Introduction
Despite much recent International Relations (IR) scholarship drawing on Michel Foucault’s insights into governmentality and biopolitics, there has been relatively little engagement with the empirical foundations of Foucault’s work. In particular, Foucault spends some time exploring armies, war, and the ‘military apparatus’ (or dispositif) within his accounts of discipline and government.Footnote 1 Despite this, there is very little scrutiny of this aspect of his work in IR literature. When Foucault’s military apparatus is discussed, it is often either taken for granted as part of the infrastructure of sovereignty and biopower that facilitates the ‘War on Terror’ and associated notions of the ‘camp’ or is viewed purely as an instrument of interventionism in neoliberal global politics.Footnote 2 Yet Foucault identifies the apparatus as one of the foundations upon which government is constructed and, despite the subsequent emergence of other knowledges, techniques, and methods, he is explicit at the end of his Security, Territory, Population lectures that ‘governmentality’ remains dependent upon the foundation provided by a permanent military apparatus.Footnote 3
The military apparatus is, moreover, not simply significant in and as of itself. The soldier, a key figure within the apparatus, is highlighted in Foucault’s work due to its peculiar disciplined subjectivity. The soldier’s subjectivation is explored in relation to the emergence of disciplinary power; his/her body being the object of particular methods and techniques aimed at transforming an individual from a member of the general population into a subject whose conduct is highly regulated and whose body is at the service of government.Footnote 4 As one of the first subjects of discipline, the soldier is key to the emergence of ‘biopower’, a power ‘that has taken control of both the body and life or that has, if you like, taken control of life in general – with the body as one pole and the population as the other’.Footnote 5 Discipline is one of the three ‘powers’ of Foucault’s governmentality, alongside sovereignty and government. As sovereignty is heavily reliant on the military apparatus, the soldier thus occupies a peculiar subjective position at the two ‘poles’ of government through biopower; an individual subject and as a tool for governing the population as a whole.
Given IR’s historic concern with matters of war, the lack of scrutiny of Foucault’s account in IR is surprising. Indeed, one critical voice has noted that Foucault’s governmentality work tends instead to inspire scholarship that is significantly different to the ‘traditional concerns of international relations theory’.Footnote 6 This may stem from the fact that Foucault’s own analysis of the military apparatus is relatively limited outside the lectures and the pages of Discipline and Punish, and even here it is fragmentary. His analysis concentrates on the establishment of the apparatus between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but not on its continued evolution since then. Nevertheless, a vibrant debate in IR over governmentality in international politics offers the potential to engage with governmentality’s empirical foundations, including its military ones. Roughly speaking, one side of this debate contests governmentality’s international applicability due to its European roots and its emphasis on power in domestic, rather than international, settings.Footnote 7 Conversely, others argue that governmentality is applicable as a theoretical framework for understanding domestic and international affairs because of the interdependency of both spaces. Meanwhile, it is viewed as a viable method of governing due to the pervasive influence of neoliberal international organisations and norms in a global political economy.Footnote 8 The crux of the IR debate therefore concerns governmentality’s utility in an ‘international’ context, thereby echoing broader debates about the spatial nature of the discipline found in the works of, for instance, Kenneth Waltz and R. B. J. Walker.Footnote 9 However valid and necessary this governmentality debate is, it nevertheless fails to engage with the empirical elements that Foucault identifies as the infrastructure of power around which governmentality has come to operate. The result is a body of IR scholarship that is willing to accept governmentality’s premises as both a theoretical framework and as a method of government without questioning the empirical foundations upon which governmentality is based.
This article is motivated by two factors. The first is a suggestion by one of the IR debate’s participants. Appreciating the need to examine the nature and underlying social relations of liberal societies more deeply to understand ‘what it is about them that makes governmentality possible’, Jonathan Joseph has issued a ‘call for action’ to further explore governmentality’s material foundations.Footnote 10 The second is Foucault’s own peculiar assertion in Security, Territory, Population that ‘the great diplomatic-military apparatus … has hardly changed since the eighteenth century’.Footnote 11 Accordingly, this article scrutinises the military aspects of Foucault’s thoughts on discipline, government, and biopolitics. It calls into question (‘problematises’ in Foucauldian terms) Foucault’s portrayal of the soldier and the military in Discipline and Punish and the Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics lectures (henceforward ‘Discipline’, ‘Security’ and ‘Birth’, respectively), in which the concepts of governmentality and biopolitics were explored in detail. The article begins by considering the debate over governmentality’s utility to IR. The article then illustrates the significance of historical analysis in Foucault’s work, before outlining his accounts of, first, the soldier and, second, the broader military ‘apparatus’. Finally, the article problematises these accounts while suggesting the need to rethink these underlying military aspects of Foucault’s work and the implications of this rethinking.
The internationalisation of governmentality in IR
Governmentality literature in IR is largely silent on the military context of Foucault’s work on governmentality and biopower. Much of this scholarship explores the extent of governmentality’s applicability in the ‘international’, introducing the notion of ‘global governmentality’. For instance, Dean’s contention is that a ‘global governmentality’ has emerged, ‘propounded’ by international governmental agencies and operating ‘through both the existing arts of domestic government within nation-states and as an attempted extension and generalisation of them across the planet’.Footnote 12 Even if states themselves have limited authority in the international, there is no escaping the importance of some form(s) of ‘governmental’ intervention by, for example, transnational supra-governmental organisations. Others, meanwhile, draw attention to the expanding involvement of non-state agencies in the process of government, either ‘internationally’ or through the domestic privatisation of some of the state’s functions.Footnote 13 Graham Burchell, for instance, draws on Foucault to make the point that modern government favours the delegation of some of its responsibilities to non-state agencies of power.Footnote 14 Such works provide valuable contributions to our understanding of contemporary government drawn directly from Foucault’s work. Indeed, as Joseph notes, this may be governmentality studies’ most helpful contribution to IR:
Foucault’s argument seems particularly well suited for describing current thinking on rolling back direct state involvement in various social and economic matters, bringing the state into cooperation with a complex network of other social institutions and giving the state more of a managerial role as an overseer of certain social processes.Footnote 15
Foucauldian accounts of government, therefore, rest on the premise that the state and a network of governmental agencies cooperate to manage life, possibly on an international scale.
Other works emphasise the significance of Foucault’s account of subjectivity under governmentality.Footnote 16 Such studies perceive Foucault’s account of the evolution of governmentality as an account of a complex process of subjectivation of individuals, which culminates in the ‘biopolitics’ of neoliberalism. The emergence of neoliberalism from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberalism, is the subject of Birth, wherein Foucault introduces homo œconomicus as governmentality’s principal subject.Footnote 17 This subject is defined as ‘someone who pursues his own interest, and whose interest is such that it converges with the interest of others’;Footnote 18 a consuming subject who is central to market society;Footnote 19 and a subject who must be encouraged and trained to compete in this market by government.Footnote 20 In short, the neoliberal subject needs to remain free only to the extent that it is ‘aware of what it wants and unaware of what is being done to it’.Footnote 21 It is the spread of this neoliberalism and this form of subjectivity in the international that signifies the emergence of a global governmentality.Footnote 22
Yet Foucault also explores other forms of subjectivity, including, in relation to discipline and the body, the soldier. An emerging corpus of ‘critical military studies’ literature in sociology and IR including authors such as Victoria Basham, Kevin McSorley, and Paul Higate, have each in some way or other linked Foucauldian ideas of military discipline to wider recent geopolitical issues.Footnote 23 The ‘embodied legacy of military training’,Footnote 24 as Higate calls it, has significant implications for both the domestic and the international contexts in which military force (and therefore the subjectivised warriors under analysis) is deployed both from and within. For Higate, this is manifested in the different levels of aggression adopted by security and military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, with different states’ military training practices continuing to influence the behaviour of ex-soldiers following their transition to contractors. Basham, meanwhile, finds that as Western military operations dragged on in Afghanistan and Iraq, a militarised form of discipline emerged in home populations as a means of providing and showing support to deployed military personnel and veterans.Footnote 25 This body of work is particularly sensitive to material and performative aspects of the political, appreciating that matter is ‘generative and agentive not just in the sense of bringing new things into the world, but also in the sense of bringing forth new worlds’.Footnote 26 Indeed, in their Foucault-inspired explorations of the body, disciplinary practices, performativity, and the everyday of war and militaries, Basham, Higate, and McSorley are all crucial in underlining how the process of subjectivation of individual soldiers is directly associated with the forms of politics experienced in the international.
The claims of the global governmentality work, meanwhile, have been challenged. In addition to expressing concern over Foucauldians’ reluctance to engage with ‘traditional concerns of international relations theory’,Footnote 27 Jan Selby believes that the use of Foucault in IR often lacks recognition of ‘the distinctive problems of “internationalising” a theorist whose focus was primarily on the “domestic” social arena’.Footnote 28 Furthermore, despite the fallacies of some ‘orthodox’ views of the division between domestic and international, there nevertheless exists ‘an ontological specificity to the international’.Footnote 29 This is based on a number of ‘elements’, two of which are of particular note. First, a distinctive arena of international politics is brought into existence by the ‘power effects’ of discourses of nation-state, sovereignty, and anarchy, alongside the processes of ‘capitalist modernity’. Second, the emergence and the territorial specificity of state-held capabilities of government, surveillance, consent-creation, and coercion has consolidated differences between inside and outside spaces.
A further critique of Foucauldian governmentality approaches concerns an alleged failure by ‘global governmentality’ scholars to break from an essentialist methodological trap also occupied by more traditional liberal approaches. Both Chandler and Joseph warn against such an essentialisation of the international, which they claim occurs in governmentality research.Footnote 30 As Joseph puts it: ‘IR theories of governmentality tend to take for granted the spread of (neo)liberalism through international institutions’, thereby attributing all parts of the international with a liberal character.Footnote 31 Similarly, he argues that governmentality simply does not apply either as theory or practice in societies that do not possess the social basis or the institutions necessary to develop a liberal programme.Footnote 32 Chandler complains that the ‘shift to “global governmentality” [in IR scholarship] is only engaged with superficially’, leading to a neglect of Foucault’s methodological emphasis on the need to subjectively frame meanings.Footnote 33 Thus Chandler invites us to eschew superficiality by engaging more comprehensively with the substantive elements of Foucault’s thesis. Joseph also calls for further engagement, albeit with the material foundations of governmentality. His concern is that:
Despite Foucault’s own talk of the development of capitalism, the spread of political economy and a new concern for population and workforce, many of the followers of Foucault are not prepared to talk of such conditions of possibility, only of the practices of governance themselves.Footnote 34
To the above, this article adds a call for ‘followers of Foucault’ to problematise Foucault’s account of the historical origins of governmentality, and especially the social structures of those Western societies from which governmentality is understood to have emerged.
Foucault’s military and historical foundations
There is a prominent military-historical element to Foucault’s accounts of discipline, government, and biopolitics. Discipline, a precursor work to the lectures on governmentality, explores the soldier’s subjectivation in relation to ‘docile bodies’ and the evolution of disciplinary techniques during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 35 Foucault views the military as what McSorley calls the ‘foundational laboratory of disciplinary power’.Footnote 36 Another lecture series, Society Must Be Defended, makes the case for politics being the continuation of war by other means, an inversion of Clausewitz’s famous axiom.Footnote 37 Moving away from this argument in the later Security and Birth lectures, Foucault outlines the military’s creation and significance as one of the foundations of modern government.Footnote 38 He explains that:
the pastoral, the new diplomatic-military technique, and finally, police, were the three major points of support on the basis of which that fundamental phenomenon in the history of the West, the governmentalization of the state, could be produced.Footnote 39
These three ‘points of support’ evolved to form part of what Foucault called the three ‘powers’ of sovereignty, discipline, and government which, despite emerging at different moments in history, have come to work alongside each other in the process of government.Footnote 40 These three ‘powers’ are the ‘apparatuses of security’ that allow governmentality to function, underpinning its processes of subjectivation, and thereby constituting its ‘essential technical instruments’.Footnote 41 Birth highlights the tensions between the world of the market and that of government, to the extent that governmentality’s ‘global character’ is at stake, and it is only resolved through the establishment of ‘civil society’ as a new ‘field of reference’ for sovereignty.Footnote 42 Crucially, however, despite all the threats to and the potential ‘disqualification’ of the sovereign by the ‘invisible hand’ of the market discussed in Birth,Footnote 43 Foucault’s conclusion is that sovereignty (and all it entails) persists, governing with and alongside economics, and with important proprietorial and productive roles to play within associated territories.Footnote 44 For its part, the soldier is central to both the sovereign and disciplinary apparatuses, being both subject and object of power.
Despite their somewhat fragmented nature, these various works and lectures are sufficient to produce in Mitchell Dean’s mind ‘a number of … lucid and coherent’ contributions by Foucault on government.Footnote 45 Moreover, the military apparatus is always part of this understanding of government and, indeed, the Security lectures close by reasserting the significance of the military-diplomatic apparatus (and discipline) in a new world of ‘économiste’ government.Footnote 46 Here, Foucault summarises the ‘new governmentality’ by noting that government must ‘manage populations’, ‘organise a legal system’, and, crucially, ‘has to provide itself with an instrument of direct, but negative, intervention’. While this instrument was initially ‘a police with a repressive function’, it is now reinforced by the diplomatic-military apparatus. One of the key conclusions of the lectures, therefore, is that modern government operates thanks to a combination of forces, including the military apparatus. Consequently, the Foucauldian understanding of government as articulated in the Security and Birth lectures should not be understood without appreciating the military apparatus at its heart.
With this in mind, it is frustrating that Foucault’s account of the military apparatus is less exhaustive than his ‘lucid and coherent’ musings on government. He admitted that this was an aspect of society that he wanted to explore in more detail, yet without ever fulfilling his ambitions:
One theme I would like to study in the next few years is that of the army as a matrix of organisations and knowledge; one would need to study the history of the fortress, the ‘campaign’, the ‘movement’, the colony, the territory.Footnote 47
This might explain Foucault’s claim that the military apparatus ‘has hardly changed since the eighteenth century’.Footnote 48 Thus a key social object such as the apparatus is portrayed as having achieved a permanence of form, ignoring the likelihood that social objects rarely maintain their form for long. True to his word, and despite its ongoing significance as one of the ‘points of support’ for ‘the governmentalization of the state’, Foucault never scrutinises the military’s evolution beyond the eighteenth century. To paraphrase Hobson’s critique of the use of history in IR,Footnote 49 whereas Foucault is more than willing to speak of governmentality as being embedded in and constituted by historical processes, including the emergence of the military apparatus and discipline, this apparatus has become an ‘immutable illusion’, eternalised and made resistant to wider sociological change. This may well have served the purpose of supporting his claim of the existence of governmentality. Yet the result is a theory of government contingent upon an ossified conceptualisation of a military apparatus that is, as time progresses, increasingly at odds with its material realities in the real world.
This is all the more surprising given the engagement with history more generally in Foucault’s work. History flows through his analyses, from Discipline’s broad engagement with a number of texts and schemas to the lectures’ historical sociology of government.Footnote 50 He has been variously labelled ‘the historian in a pure state’,Footnote 51 ‘the greatest modern philosophical historian’,Footnote 52 and a philosopher who ‘revives’ history.Footnote 53 In his own defence of (Nietzschean ‘effective’) history, Foucault contended that ‘history has a more important task than to be a handmaiden to philosophy … its task is to become a curative science’.Footnote 54 To this end he proposes an ‘effective’ history to explore ‘events in terms of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations’.Footnote 55 Without engaging in detail here with Foucault’s historical methods, it is nevertheless important to note the prominent historical approach taken in Discipline and the lectures on governmentality and biopolitics.
Conversely, the IR debate on Foucauldian notions of government is generally devoid of historical analysis. Calls for a ‘new materialism’ in IR have, on the other hand, drawn on Foucault’s genealogical approach and its historical method. Building on new materialist works’ appreciation of the agency of objects and the inert,Footnote 56 Diana Coole’s call for a ‘capacious historical materialism’ encourages scholars to re-evaluate apparently ‘congealed’ institutions and systemic logics.Footnote 57 Institutions and systemic logics, no matter how settled they might first appear, ‘need always be reappraised within any particular context, along with their underlying ontological assumptions, lest they become reified or taken for granted’. Foucault’s uncritical assumption of the eighteenth-century ossification of the military apparatus, suggest a need for a reappraisal of the military apparatus. Moreover, the lack of a historical engagement in the ‘global governmentality’ and critical military studies work reinforces that need. To do so, however, first requires an exploration of the military’s significance in Foucault’s work.
The soldier subject
An important aspect of much of Foucault’s work, including Discipline and the lectures, is the link between the subject, power, and government. In relation to governmentality, a plethora of subjective processes and resulting subjectivities are evident within the component elements of the apparatuses. For example, ‘sovereignty’ involves members of the armed forces, judiciary, and diplomatic services, whereas ‘discipline’ involves an array of subjectivising spaces such as schools, asylums, and military training establishments, each producing and dependent upon its own distinctive subjectivities. Subjects associated with these apparatuses are simultaneously foundational and exceptional: foundational as they are those subjects upon or around whom government or ways of thinking about government are established; exceptional as the distinctiveness of their ‘sovereign’ and ‘disciplinary’ subjectivities is necessary for the subjectivation of the general population. The school, for instance, involves the subjectivation of pupils by another, very specialised, subject in the form of the teacher. In turn, such ‘teacher-subjects’ are themselves products of distinctive subjectivation process which establish them as subjectivising agents for pupils, a process with its own specialised techniques, practices, and ways of knowing that are exceptional from but central to the subjectivation of the broader population.
Significantly, the soldier is the first subject noted in Foucault’s account of the emergence of discipline in society,Footnote 58 establishing it as potentially the original biopolitical subject. Foucault describes the soldier as a member of a permanent armed force under the control of the government,Footnote 59 and it is as part of his exploration of disciplinary power in Discipline that Foucault first pays detailed attention to the soldier. While Discipline predates his turn to governmentality, there is a clear thread connecting it with the later governmentality work, stemming from the understanding of discipline as an art ‘of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine’.Footnote 60 The conducting of conduct by government is, therefore, clearly emerging as one of Foucault’s key conclusions on the role of government before the governmentality lectures themselves. The soldier is not the only subject under Foucault’s analytical gaze as he explores the development of other disciplinary spaces and practices, such as the class, factory, and the hospital alongside the military training and the barracks. Such spaces involve the application of disciplinary techniques to change the behaviour of subjects, be these patients, recruits, prisoners, or pupils.Footnote 61 Barracks are thus one of the first spaces dedicated to the exercise of disciplinary regimes over the bodies of subjects, and from which the broader notion of biopolitics grows.
The emergence of such institutions and practices mark a significant shift in government, away from a reliance on juridical power towards the ‘action of the norm’ and the distribution ‘of the living in the domain of value and utility’.Footnote 62 Foucault argues that we should seek to explain power by considering the ‘entry of forces’ in the subject,Footnote 63 and the class, factory, hospital, and barracks are the points of such entry. The government of groups of individuals, therefore, was made possible through a concentration on their micro (‘tactical’) behaviour. The alteration of specific movements, postures, and bodies expanded from being merely a means of turning the individuals into collective entities into a method of governing the masses. Foucault’s primary contention therefore is that the practices developed in these disciplinary spaces permeated into wider society to facilitate a government by aggregation: the transformation of individuals into groups, classes, regiments, and units that were easily governable.
Foucault’s analysis of government and the growing importance of the micro level of subjectivity is centred on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The period involved a range of major wars between European powers, such as the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the wars of Spanish (1701–14) and Austrian (1740–8) succession, and the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), along with revolutionary wars in the US (1775–83), Haiti (1791–1804), and France (1789–98). Yet in keeping with his ‘effective’ historical approach, in Discipline Foucault concentrates on the micro-tactical rather than the strategic level, exploring the changes to the training of soldiers and on the realisation of what training might achieve of the soldier. He identifies a transformative period bookended by the image of the soldier in two texts, Montgomery’s La Milice Française (1636) and the French Crown’s Ordinance of 1764.Footnote 64 Foucault contrasts Montgomery’s belief that one needed to be born a soldier and in possession of particular physical attributes with the Ordinance’s understanding that a soldier was ‘something that can be made; out of formless clay’. By the Ordinance, the soldier was to be formed via training regimes designed to get ‘rid of the peasant’ and to give him the ‘air of a soldier’. The soldier was thus turned into an exceptional subject: one that was to be extracted from the general population and subjectivised in a different, but very deliberate, manner.
This new form of soldier subjectivity developed alongside a new intellectual interest in the conduct of war, sometimes involving detailed discussion of the bodies of soldiers. This was accompanied by a ‘revolutionary growth in military literature’,Footnote 65 with ideas from works on military training acquiring a broader societal impact.Footnote 66 Foucault himself cites works by a number of well-known early modern military figures, including Maréchal de Saxe, Maurice of Orange, Gustavus Adolphus, and, especially, Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert’s Discourse Préliminaire: Essai Général de Tactique I. The soldier demonstrated how a body became something ‘docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved’.Footnote 67 Military training formed part of a ‘political anatomy’, which allowed both control over the bodies of others along with improved speed and efficiency. This political anatomy was a result of a ‘multiplicity of often minor processes, of different origin and scattered locations, which overlap, repeat or imitate one another … [to] produce the blueprint of a general method’.Footnote 68 Schemas emerged for uninterrupted and constant coercion, with a spread of disciplinary techniques from monasteries, armies, and workshops to being ‘general’ formulas of domination in society. These disciplinary methods were distinctive to those found under slavery as they did not rely on violence but rather on subtler forms of discipline. An ‘art of the human body’ was born, which led to a growth in the subject’s skills and the intensification its subjection, and the body becomes the object and target of power. This made the subject ‘more obedient as it becomes more useful’.Footnote 69
The soldier was required to endure transformative techniques and practices designed to alter the very physics of his subjectivity. Foucault cites ‘rifle drill’ from the 1766 Ordinance to illustrate how training in firearm use had led the emergence of the ‘body-weapon, body-tool, body machine complex’.Footnote 70 Drill in particular comes to occupy his thought, along with its transformative effects on the human body. Foucault envisages the army as a
geometry of divisible segments whose basic unity was the mobile soldier with his rifle, and … below the soldier himself, the minimal gestures, the elementary stages of actions, the fragments of spaces occupied or traversed.
Foucault frequently draws on Guibert’s work while exploring drill according to a strict timetable underpinned by the ‘negative’ principle of non-idleness.Footnote 71 Discipline, Foucault writes, ‘arranges a positive economy … [of] ever–growing use of time’ and generating ‘organic individuality’. A ‘technique of subjection’ was established to form a ‘natural body’ to supersede the ‘mechanical body’.Footnote 72 This ‘natural body’ became the target for new mechanisms of power, was offered up to new forms of knowledge, a body manipulated by authority, and ‘a body of useful training and of rational mechanics’.Footnote 73
Such ideas were, Foucault argues, what underlay Prussian infantry training under Fredrick II (the ‘Great’) with its breakdown of time and movements and embodied in the Prussian regulations of 1743. Figures such as Fredrick were important as they bridged the gap between society, philosophy, government, and the military by fusing interest in the automata with approaches to military training, with notable successes on the battlefield. In turn, it is this aspect of Foucault’s work on the body and on drill that has informed much of the critical military studies work in IR. However, it should also be noted that Foucault was not the first observer of European sociopolitical evolution to highlight the significance of the militaries of this period. For instance, the early professional military officer was, for Max Weber, the prototype of the modern civil servant.Footnote 74 Consistent across Foucault, Weber, and the critical military studies literature, is the societal significance of the micro-processes of soldier training, with the soldier thus evolving from being merely an exceptional subject to the population to being one of the foundational subjects of contemporary politics, both domestically and internationally.
The soldier, raison d’État, and international ‘balance’
The soldier occupies a second significant role in Foucault’s work beyond its role as incubator of societal disciplinary techniques. In his Security and Birth lectures, Foucault explores the development of the state and raison d’État, the principle according to which the state comes to be governed. The development of a permanent army (and diplomacy) is presented alongside ‘mercantilism’ and ‘police’ as one of ‘a number of precise ways of governing’ in which the ‘plurality of the state is embodied’.Footnote 75 He contends that:
To govern according to the principle of raison d’État is to arrange things so that the state becomes sturdy and permanent, so that it becomes wealthy, and so that it becomes strong in the face of everything that may destroy it.Footnote 76
This has evident implications for the international and, indeed, Foucault’s discussion of raison d’État is arguably his most explicit venture into IR scholarship.
As in Discipline, significance is awarded to the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Foucault argues that this era involved the relations between states undergoing ‘one of the most fundamental mutations both in the form of Western political life and the form of Western history’, from being rivalries between Princes to being relationships of competition between states.Footnote 77 This ‘mutation’ has significant consequences for international relations as it instigates a period where states seek to assert themselves
in a space of increased, extended, and intensified economic exchange. They seek to assert themselves in a space of commercial competition and domination, in a space of monetary circulation, colonial conquest, and control of the seas, and all this gives each state’s self-assertion not just the form of each being its own end … but also this new form of competition. To use somewhat anachronistic words for this reality, a state can only assert itself in a space of political and economic competition, which is what gives meaning to the problem of the state’s expansion as the principle, the main theme of raison d’État.Footnote 78
This reading of the international highlights the growing significance of ‘force’ and the emergence of a ‘new theoretical strata’ in which politics becomes the employment and calculation of forces. This new ‘strata’ involved a number of significant consequences such as: a change from thinking of possible conflicts in terms of the Prince’s wealth to thinking of them in relation to state wealth, establishing the state’s wealth as ‘the very force of the kingdom’; moving from estimating a Prince’s power by his possessions to investigating the state’s intrinsic wealth, resources, commercial possibilities, balance of trade and so on; and a shift from a diplomacy based on princely alliances and obligations to kin and family to new alliances centred on state interests. For Foucault, this represented the establishment of a new governmental rationality, and a key moment in the development of governmentality.Footnote 79
Three ‘instruments’ are seen to serve this rationality: war; diplomacy and the ‘law of nations’; and a permanent military apparatus.Footnote 80 The soldier, evidently, is associated with the first and third instruments. Regarding war, this becomes an instrument of politics in its own right by losing its ‘continuity with law, justice and right’. War is important as it provides the means through which territorial expansion is possible but, on the international level, it also threatens the European balance and thus the rationality of international politics. Moreover, in a nod of recognition of more total incarnations of warfare, Foucault argues that war now involves the employment of all the state’s resources.Footnote 81 A political-military complex has emerged that is ‘absolutely necessary to the constitution of this European balance as a mechanism of security’, yet war itself is but one of the functions of the political-military complex. The relations between war and peace, civil and military have, Foucault claims, been redeployed around this political-military complex.
The permanent military apparatus, the third and final instrument, is very clearly associated with the soldier. While Foucault does not add much in the lectures to the earlier analysis of soldier subjectivity found in Discipline, he does outline four key components of the military apparatus. These are: (i) the professionalisation of the soldier and the establishment of a ‘military career’; (ii) a permanent armed structure that can ‘serve as the framework for exceptional wartime recruitment’; (iii) an infrastructure of back-up facilities and strongholds; and (iv) a form of knowledge, ‘a factual reflection on types of manoeuvre, schemas of defence and attack, in short an entire specific and autonomous reflection on military matters and possible wars’. This emphasis on permanence is striking, as is the reference to the logistical infrastructure to support such a degree of permanence. It is also clearly implied that the permanent military apparatus is a state military, with Foucault questioning whether maintaining international balance is possible if all states did not seek to maintain an apparatus of a similar ‘level’ to that of its main rival.Footnote 82
This has significant implications for the international, or at least the European international system. Foucault contends that:
The existence of a permanent, costly, large, and scientific military apparatus within the system of peace itself has … been one of the indispensable instruments for the constitution of European balance.Footnote 83
Thus the existence of the military apparatus is important not just to government, the broader subject of his lectures, but also to the constitution of a distinctive European space of balance within the international. He notes that:
the constitution of a permanent military apparatus … is an essential component of politics governed by the calculation of balances and the maintenance of a force obtained through war, or through the possibility or threat of war. In short, it is an essential element in this competition between states in which … each seeks to turn the relation of force in its favour, but which all seek to maintain as a whole.Footnote 84
The implications of raison d’État for the European states was that ‘each state [had to] limit its objectives [and] ensure its independence’.Footnote 85 Indeed,
From the Treaty of Westphalia to the Seven Years War, or to the revolutionary wars … military-diplomatic policy is organised by reference to the principle of the state’s self-limitation, to the principle of the necessary and sufficient competition between different states.Footnote 86
Thus was created, through raison d’État, a ‘zero sum’ problem of competition wherein each state risked losing everything in its attempts to become more powerful.Footnote 87 However, a new eighteenth-century liberal raison d’État emerged in response to the ‘zero sum’ problem. This allowed states to go to work on the subjects they governed, allowing government to expand indefinitely within their borders and leading to the establishment of ‘police’. The police state aims ‘to strengthen itself endlessly … its aim is an unlimited increase in its power in relation to others’.Footnote 88 Making the subject more productive therefore became the means for states to strengthen themselves in relation to others. Thus, as outlined in the introduction to Birth, it is precisely because of the emergence of balance as the stabilising force within Europe, following the emergence of the military apparatus and sovereign raison d’État, that the liberalisms and their associated subjectivities discussed in Birth emerge.Footnote 89
To summarise this and the previous section, the significance of the soldier-subject in Foucault’s work is twofold. First, Discipline identifies the soldier as an exceptional subject who is extracted from the general population and subjected to disciplinary regimes within dedicated spaces. Those regimes spread from their original contexts to enable the government of the wider population. Second, according to Security, the entire system is the ‘triangle’ of powers, including the sovereign and disciplinary powers to which the soldier is so important, underpins the whole system of governmentality.Footnote 90 In Birth, European liberalism is permitted to develop because of the international balance within Europe; the structural conditions of ‘zero sum’ international relations of the sovereignty raison d’État period encouraged a ‘mechanism of mutual enrichment’ through which ‘either the whole of Europe will be rich, or the whole of Europe will be poor’.Footnote 91
Problematising Foucault’s military apparatus
Foucault abandoned his exploration of the military when he shifted his focus to the eighteenth-century transition from sovereignty-based raison d’État to a liberal ‘governmental reason’.Footnote 92 This, along with his claim that the military apparatus has not evolved in two centuries, is perplexing given both his stated desire to further explore the military and his recognition that discipline and the apparatus were so important to his discussion of the centuries before the emergence of liberalism. As noted in the first section, the spatiality of governmentality has been a point of contention among IR scholars. There are clear ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ spaces in his work within which different conditions apply. This inside/outside dichotomy is not limited to the West/non-West divide but is also present where the state intersects the domestic and international. For example, raison d’État is understood to have ‘unlimited objectives’ within the state and only ‘limited’ objectives outside it.Footnote 93 Nevertheless, Foucault’s work on the military also suggests a high degree of contingency between the international and the domestic. By considering Foucault’s discussion of the soldier in Discipline alongside his analysis of the military apparatus in the lectures, the international significance of micro-politics and subjectivity is revealed. Discipline produces soldiers who inhabit the apparatus, which, in turn, establishes the conditions of international competition and European balance.
