventions, dualisms, and dilemmas of the traditional social sciences. ANT promises to liberate scholars from strict dualisms such as the nature/society divide and the agency/structure dilemma. It claims to open up a reflexive discourse on what constitutes the practice of science. ANT's avant-garde spirit further fuels the fire. Others reject ANT. They (rightfully) lament the often-awkward terminology of ANT, its lack of appropriately defined models and concepts, its literary style of presentation, as well as the radical rhetoric that often comes along with it. For many, the question of what actually constitutes ANT remains mysterious, and it is often unclear whether it is more than a “new materialist” argument for taking objects, things, and technology seriously. I would like to begin by exploring why it is difficult to provide a clear-cut answer to the questions “What is ANT?” and “What can I use it for?” I then suggest that ANT is anything but radical. It shares many concerns with the pragmatist and practice theoretical ideas that have recently been introduced to IR. Ideas from ANT enrich our theoretical and methodological repertoire for understanding the international. I suggest that ANT offers a fruitful toolbox for research: It encourages the researcher to seek proximity to the practices studied, to build theory from empirical insights, and to rethink the character of representation. ANT-inspired studies promise to provide major insights for understanding the worlds of international relations. Actor-network theory is a loose and heterogeneous conglomerate of studies that, on the one hand, are very empirical, often examining seemingly “exotic” …

Sentencing Risk: Temporality and Precaution in Terrorism Trials†

Abstract: In debates on the preemptive measures of the war on terror, criminal law is often regarded as the antithesis to exception—a conventional mode of response that acts on the basis of past harm. Since September 11, 2001, however, significant new terrorism laws have been adopted in most countries in order to make possible the disruption and prosecution of potential terrorists engaged in preparatory activities. Thus, ancillary acts undertaken increasingly in advance of actual violence are brought within the remit of criminal law. This paper engages the question of the precautionary turn in criminal law itself, and how it plays out in actual courtrooms. We examine the terrorist trial as a performative space where potential future terror is imagined, invoked, contested, and made real. By focusing on the cases of the Hofstad group in the Netherlands, and the Rhyme trials in the UK, the paper examines how present criminal offenses involving terrorist aims and intent are constituted through the appeal to potential future violence. In conclusion, the paper teases out the political dynamic of secondary risk management that—frequently—underlies contemporary terrorism prosecutions.

International Relations Theory and the “Social Whole”: Encounters and Gaps Between IR and Sociology

Abstract: This article explores some basic issues which arise from International Relations (IR) theory also being a form of social theory in a broader sense. Many of these issues are related to the question of a “social whole,” that is, whether international relations/International Relations is one of many parts of a social whole, on what grounds it is differentiated from other parts, and whether it operates on a distinct level of social reality. We argue that these questions have been addressed in many forms of IR theory, but mostly only implicitly, and that the failure to make explicit assumptions about a social whole is probably due to the relative neglect of the subject in modern Sociology. The article argues that implicit assumptions about a social whole can be unearthed by looking at the concepts of systems, levels, and sectors, discussing debates about each of these in turn. Openly addressing IR theory as social theory, and spelling out images of a social whole, allows one to gain a sharper understanding of some of the basic analytical categories used, and to judge whether they form plausible delimitations of social reality within a wider social context.

“Once Was Blind but Now Can See”: Modernity and the Social Sciences†

Abstract: This article asks a series of very direct, if not simple, questions. How, and why, is it that we assume that modern knowledge is universal, despite its European genealogy and its historically recent provenance? What warrant do we have for considering this knowledge superior to the premodern knowledges of the West and the autochthonous knowledges of the non-West? Are we, in short, right to assume that modern Western knowledge transcends the circumstances of its historical and geographical emergence and thus that the social sciences are “true” for everyone—even though to do so is to privilege the modern and the Western over the premodern and the non-Western? In addressing these questions, this essay highlights the exclusions—of gods and spirits, and of nature—that have gone into the constitution of the concept of “the social,” a taken-for-granted object which provides the ground and the subject matter for the social sciences.

Constructing a Chinese International Relations Theory: A Sociological Approach to Intellectual Innovation

Abstract: Chinese scholars are debating whether, and how, to innovate a Chinese theory of International Relations (IR). This article examines the driving forces behind this theoretical debate. It challenges the commonsensical link between external events in the subject matter (i.r.) and theorizing (IR), which suggests that the innovation of a Chinese IR theory is a natural product of China's geopolitical rise, its growing political ambitions, and discontent with Western hegemony. We propose instead a sociological approach to intellectual innovation which opens the black box of knowledge production, and argue that theoretical innovation, in China and elsewhere, is best understood as an interplay between internal and external layers. The internal academic context comprises intellectuals pursuing prominence, with each intellectual trying to carve out a maximally distinct position in order to receive attention from their peers—theorizing a Chinese IR theory being one important way of doing this. The external layer—which ranges from power politics to sociopolitical developments—affects this process indirectly by providing more research funds and autonomy to the more immediate institutional environment where control over rewards such as research funds, promotion, and publications affects what kind of work is done, with theorizing being increasingly rewarded.

The Other Side of the Fence: Reconceptualizing the “Camp” and Migration Zones at the Borders of Spain

Abstract: This article explores the dynamics of the space of exception at the borders of Europe in the Spanish enclave of Melilla, and the neighboring Moroccan city of Oujda. Building upon field research conducted in the spring of 2008, I ask how we can understand the political space of migration not simply as exceptional, but as shaped by the mobility of the irregular migrants moving outside of the frameworks, policies, and practices of the state. By privileging the migrant narrative and making use of Ranciere's conception of politics as shaped by the demands of those who “have no part,” I suggest an alternative way of understanding the politics of exception and agency of non-citizens—that is, one of disruption and demands to open up powerful potentials for change in an otherwise rigid regime.

The Politics of Drawing: Children, Evidence, and the Darfur Conflict

Abstract: Drawing has been largely neglected in discussions of visuality, conflict, and violence. In 2007, the International Criminal Court accepted 500 children's drawings depicting the conflict in Darfur as contextual evidence for war crime trials against Sudanese officials. Starting from this event, and the attention that the Darfuri children's drawings have garnered internationally, this article explores the role that drawings, and children's drawings in particular, play in the visualization of conflict and violence. Rather than focusing primarily on the relation between image and text, the article argues that visuality needs to be understood as both an aesthetic and social object, whose production, circulation, and reception transform its political effects. It then shows how children's drawings are both differentially produced, and productive of difference and ambivalence, in the “truthfulness” of conflict.

Translating the Sociology of Translation

Abstract: Actor-network theory, material semiotics, the sociology of translation… The precise name of the domain in question is not itself entirely stable, and rightly so In the ANT scheme of things, society is far less stable, representation and governance considerably more disputed, and order quite a bit more precarious, than most other frameworks would allow Flux and impermanence are minor and tangled threads running throughout the history of the Western political imaginary: from Heraclitus and Lucretius to Nietzsche and Deleuze No other research framework has married this minor current with empirical inquiry in a manner that is as thorough, practical, and relentlessly materialist as ANT Bringing the Heraclitean worldview down to earth is one of its foremost accomplishments While ANT scholarship has seen certain prominent attempts to define and delimit it as an approach (Latour ⇓), others have resisted this move (Law ⇓), insisting that we keep things fluid We side quite definitely with this latter position It seems to us utterly consistent with the epistemology that ANT has done so much to advance Not another school, another theory to be imported, but an open-ended play of translation What does it mean to translate the sociology of translation? What it most certainly is not is translation in the style of Berlitz: the writing of a phrasebook that makes a foreign country navigable to an outsider Neither is it a matter of setting out ANT's principles in order to apply them like a formula to the subject matter of IR Instead, it is the transformative aspect of translation that we emphasize in this short essay Translate a text and certain meanings will change, some more than others Our call to translate the sociology of translation is therefore more than an invocation to connect concepts, guidelines, sensibilities, and sensitivities drawn from ANT to …

The Making of Docile Dissent: Neoliberalization and Resistance in Colombia and Beyond

Abstract: This paper is about strategies of neoliberalisation in relation to practices of dissent and resistance. It explores how struggles arising in the context of neoliberalisation may be subject to entanglement within the very processes they seek to contest and – in so doing - interrogates the political stakes of neoliberal governmental rationality. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic research, I trace the international trajectory of mobilisations against the dispossession visited upon Colombian farmers in the context of BP’s investment in oilfields in the mid-1990s. Reasoning through attention to the ways in which this one specific struggle was neutralised, I suggest that a key aim of neoliberal strategies of political control is to accomplish a sort of “political hygiene” by nullifying politically surplus subjects and containing dissent within manageable parameters. The invocation of discourses of rights and civil society can be seen to be integral to neoliberal political rationality in this regard: but rights are comprehended within a symbolic structuration of the population that coincides with neoliberal logics. I suggest that such logics are directed not so much at incorporating the population into a generalised “right of death and power over life”, as Foucault famously put it, but but at inscribing subjects into networks of unstable and precarious private contract that constrict the wider obligations of population and citizenship commonly associated with liberalism. Discourses of rights, civil society, and development are not antidotes to socio-economic dispossession or armed repression. Rather, all of these are complementary components of strategies aimed at the domestification of dissent.

At the Crossroads of Autonomy and Essentialism: Indigenous Peoples in International Environmental Politics

Abstract: Indigenous peoples are often perceived as custodians of nature owing to their close relationship with their environment and their nature-based livelihoods. This paper investigates the kinds of environmental agencies that are constructed for, and by, indigenous peoples within the United Nations (UN) Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PF) and the Arctic Council. The particular focus of this research is the issue of responsibility. The article brings together empirical materials from the two forums and engages with them using Foucault-inspired approaches. We offer a critical discussion of indigenous peoples' environmental agency in international politics, addressing the need to problematize representations of indigenous agency that to date have been largely unchallenged in both the practice and study of international politics. We identify three perspectives through which the environmental agency of indigenous peoples is validated and justified: having particular knowledge, being stakeholders, and having a close relationship with nature. Certain kinds of expectations are inscribed in each of these perspectives; responsibility becomes intertwined with agency.

The end of the 'liberal theory of history'? : Dissecting the US Congress' discourse on China's currency policy

Abstract: In the last ten years, economic issues related to currency policy have become the major ongoing dispute between China and the U.S. Especially the U.S. Congress is stridently demanding a tougher policy to avert the negative consequences for the U.S. economy of “unfair” Chinese policies in the form of a “manipulated currency.” Building on an analytical framework of discourse theory (DT) - and furthermore proposing a method for applying DT in empirical research - an investigation of the congressional debates on the Chinese currency shows that the question is not a purely economic one, but that it reflects a dislocation of U.S. identity as the vanguard of liberal-democratic capitalism. This implicates changes in regard to how “liberal” identity in the U.S. is constructed in relation to the role attributed to “illiberal” China, which in turn affects the formulation of China policy by the U.S. Congress.

Standardization for Transnational Diffusion: The Case of Truth Commissions and Conditional Cash Transfers

Abstract: The study of the transnational transfer of practices and institutions generally looks at the intermediary and final stages of the process, with much less attention devoted to its initial steps. In contrast, this article theorizes the early part of the trajectory of transfer, conceptualized as the process through which local ideas and practices are turned into a “standard model,” which we term the process of standardization. Drawing upon the public policy and social movement literatures, we identify three potentially robust mechanisms as central to the process of standardization—certification, decontextualization, and framing—and apply this framework to two cases: the transnational spread of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and the use of conditional cash transfers as a social policy instrument. We find that the key actors in shaping the content of these standards were neither the innovators nor the early adopters but intermediary entrepreneurs located at the intersection of a complex mix of state and nonstate networks.

Why Global? Diagnosing the Globalization Literature Within a Political Economy of Higher Education

Abstract: This article examines the assumed factuality of globalization in light of its persistent conceptual incoherence. Through a diagnosis of five reoccurring ambiguities within the globalization literature, I argue that the concept of globalization lacks an empirical referent. Scholars writing on globalization overcome this absence by asserting that some things (the Internet, McDonald's, etc.) and not others (genocide in Rwanda, refugee camps, etc.) are essentially “global.” It turns out, however, that who is positioned to posit some things (and not others) as “global,” and therefore posit the foundation for a theory of globalization, is shaped by a highly asymmetrical political economy of knowledge production. In particular, some scholars—usually in North American and European universities—are materially better positioned to produce knowledge about globalization than many of their colleagues in postcolonial countries. The seemingly arbitrary positing of some things as “global,” therefore, should be understood as a symptom of the highly unequal social relations in which knowledge about globalization is produced.

(Neo) Republican Security Governance? US Homeland Security and the Politics of “Shared Responsibility”

Abstract: Written from a vantage point in between Security Studies, Political Theory, and Governance Studies, this article attempts to theorize the current mobilization of civil society for the purposes of “national security,” “risk precaution,” or “homeland resilience” as the emergence of a neo-republican form of security governance—a mode of governance more reliant on organicist means of social construction than on economic or individualist instruments of social control. We argue that if the discipline of International Relations (IR) wishes to understand the nature of this emerging security order, it needs to assume a more cross-disciplinary approach and to develop a much richer idea of republicanism as not only a political philosophy but also a practice of governance.

Cosmopolitanism and the End of Humanity: A Grammatical Reading of Posthumanism†

Abstract: The academic discipline of International Relations has yet to systematically begin tracing the impact of posthumanism on ethics in global politics. In a context where a humanist picture of the subject is in “a state of crisis that is more acute than ever,” and the “end of humanity” is being declared by some, the question arises as to whether a moral commitment to liberal cosmopolitanism can be maintained. It arises because the moral commitments of cosmopolitanism traditionally rest on a humanist foundation, and posthumanism, at first glance, seems an obvious threat to it. In this article, rather than reading posthumanism as a threat to humanity, I read humanism as the threat. I propose that, tricky though it may be, a cosmopolitanism that embraces the end of humanity can be formulated and defended as a moral commitment to humanity: a cosmopolitanism without foundations. This cosmopolitanism without foundations is, I suggest, one way to overcome the skeptic's fantasy that we are hidden from each other, and with it the belief that our primary relation to the world is one of knowledge anchored to foundational promises of certainty. Instead, a life lived in the world with others is proposed, and with it a cosmopolitan commitment to humanity as an unavoidable ethical responsibility.

Performativity and the Politics of Equipping for Calculation: Constructing a Global Market for Microfinance†

Abstract: This article argues that the concept of performativity deepens our understanding of contemporary, expertise-driven processes of global economic governance. Tracing the World Bank's role in constructing a global market for microfinance, the paper suggests that the World Bank was instrumental in translating selected parts of economic models into practice, thereby changing microfinance practices globally. Socio-technical networks centered on the World Bank were created to equip actors to become part of a global market, which incorporated not only donors but also commercial investors. The paper makes a critical intervention in the performativity literature by arguing for the need to take positional power and dominance in the socio-technical networks of International Organizations more seriously. This move improves our ability to specify how economic ideas and models are translated into practice in transnational arenas.

Tracing Associations in Global Finance

Abstract: Four decades ago, when financial globalization was attracting widespread attention, the few theoretical frameworks that were available to analyze it were relatively simplistic. Often, it was seen as an unstoppable quasi-natural expression of the expansion of market forces, operating independently of state power, which it was undermining. Today there is a rich variety of frameworks which help us understand the immensely complex entanglements of power, states, markets, and international institutions that constitute and govern global finance, including some insightful uses of actor-network theory (ANT) (for instance, Langley ⇓; Best forthcoming ⇓). In this contribution I highlight a number of unique contributions that ANT makes to our understanding of global finance. Actor-network theory focuses on the importance of micro-level connections among humans and “non-humans” such as other life-forms, technical artifacts, or physical objects. Latour (⇓:5) has advocated studying these types of associations rather than the social: to redefine sociology “not as the ‘science of the social’, but as the tracing of associations .” He argues that the social is too often used as a shorthand that obscures the painstaking and often fragile ways that collectivities are constructed and assembled. The social then can become “invisible, untraceable, ubiquitous, and total … It's only if forces are made of smaller ties, whose resistance can be tested one by one, that you might have a chance to modify a given state of affairs. To put it bluntly: if there is a society, then no politics is possible ” (Latour ⇓:250). ANT's insistence on tracing out associations is a valuable corrective to the common tendency to see global finance as involving large, powerful, unstoppable forces operating independently of humans. On closer examination, it becomes apparent that global finance is heavily dependent on careful, detailed coordination of particular humans and objects, and this …

Philanthrocapitalism and the Healthification of Everything

Abstract: In 2012, it is hard to find a philanthrocapitalist campaign that does not trade in the language of “health.” Sometimes the health cause is defined specifically, as with Bono's RED initiative designed to provide antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) for people living with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa (Richey and Ponte ⇓), and sometimes the cause is defined vaguely, as in the “Healthy Communities Program” operated by the World Cocoa Foundation, an industry group for cocoa growers. Regardless of how health is mobilized, it is assumed to be an unambiguous and universal good, hence its appeal to corporations, mega-rich donors, and their nonprofit and governmental partners. But as Jonathan M. Metzl writes in an essay titled “Why Against Health?,” “‘health’ is a term replete with value judgments, hierarchies, and blind assumptions that speak as much about power and privilege as they do about wellbeing. Health is a desired state, but it is also a prescribed state and an ideological position” (Metzl ⇓:2). Health must therefore be treated with caution and the political, economic, and social agendas to which it becomes harnessed carefully scrutinized. This is no easy task, for as health has become increasingly moralized, its remit has also expanded. Thus, as I was reading Richey and Ponte's (⇓) provocative account of the RED campaign, I found myself contemplating the extent to which the affective appeal …

iCare Capitalism? The Biopolitics of Choice in a Neoliberal Economy of Hope

Abstract: International relations and global development just got a whole lot easier. Through the conscious choice and purchase of the “right” kind of coffee, bottled water, or t-shirt, now available at one's local supermarket, the caring relationalities of development of the “fair trade” kind can quite easily be put into practice. For some, these practices provide the space for people's “everyday” moralities let loose through their ordinary choices that then works to globalize a form of responsibility toward poor Others (Barnett, Cloke, Clarke and Malpass ⇓). Here, the weekly grocery shopping has morphed into the first line of defense of poor farmers’ livelihoods, clean water, women's empowerment, and international development. With Brand Aid (Richey and Ponte ⇓), with its celebrity- and corporate-brand-drenched marketing campaigns, this “causumerism” has been taken to the extreme. Now, through the purchase of Product (RED)-labeled commodities, it is instead the very real case that saving the very lives of poor, Aids-stricken Africans just got a whole lot easier. Put in rather stark, and exceedingly un-ironic and unproblematic terms, in buying a Product (RED) iPod, “you have a new iPod and you helped save a person's life.” Over time, however, the Product (RED) campaign has morphed slightly and narrowed the advertised scope of whom it saves. Now, RED provides its drugs predominantly to pregnant HIV-infected mothers in Africa in order to halt the spread of HIV to newborn children designed to usher …

Brand Aid and the International Political Economy and Sociology of North-South Relations

Abstract: This forum brings together a diverse group of scholars from international relations, international political economy, sociology, geography, and development studies to explore “Brand Aid”—a new concept in studies of North–South relations that can be advanced by IPE/IPS scholarship. In Brand Aid, branded products are sold to “ethical” consumer/citizens through celebrities who link them to worthy causes in developing countries. Brand Aid is “aid to brands” because it helps sell products and improve a brand’s ethical profile and value. It is also “brands that provide aid” because a proportion of the profit or sales is devoted to helping “distant others.” Brand Aid reconfigures images and representations of the legitimate role of business, civil society, and the state (and their overlaps) in North–South relations in ways that are not easily situated between “exploitation” and “development.” The contributions collected here stem from a series of roundtables organized in 2011 (including one at the International Studies Association annual convention in Montreal) to discuss how “we” in the North engage to “help” people in the South beyond the traditional international aid and trade channels (see contribution by Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte). The roundtable discussions developed into examinations of the broader aspects of contemporary North–South relations around gender and security, the morality of health, the changing role of the global South, corporate practices and social responsibility, biopolitics, celebrities as global social actors, and mediating material cultures across distance. These areas could be usefully informed by contemporary IPE/ IPS scholarship, but are not yet part of mainstream debates. Five of these points of engagement are highlighted by the contributions in this Forum. First, visual representations are a key feature of Brand Aid. By mediating Richey, Lisa Ann et al. (2013) Brand Aid and the International Political Economy and Sociology of North–South

Jomo Kwame Sundaram: An Interview

Abstract: Encounters between economic theory and other social sciences have come to be characterized by debates about the respective claims to truth, truthfulness, and authority that can be derived from different disciplinary methodologies. With the advance of quantitative statistics and mathematics-based reasoning, the economics profession has advanced claims of universal validity which allegedly rank the discipline first and foremost among the social sciences . A related development has been the “colonization” of other fields of the social sciences by economic methods. As a consequence, many scholars in disciplines such as politics and sociology have become either awed or wary of economic theory and methodology. In these—and many other—disciplines, there has also been a turn away from attempts at generalization and an increasing focus on the particular, the local, and the historically distinct . But a growing minority of social scientists has also been engaged in critical reflection within and across disciplines. These efforts center on reflexive analysis of the extra-disciplinary contexts for the production of knowledge, and the advantages and limits of different disciplinary methods. While IPS has published many examples of “international political sociologists” constructing such pathways among the disciplines, little attention has been paid to those economists who might be following a similar trace. Yet the number of economists developing links across disciplines has been growing, with interesting and important results. We therefore find it appropriate to begin the IPS interview series with Malaysian economist Jomo Kwame Sundaram, who has been a pioneer in this endeavor . Jomo has developed a form of economic thinking that steers clear of excessive abstraction and formalization, as well as the universalizing pretensions that tend to accompany those techniques—without giving up on the idea that economic reasoning has important contributions to make toward the solving of critical problems. He has done so in …