Sovereign Power, Government and Global Liberalism’s Crisis

Abstract: For some time now a leading cause of debate among IR scholars has been the so-called Liberal International Order (LIO) and its assumed crisis. This article pierces this debate from a critical perspective asserting that different conceptions and analytics of power allow diverse questions on and diagnoses of liberalism in the global realm. With this objective, it confronts Ikenberry’s conception of LIO with the Foucauldian notion of liberalism. This is done by identifying the conception of power that underlies each notion of liberalism, assuming the former as performative. This way, it first defines two different conceptions of power: sovereign and governmental. Second, it links Ikenberry’s conception of LIO with the sovereign conception of power and points out the political and analytical effects of this relation, mainly, the hierarchical character of LIO and the consequent desire for a West-led world. Third, it develops Foucault’s conception of liberalism linked to governmental power and establishes some of its political and analytical effects: the importance of a heterarchical notion of power focused on the dimension of subject and subjectivity for the analysis of the present, and the political need to reflect on our practices of freedom.

Kajian fenomena pandemi Covid-19 di Indonesia: Perspektif wacana, pengetahuan dan kekuasaan Foucault

Tujuan kajian ini untuk melihat pandemi Covid-19 di Indonesia sebagai fenomena sosial yang memberikan ruang interpretasi dari masyarakat dalam ruang aksi. Artikel ini merupakan kajian dalam melihat fenomena pandemi Covid-19 yang dianalisis secara kualitatif menggunakan perspektif wacana, pengetahuan dan kekuasaan dari Foucault. Hasilnya menunjukkan bahwa berbagai interpretasi dari masyarakat melibatkan tindakan nyata yang berkaitan dengan pemahaman tentang kekuasaan yang subjektif, horisontal, dan hadir dalam ruang interaksi publik yang melibatkan berbagai pihak. Melalui perspektif ini kita bisa lihat bagaimana kekuasaan bekerja melalui beragam mekanisme dalam ruang interaksi yang dilihat secara horizontal. Ruang tafsir relasi kekuasaan terkait fenomena pandemi Covid-19 di Indonesia memperlihatkan adanya tiga perhatian yang berbeda (relasi kekuasaan sebagai strategi, relasi kekuasaan govermentality, dan relasi kekuasaan dominasi).This study aims to see the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia as a social phenomenon that provides space for interpretation from the community in action space. This article is a study in looking at the Covid-19 pandemic phenomenon, which is qualitatively analyzed using the perspective of discourse, knowledge and power from Foucault. The results show that various interpretations of society involve concrete actions related to an understanding of power that is subjective, horizontal, and present in the public interaction space involving multiple parties. From this perspective, we can see how power works through various mechanisms in the interaction space seen horizontally. The interpretation room for power relations related to the Covid-19 pandemic phenomenon in Indonesia shows that there are three different concerns (power relations as a strategy, governmental power relations, and dominance power relations).

Policy Forum: In Defence of the First Nations Fiscal Management Act

The debate with respect to the recognition of Indigenous rights, title, and jurisdiction has largely been won. It has now moved to how best to implement those rights, title, and inherent jurisdictions. For Indigenous taxation jurisdiction, implementation must address challenges related to taxpayer representation, concurrent jurisdiction, service agreements with other governments, administrative capacity, financial management, and access to public debt capital at competitive rates. In this article, the author argues that the First Nations Fiscal Management Act (FMA) has been successful in overcoming these challenges. The FMA has protected and expanded Indigenous tax jurisdiction through standards and institutional support. As a result, it represents an effective path for interested Indigenous governments "to exercise [their] inherently governmental power of taxation" affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada in <i>Matsqui Indian Band</i>, and to expand their use of that power.

Cooperation between the EU and China: A post-liberal governmentality approach

The European Union's partnership with China has received significant academic attention. Experts have focused on both parties’ economic and political objectives and have made efforts to grasp the dynamics of the institutionalisation of EU-China cooperation. However, little has been said about how this collaboration affects the lives of citizens, especially in China. Adopting a Foucauldian epistemology, this article's key contention is that EU-China cooperation imposes a joint form of post-liberal governmental power on the Chinese population, which socially constructs empowered but not liberal political subjectivities for Chinese citizens. The article first reviews Foucault's approach to governmentality. It then explores Sino-EUropean collaboration after 2013, when the two partners established the ‘EU-China 2020 Strategic Agenda for Cooperation’. We illustrate how the institutionalisation of the partnership has been consistent with a governmentalised political rationality, and how policy implementation has allowed a post-liberal form of governmental power to flow from both EU and Chinese policymakers towards the Chinese population, triggering processes of political subjectivisation.

