Content area
Full Text
Nothing is bad, but everything is dangerous [...] If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do (Michel Foucault).
Governmentality, Normalization and Resistance
In this paper, I use Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality to explore regimes of practices deployed in the process of the pacification and Europeanization of Croatia. The peace agreements brokered by the United Nations, the monitoring mechanisms set in place by the international community in order to protect minority rights, and the political and economic assistance provided to, and the conditionality imposed on, Croatia by the European Union (EU) and NATO testify to the deployment of multifarious, diffused, but decentralized disciplinary and governmental mechanisms. These were organized around liberal idioms of democracy, human rights, market economy and administrative effectiveness.
In recent years, studies that apply Foucauldian analyses of government (Foucault 1991a, 1991b; Dean 1999; Rose 1999; Moran 2003) to the study of international dynamics have proliferated (Maurer and Perry 2003; Huysmans 2004; Larner and Walters 2004a, 2004b; Lipshutz and Rowe 2005; Walters and De Haar 2005; Merlingen and Ostrauskauite 2006). Governmentality theories have been recognized as a distinctive theoretical approach to the study of international relations (Merlingen 2006). This body of literature focuses on the analysis of regimes of practices, that is, the how of power, its idioms, its technologies, its multiple and contingent configurations, local interaction and effects. For Foucault (1991b: 75), 'to analyze a "regimes of practices" means to analyze programmes of conduct which have both prescriptive effects regarding what is to be done and codifying effects regarding what is to be known'. Relevant questions in this regard are how specific idioms and rationalities have come to existence, how they are translated into practices of government, what forms of subjectification emerge, what spaces of resistance are opened, how these openings are strategically used by different actors and what political effects are produced in the process. Inquiries do not regard the legitimacy of power, but the modalities of its continuous transformation.
This paper maps the idioms and governmental mechanisms deployed by international organizations for maintaining order in Croatia. Through this case I show that in the post-Cold War, international security regimes of practices operate through the proliferation and intensification of mechanisms for monitoring, steering and disciplining potentially disorderly states....