This links the international to the individual, strengthening the case for ‘internationalising’ a theorist whose primary focus, according to Selby, was on the ‘domestic’. It is this micro-politics that is of interest to the critical military studies work of Basham, McSorley, and Higate, and it is reinforced by Christophe Wasinski. Also drawing on Foucault, Wasinski argues that the practices of military discipline, geometric planning, and panopticism discussed in Discipline are part of a ‘military grand narrative’ that has, since the Middle Ages, made war possible in the international.Footnote 94 The micro of military discipline is always part of a broader, interconnected whole via the nature of the institutions (militaries) produced by the disciplinary regime. Analysis of the soldier thus echoes claims that power cannot be localised at the micro-, meso-, or macro-level because these spaces are not ‘in and of [themselves] necessarily real’.Footnote 95
The timeframe of Foucault’s work is also noteworthy, with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries crucial for the development of both discipline and the military apparatus. This era also saw momentous developments in warfare and is the subject of a debate in historical scholarship over a suggested ‘military revolution’ that transformed warfare and sociopolitical structures in Europe and beyond.Footnote 96 Foucault’s identification of the 130 years between Montgomery’s La Milice Française (1636) and the French Crown’s Ordinance of 1764 as the key transformative period in military training notably contrasts with the ‘military revolution’ debate’s longer period of change, beginning with medieval advances in infantry warfare and ending in the various revolutionary wars with the advent of bayonets and dispersed formations of light infantry.Footnote 97 While not necessarily undermining Foucault’s overall conclusions, this earlier, medieval dating of the beginnings of drill in Europe calls into question the broader philosophical context in which he claims that such reforms occurred. Foucault associated the shifts in military discipline with works such as Montesquieu’s De l’Espirit des Lois (1748), La Mettrie’s L’homme Machine (1747), and Holbach’s Système de la nature (1770) to argue that new ways of knowing and thinking about the body had emerged which facilitated a new way of governing. La Mettrie’s work, for instance, fostered an ‘obsession’ with the body and a shift from an understanding of the body as a totality to exploring individual movements and attitudes.Footnote 98
The military revolution scholarship, on the other hand, finds more material reasons for the introduction of drill, including the introduction of firearms and increased appreciation of the potency of polearms against armoured cavalry. The re-emergence of the pike-phalanx in the fourteenth century posed an existential challenge to a political system organised around the mounted knight’s military superiority over the population.Footnote 99 The phalanx was a close-order infantry formation of ranks armed with ‘the simplest weapon with which a man on foot can be armed against cavalry’,Footnote 100 the spear. Phalanxes proved invulnerable to attacks by knights on numerous occasions, such as at the battles of Courtrai (1302), Bannockburn (1314), Morgarten (1315), Dupplin Moor (1332), Halidon Hill (1333), Laupen (1339), and Crécy (1346). Yet the success of the phalanx was due to ideational factors rather than any new material enhancement to the ancient pointed stick. Early firearms similarly required the development of training and drill for effective use. As Bean observes, infantry armed with bow, pike, crossbow, or handgun were ‘practically helpless in small parties’ but ‘useful when en masse and trained to act en masse’.Footnote 101 What changes in the fourteenth century, therefore, is the ability of rulers to train soldiers to operate en masse, turning a levy of individual peasants into formidable blocks of mutually reinforcing ranks of pikemen and, later, musketeers.
Foucault also ignores some important features of warfare. Notably, his understanding of soldiering is state-centric, with no consideration of other forms of combatants beyond the state-trained soldier. The account of training in Discipline, for instance, concentrates on the barracks, ignoring other possible spaces of military discipline. This is perhaps unsurprising given that Foucault was writing in the 1970s when conscription was widespread and the World Wars were recent history. Conscription magnifies the subjectivising impact of military discipline as large proportions of populations pass through barrack doors to be given the ‘air’ of soldiers. Meanwhile, the world and ‘cold’ wars were possibly what Foucault had in mind when suggesting that conflicts now involved all ‘the state’s forces’ in efforts to achieve victory.Footnote 102 Both conscription and ‘total’ wars make very visible within society the permanent armed forces, the infrastructure of back-up facilities, and the military knowledge that Foucault cites in his lectures.Footnote 103
Yet nuclear weapons have rendered industrial warfare almost obsolescent, at least between nuclear armed states, as a nuclear war would likely be over before many of the ‘forces of the state’ could be brought to bear. As the early American nuclear strategist Bernard Brodie wrote: ‘nuclear weapons do by their very existence in large numbers make obsolete the use of and hence need for conventional forces on anything like the scale of either world war.’Footnote 104 Meanwhile, the actual experience of conflict for most Western societies since 1945 has usually been in ‘wars amongst the people’ outside Europe, requiring only a small portion of the state’s forces in predominantly counter-insurgency and police-type actions.Footnote 105 Such wars present the observer with a myriad of possible soldier types distinctive to Foucault’s barrack-trained state soldier. Within IR scholarship a source of much curiosity has been the proliferation of private military actors, often alongside state forces.Footnote 106 The expansion in the use of private military companies (PMCs) has been rapid: whereas the US in the late 1990s employed one contractor to every fifty members of its armed forces it deployed in Yugoslavia, by Iraq in 2008 the ratio was one to one.Footnote 107 The US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s accelerated the PMC resurgence, to the extent that the market may have been far smaller in size without the interventions.Footnote 108
Whereas the private force literature addresses many of the challenges posed by PMCs to international politics, Foucault’s neglect of this aspect of the security apparatus is lost on the global governmentality debate. This neglect is intriguing as many of the military thinkers Foucault cites were keen users of private forces. Foreign mercenaries were common in the armies of the Dutch Republic (Maurice), Sweden (Gustav Adolphus), France (Guibert; the Ordnances), and Prussia (Frederick). These were often soldiers who may not have been subject to the disciplinary regimes and spaces identified in Foucault’s work.Footnote 109 For instance, Frederick needed between one and two thirds of the positions in his eighteenth-century Prussian army to be filled by foreign mercenaries.Footnote 110
This picture is further complicated by the practice of sourcing soldiers from groups that were outside the territory and disciplinary influences of the state, such as highlanders, hussars, uhlans, and jäegers.Footnote 111 The recruitment of such soldiers was driven by a need for warriors who were effective in the rougher terrain where European armies were increasingly fighting during the eighteenth century and, crucially, where ‘standard’ European military practice was found wanting. As John Ferris argues, European armies ‘were designed for high-intensity combat or sieges and operations in territories with open terrain, large populations, and well-developed logistical infrastructure’.Footnote 112 Using such militaries outside Europe was problematic ‘because of differences in terrain, politics, enemies, and infrastructure. To work elsewhere, the systems had to be adapted to local conditions’. It was recognised that the standardised model of army training was unsuitable for many contexts in which European armies found themselves operating, and overseas campaigns would demand the participation of frequently large numbers of foreign auxiliaries.Footnote 113 Such auxiliaries were recruited precisely because they were different to the European armies of the Enlightenment and had not been subjected to the forms of training outlined in Foucault’s work.
Interestingly, Foucault may well have been aware of some of these points in his research on discipline and the formation of the military apparatus. Guibert’s Essai Général de Tactique, which is a source for Discipline, includes three particular observations overlooked by Foucault. First, Guibert was critical of Adolphus and Maurice’s resurrection of Roman tactics and drill, claiming instead that it was the Roman spirit that needed to be emulated. Second, this spirit should include duty and patriotism, thereby linking military service to notions of professionalism and the nation. While this is not wholly at odds with Foucault’s state-centric idea of the military, it does introduce the question of soldier motivation, with Guibert recognising that correct motivation was far more important than correct drill. Third, in place of the rigidity of massed drilled formations, Guibert argued for imaginative and innovative soldiers open to a variety of tactical approaches.Footnote 114 However, it is not clear why Foucault, despite citing Guibert’s descriptions of drill and body movements,Footnote 115 did not delve further into the latter’s ideas.
Indeed, European armies sometimes displayed considerable initiative on colonial campaigns to ‘become the enemy to defeat it’, thereby radically altering their doctrine and fighting methods.Footnote 116 For example, before 1914 ‘most British forces were designed for use in only one arena’,Footnote 117 thus limiting their global utility while maximising it in particular localities. After 1918, however, the British army recognised that it may be involved in four different kinds of conflict, with each sort demanding ‘different kinds of organization, equipment, and training’.Footnote 118 In 1965 recently-retired US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and US Ambassador in Saigon General Maxwell Taylor reversed his initial advocacy for US troop deployment in Vietnam by stating that a ‘white faced soldier armed, equipped and trained as he is [is] not [a] suitable guerrilla fighter for Asian forests and jungles’.Footnote 119 Guibert himself noted that an army of citizens was ill-suited for operations beyond the homeland and, rather prophetically in relation to more recent conflicts, questioned the willingness of national soldiers to care as much for ‘all the provinces of the empire’ as they did for their homes and families.Footnote 120
Perhaps reflecting the limitations of the ‘traditional’ Western way of war outside the West, the US has often developed unique force structures according to circumstances, creating in Barkawi’s words ‘a mostly foreign and private force for one purpose (CIA covert operations), a foreign and public one for another (colonial armies, foreign legions), and a domestic and private one for another (US private contractors in Iraq)’.Footnote 121 Central to US foreign policy since the 1950s has been President Eisenhower’s idea ‘to develop within the various areas and regions of the free world indigenous forces for the maintenance of order, the safeguarding of frontiers, and the provision of ground capability’.Footnote 122 Crucially, Eisenhower continued, ‘the United States could not maintain old-fashioned forces all around the world’ and that having other nationalities bearing the brunt of any fighting ‘was the kernel of the whole thing’. Eisenhower thus identified the problem for any military seeking to operate in the international: material conditions such as lack of resources and unfamiliarity with local geography demand the employment of foreign forces to augment the military apparatus of even the most powerful of governments.
Eisenhower’s words along with Barkawi’s observations conjure the spectre of not a single permanent military apparatus in the Foucauldian mould but rather a heterogeneous apparatus, a multi-headed hydra driven by a frequently opaque combination of public and private motivational logics, especially outside Europe. Indeed, Western ‘colonial conquests’, a central element of international competition in Foucault’s Security lectures,Footnote 123 usually relied upon native, irregular, and private auxiliaries operating alongside Western regulars.Footnote 124 Examples such as the 1916–18 Allied pursuit of the forces of General von Lettow-Vorbeck in East Africa and contemporaneous Anglo-French operations against the Ottoman Empire in the Levant demonstrate that even intra-European wars involved significant numbers of native, impermanent, or auxiliary soldiers within nominally Western armies.Footnote 125
While not necessarily negating Foucault’s findings on the spread of discipline throughout society, this heterogeneity exposes the limits of military discipline. Discipline is, Foucault writes, ‘the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a “political” force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force’.Footnote 126 Yet the conflicts above suggest that the disciplined soldier of Foucault’s account was less useful in unfamiliar contexts, and that meeting military objectives often depends on combining disciplined subjects with other, differently- or un-disciplined subjects. The key to military success in the international, therefore, rests not on discipline per se, but rather the ability to persuade the un- or differently-disciplined to cooperate with the disciplined within military campaigns. This opens the door to new lines of enquiry regarding the power relationship between the different elements involved in a campaign, including exploring the use of different soldier types.
Such analysis might include the matter of subject motivation, along with its relationship to disciplinary techniques. Mercenaries, for instance, can bring with them problems of their own. Machiavelli’s famous critique was that mercenaries were insufficiently bloodthirsty, could not be trusted due to the temptations of political power, and that their motivations were inappropriate for those wishing to engage in warfare.Footnote 127 While he has been questioned by some,Footnote 128 the issues Machiavelli raised have not disappeared.Footnote 129 Pertinent in a Foucauldian context is the matter of Gustav Adolphus’s armies, again not discussed by Foucault himself despite his interest in Adolphus’s ideas on training his armies. In this instance, the use of mercenaries had a negative effect on army discipline, which was itself based as much on a sense of religious morality as on Foucauldian drill-based discipline.Footnote 130 Consequently the Swedish king sought to better integrate his mercenaries into his national army by dealing with them ‘not as hired units but as individual soldiers’. Indeed, ‘individualism was a remarkably prominent ingredient in the Swedish Army … in counterpoise with the discipline that made his army a reincarnation of the legions’.Footnote 131 The need to accommodate the often individualistic motivations of private soldiers thus led to new forms of disciplinary practices beyond simply drill, geometry, and subunits.
