41. A Governmentality Approach to Peace Operations
- Author:
- Elisa Lucia
- Publication Date:
- 12-2011
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- The International Spectator
- Institution:
- Istituto Affari Internazionali
- Abstract:
- In this book, Laura Zanotti uses Foucault's governmentality theory and genealogical method to trace the formation of the political rationale of the post-Cold War international security regime. Interestingly, she goes beyond the literature focusing on the capacity and legitimacy of international organisations to question how the legitimisation of discourses of international order developed. She convincingly demonstrates that, in the 1990s, discourses of democracy converged with discourses of collective security: democratisation became a means to create a peaceful world and non-democratic states were constructed as ''political monsters'' to be ''normalized''. Democracy was operationalised through the doctrine of ''good governance'', which became the organising principle for UN intervention as a universalised technical solution to achieve peace, democracy and development. In addition, at the beginning of the 2000s, the concept of ''human security'' emerged and converged with these previous discourses. It expanded the definition of international threat and shifted ''the referent and source of legitimacy of international organizations from states to population'' (19). As a consequence, political monsters endangering the human rights of their own population s lost, to a certain extent, their right to full sovereignty, and this opened the way for legitimizing forcible intervention through the ''responsibility to protect'' concept.
- Topic:
- Security