Certifying Health: The Unequal Legal Geographies of COVID-19 Certificates

This article discusses some of the challenges posed by the introduction of COVID-19 certificates as a privileged tool for opening up mobility and access in order to restore a semblance of normality to social life. While at present there is no international consensus either on how – or why – such certificates should be used or on how they should be designed and applied, a growing number of countries have already introduced COVID-19 certificates in one form or another. Yet the scientific community as well as the World Health Organisation (WHO) have expressed caution, noting that such certificates might disproportionately discriminate against people on the basis of race, religion and socioeconomic background, as well as on the basis of age due to the sequencing of the vaccine rollout. Indeed, while the new COVID-19 certificates may appear to promise a magical solution enabling us to free up global mobility and reopen economies, they actually risk creating new borders and new forms of inequality through an exclusionary sorting and profiling mechanism that delimits “safe” from “unsafe” bodies, based on differential access to “immuno-privilege” – but also differential forms of “bio-securitisation”. They also provide an illusion of pandemic safety – assuring citizens that through the “fetish” of the certificate “safe travel” can magically be reinstated. Securing territories and populations has always been, in Foucauldian terms, a matter of “making a division between good and bad circulation and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad”. We can therefore reasonably expect growing contestation, including before courts, around COVID-19 certificates in their different national and international iterations, as their inherently discriminatory nature and other unintended consequences such as those stemming from the use of persuasive – as opposed to the more traditional coercive – governmental power begin to unfold in their performative trajectory.

The Other Agrarian Urbanisation: Urbanism in the Village

This article considers a range of early 20th-century projects in which rural space was made subject to an ensemble of institutional forms and practices grounded in emergent urban paradigms. The projects in rural reconstruction I consider here seized on village space and the minds and souls of villagers as their terrain of operation. Rural reconstruction entailed the production of intimate knowledge of the rural population, the development of affective modes of engagement with them, and investments of governmental power not only in state institutions but in more abstract concepts like the ‘rural community’. Many projects were largely propagandistic; their concrete effects were minimal. But rural reconstruction brought urban logics, objects, and institutional forms directly into village milieus in ways that continue to shape how India’s urban and rural areas are conceptualised and operate in relation to one another. If urbanism in India today is deeply enmeshed in agrarian processes, then this article attempts to reverse the gaze by asking how expert knowledge directed towards managing rural change in 20th-century India depended crucially on emergent urban paradigms.

Between Normative Power and Soft Power: the Psagot case

The Psagot judgment, handed down by the European Court of Justice (CJEU) in 2019, provides that products originating in Israeli settlements in territories Israel occupied during regional wars, exported to the EU, should be labelled as such, to allow consumers make an informed political choice. This article argues that the Psagot judgment thus reinforces normative, 'top-down' governmental power with soft, 'bottom-up' consumer power. Psagot's implications for Israel-EU relations is discussed along with the effectiveness of the EU approach in the short and longer terms.

Religious Speech in Public Discourse

The thesis that the government is justified in restricting insults to religious feelings implies a broader view about the place of religious speech in public discourse, and about the nature of public discourse itself. The implication is that it should be possible to be critical or negative about religion provided that this is expressed in a moderate and respectful manner, but the speaker who disregards norms of civility can be legitimately silenced by the state. This means that public discourse is seen as a highly regulated space for orderly discussion, with the role of the regulator played by the government. The chapter argues that there are good reasons to adopt a different view of public discourse and think of it as the safe space for an open deliberative process where all citizens have an equal claim to speak even if what they say is abusive or offensive if judged by the prevailing civility standards. This is a necessary condition for allowing a society to reflect upon its values, and change. Further, this understanding of public discourse grounds two important limitations on governmental power to regulate speech. First, the procedure and agenda of public debate are not neutral, value-free issues situated outside public discourse and reserved for the government. Rather, they are substantive questions, part of the debate itself, and subject to constant reinterpretation. Secondly, free speech includes, and the legal right to freedom of expression ought to protect, both the substance and the manner in which an opinion is expressed.

Mexico

This chapter explores the origins and growth of Mexican judicial review. Mexico borrowed the idea of a Supreme Court with the power of a Constitutional Court from Brazil in 1994. In addition, the rise of independent judicial review, after 2000, coincided with the rise of different parties controlling the presidency, the two houses of Congress, and the state governorships and legislatures. This created a need in Mexico for a constitutional umpire, which was filled by the emergence of independent judicial review. It also created a political environment in which governmental power was checked and balanced enough to leave political space for an active Supreme Court. There is, in addition, a rights from wrongs element to the emergence of Mexican judicial review after the end of the often-brutal PRI dictatorship.

The African Union and the Advancement of Democracy

The African Union (AU) has as one of its goals the promotion and protection of democracy, human rights, and constitutionalism. A critical element of this goal is the rejection of unconstitutional changes of government (UCG), particularly in the form of coups d’état. While there have been some inconsistencies, the AU has rejected coups d’état and called for the reinstatement of democratic dispensations. Nevertheless, the UCG framework has been unable to stem subtler mechanisms of retaining power, such as the suspension of elections or the imposition of ostensibly proper constitutional reform initiatives. This chapter calls for increased attention to the latter forms of extending governmental power. Specifically, it recommends the establishment of formal mechanisms through which the AU can engage directly and offer assistance at moments when reform proposals are debated so as to ensure that domestic actors take cognizance of both the relevant AU frameworks and the comparative continental and global experience. Such a mechanism would be comparable in its workings to the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe.