To get a better sense of power dynamics in global politics, this book presents an innovative theoretical framework, combining a critical engagement with, and further development of, Michel Foucault’s governmentality on the one hand, and the theory of world society of the Stanford School of Sociology on the other. Making an original contribution to academic debates about power and global political order, this book develops a comprehensive theoretical perspective on power relations and political dynamics. The book starts from the presupposition that any theoretical engagement of that kind requires nuanced empirical study as well. It therefore analyzes the dynamics of world-societal order in the concrete empirical example of Palestine, and raises the question of how its political and societal order comes into existence. The author argues that governmentality represents a fundamental pattern of political order in world society that also profoundly affects power dynamics in Palestine. This insight has two important implications: First, power relations do not follow dichotomous distinctions such as international/domestic or global/local, but manifest themselves within world society. Second, therefore, order that comes into existence in Palestine needs to be understood as world-societal order. Offering a comprehensive understanding of power relations and patterns of political order(ing) embedded in world society, the book provides a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics that contribute to the political and societal order of Palestine. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Middle East Studies, Palestine Studies, International Relations, International Political Sociology, International Relations Theory, Governmentality Studies, and Political Theory.

This book brings together theories of world society with poststructuralist and postcolonial work on modern subjectivity to understand the universalising and particularising processes of globalisation. It addresses a theoretical void in global studies by attending to the co-constituted process through which modern subjectivities and global processes emerge and interact. The editors outline a key problem in global studies, which is a lack of engagement between the local/particular/individual and the ‘universalising’ processes in which they are situated. The volume deals with this concern with contributions from historical sociologists, poststructuralist and postcolonial scholars and by focusing in the Middle East, religion in global modernity and non-human subjectivities.

This book reinvigorates the governmentality debate in International Relations (IR) by stressing the interconnectedness between governmentality and globality. It addresses a widening gap in the social sciences and humanities by reconciling Michel Foucault’s concept of "governmentality" with global politics. The volume assembles leading scholars who draw attention to the importance of approaching governmentality in IR from the perspective of globality, and thereby suggests to consider governmentality and globality as fundamentally entangled. Accordingly, the contributors engage in a multifaceted debate about the relationship of governmentality and globality, relating their views to the proposition that globality cannot be equated with the international level and should rather be considered as a genuine context of its own requiring distinct consideration. The book builds on the increasing importance and popularity of governmentality studies, not only by updating Foucault’s concepts at a theoretical level, but also by introducing novel empirical problems and practices of global governmentality that have not hitherto been explored in IR. With a wide theoretical and empirical range, it is relevant not only to IR in general and International Political Sociology in particular, but to any student or practitioner in political science, political theory, geography, sociology, or the humanities.

The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda is celebrated as a landmark global framework for achieving gender equality in peace and security governance. Its power is visible in two decades of United Nations resolutions, national action plans, regional initiatives, and countless activist, academic, and philanthropic projects. Yet despite this vitality, it is haunted by failure, as a lack of political will and stubborn patriarchal resistance frustrate its promise. This book offers a groundbreaking critical account of the WPS agenda, exploring its evolution in relation to the wider politics of global governance and feminism. Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd argue that WPS is not a settled, cohesive policy but a field in flux, defined and disrupted by a growing number of national, supranational, subnational, and transnational agents who in turn act on an expanding catalogue of threats, from climate change to homophobia, challenging traditional boundaries of peace and security. Kirby and Shepherd reconceptualize WPS as a “policy ecosystem,” tracing interaction and contestation around the agenda across levels from the UN Security Council to military alliances to feminist activists. They combine analysis of a vast dataset of policy documents with key informant interviews and close readings of diplomacy, statecraft, the politics of indigeneity, counterinsurgency, antimilitarism, human rights, and the arms trade across the first twenty years of WPS. Far-reaching and incisive, Governing the Feminist Peace poses a provocative question: What if we abandoned the idea of the WPS agenda as a unified political project altogether?

This book combines sociological theorising with studies on the Middle East and Islam. The diversity of modernities that can be observed in our world is linked to the claim of living in a global modernity, in a world society. The book underpins this claim with numerous excursions into Islamic history. It criticises the view that modernisation can be equated with westernisation and considers different projects of specifically Islamic modernities as integral parts of world society. From this perspective, the study contributes to the "provincialisation" of European history in contemporary social scientific thought. Contrary to the theories of postcolonialism associated with the call for the provincialisation of Europe, however, this book adheres to essential traditions of classical sociology. It thus aims to make a contribution to the social theoretical discussion on modernity, which is empirically underpinned with the help of data from the history of the Middle East and Islam. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.

The Handbook on Governmentality discusses the development of an interdisciplinary field of research, focusing on Michel Foucault’s post-foundationalist concept of governmentality and the ways it has been used to write genealogies of modern states, the governance of societal problems and the governance of the self.

This book examines what counts regarding the role and conceptualization of regions in world politics. It presents a fresh look at which narratives awake, persist, fall dormant or re-emerge amidst diverse interlocking processes of environmental, technological and global political changes. It puts forward a thorough and multidimensional conceptualization of regions as embedded in changing, overlapping environments, and requires more attention to regions’ shifting materiality, temporality and technological underpinnings. Combing the approaches, questions and analyses of Critical IR and Political Geography, it calls for a renewed emphasis on the puzzle of how the contextual environment of regions may become more (or less) multidimensional, or how some aspects of a region’s contextual environment may be mutually constitutive in non-intuitive ways. Ultimately, it sheds light on the politics of regions and the regional scale in international politics in order to overcome the often-underlying territorial fixity of territory and space within IR approaches. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of international relations, international political sociology, political geography, regionalism, geopolitics and area studies.