Similar problems emerge when the reverse occurs, that is when state-trained soldiers become commercial security and military contractors. Higate’s ethnographic research reveals that when military contractors are faced with danger, the lessons of weapon drill from their public soldiering days instinctively kick into action; in echoes of the Foucauldian automaton, contractors become ‘robotic’ in their physical responses to danger.Footnote 132 Unlike state soldiers, however, contractor responsibilities and objectives are often very different, focusing mainly on convoy security, close protection of dignitaries, hostage negotiation, guarding of civilian and military installations, training of local personnel as part of security sector reform, provision of logistical and support functions to military peacekeeping. Only to a much lesser extent are contractors expected to engage in combat operations, the task for which their state-directed drill prepares them.Footnote 133 Problems involving contractors instinctively becoming aggressive while on deployment have, notes Higate, led some to call for more recruits from the civilian world for PMCs; individuals without the robotic muscle-memory typically instilled in military training barracks.
Another aspect of the ‘motivational problem’, so to speak, can be seen in a further soldier type to have been disciplined within the European/Western training system, the foreign auxiliary. These might include anyone from a Natal native drilled for a few weeks by European instructors before joining the Natal Native Contingent in the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War,Footnote 134 to Army of the Republic of Vietnam soldiers trained by the Americans. The motivations for individual auxiliaries might differ, ranging from notions of duty to local chiefs ingrained in the indigenous South African amabutho system, to earing a decent wage. Yet their motivation would influence the ability of the major Western power to incorporate them and their leaders within their military apparatuses.
In Vietnam, for instance, decades of US support, funding, and training, including President Nixon’s ‘Vietnamisation’ programme, could not account for the agency of the South Vietnamese government. Despite US pressure and an even more extensive aid package, South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu refused to cooperate at the 1972 Paris Peace Talks, scuttling US plans for a prompt cessation of hostilities.Footnote 135 Similarly, recent US efforts to support specific tribes in Afghanistan, including subjecting large numbers of Afghans to Western training methods, have often resulted in strengthening local warlords who, in turn, have undermined other aspects of Western policy in the region.Footnote 136 The Afghan and Vietnamese cases demonstrate one of the fundamental problems with a heterogeneous apparatus, namely the inability of the wielder of the apparatus to fully rely on its constituent parts. This echoes Machiavelli’s concerns about mercenaries, and, indeed, Machiavelli’s points were aimed just as much at auxiliaries as they were at mercenaries,Footnote 137 branding them as both ‘useless’ and ‘almost always harmful to those who use them’.Footnote 138
Problematising Foucault’s account of the soldier and the military apparatus therefore reveals a much more complex military apparatus than the one found in Foucault’s works themselves. Changes to training associated with drill and body movement were made necessary by material changes far earlier than Foucault suggests, around the early fourteenth century. The armies and soldiers of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe that featured so prominently in Foucault’s works were more diverse than Foucault suggests, often involving large numbers of impermanent mercenaries. Military heterogeneity is also more pronounced outside than inside Europe. Within Europe, the role of private military actors was negligible for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when major belligerents mostly conformed to international legal norms on the matter of private force.Footnote 139 Recent wars involving Western states appear to continue these trends, although the lack of wars within Europe/the West itself adds a speculative aspect to such a conclusion.
Conclusion
While not necessarily rendering Foucault’s work redundant, the problematisation of the military apparatus and the more complex picture this reveals raises questions over the broader empirical foundation of Foucault’s theories of government. For instance, why did Foucault not discuss the role of private force in government or the mixed forces of colonial empires? Why choose the examples that he did, and not others? More fundamentally, perhaps, to what extent does the state- and Eurocentric nature of his understanding of the military apparatus have a bearing on his overall conclusions about the development of a new governmental rationality in the eighteenth century? For a ‘scholar’ who drew extensively on a historical method, and who argued that role of history was to become ‘“effective” to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being’,Footnote 140 such a problematisation of Foucault’s own work might be entirely in keeping with his intentions. Indeed, his account of the military apparatus and military discipline can be viewed as being inconsistent with such an ‘effective’ historical approach: Foucault eschewed his usual desire to explore ‘events in terms of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations’ to provide instead a more orthodox reading of European military history, based on a supposed consolidation of centralised, permanent, state militaries.
The key finding of this problematisation is that the militaries of the societies discussed in Foucault’s works were and are far more heterogeneous than suggested by Foucault himself. A permanent armed force of Foucault’s description may have been the necessary platform for the development of governmentality and a suitable international context based on balance or competition. Yet Foucault, the ‘philosopher historian’, based his theories on a patchy exploration of history, including a selective use of some of the sources (such as Guibert) and cases (Frederick II) he identified as being central to the development of government, discipline, and the international system. He thereby did not account for the significant role of private, foreign, and auxiliary forces in the military apparatus, nor for the likely earlier medieval dating of the military disciplinary processes identified in Discipline and Punish. Indeed, the ‘military revolution’ debate might prove to be fruitful reading for those seeking a fuller (if still somewhat Eurocentric) analysis of many of the historical aspects of Foucault’s accounts of government, the state, and discipline.
Proponents of the notion of an emergent global governmentality, meanwhile, would do well to appreciate the very different nature of military apparatuses across the globe, both in the past and the present. The state-centricity of nineteenth- and twentieth-century warfare within Europe was rarely matched outside it, reinforcing critical voices within IR who question whether the necessary conditions are yet present outside Europe for Foucault’s ideas to be applicable. One means of making a case for a global governmentality would be to re-examine the conditions for a local governmentality, which is outlined so fluently in Security. If governmentality, as Foucault expressed during the lectures,Footnote 141 does rest on the triangle of powers that includes discipline and (under sovereignty) the military apparatus, what are the implications for governmentality if neither the discipline nor the military apparatus are what Foucault claimed they were? As this article demonstrates, if governmentality exists at all outside the West, it appears that it must rely on the support of a very different military (and more broadly, security) apparatus to that found within the West itself, one that demands further investigation.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol (Wales) and the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, for the period of research leave during which the research for the article was conducted. Further thanks to: the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments; Shabnam Holliday for reading and commenting on various drafts; Jaakko Ailio for his comments as discussant during the European International Studies Association Conference in Sicily, 26 September 2015; and to the various questioners in the audience during that panel.
