Summary
The concept of ‘duty of care’ for citizens abroad is grounded in a political rationality where the population is seen as an object for protection by the state. In today’s globalised world, however, this rationality is challenged by increased citizen mobility, budget cuts, new information technologies and the proliferation of new security threats. In recent years the state’s duty of care has received fresh political and scholarly attention, but Diplomatic Studies have so far overlooked how the recent waves of neoliberal reforms have introduced a new political rationality into policy-making circles, where the population is not seen only as an object for protection, but also as a resource for mobilisation. Developing insights from studies of governmentality, this article argues that when this neoliberal political rationality becomes predominant in diplomatic circles, it leads to inversion of the duty of care through new citizen-based practices, steered at a distance by the state.
Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.
President John F. Kennedy
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Introduction
The protection of citizens within national territorial borders is interwoven with ideas of sovereignty, and with International Relations (
While pointing to political, ethical, legal and managerial tensions, the underlying assumption of most scholarly accounts of the duty of care is that the state sees society as an object for protection. Such notion of care, this article argues, has been said to stem from the pastoral power associated with the modern (welfare) state — an art of government in which care of the population by the state is the generic political rationality for how things should be done within a polity. However, this notion of care — like a shepherd protecting the flock — is increasingly marginalised by a new political rationality where the state no longer sees the population solely as an object for pastoral protection. Instead, in the neoliberal art of government, the population is perceived as a resource of productive forces to be mobilised for governmental purposes, rather than merely protected. Consequently, the fundamental relations between state and society and the responsibility for care that they entail become inversed, since the citizens are no longer passive recipients of state protection, but active providers of care for themselves. This approach was vividly expressed by mass privatisation in the 1980s and the Third Way post-political solutions of the 1990s. As such, the legitimate exercise of power in ‘advanced, liberal’ societies increasingly moved from pastoral interventions towards indirect incentivisation, steering the behaviour of the population at a distance towards certain ends — a form of political power often captured through the concept of ‘governmentality’.3 The implications of these tectonic shifts in relations between state and society have been thoroughly explored across the social sciences, including International Relations, in recent years,4 but have so far remained largely neglected by Diplomatic Studies.5 While some critical scholars have recognised manifestations of this new neoliberal rationality in nation-branding,6 its broader implications for diplomacy, and particularly for the duty of care, remain under-studied.
To begin addressing this gap both theoretically and empirically, this article is structured in three parts. First, it excavates the rationality behind the concept of care, and how it has been challenged by the emerging neoliberal rationality. Second, it illustrates how the rationality of care for citizens abroad historically evolved, and how the emerging practices of mobilising ordinary citizens in diplomatic practices are revelatory of a new neoliberal rationality — beyond the economic and technological considerations often invoked by scholars and practitioners. Third, through illustrative examples from across the globe, the article proceeds by analysing how this inversed logic of care affects the practices of diplomatic care for citizens abroad. The article concludes by suggesting that the governmentality approach to diplomacy can be generalised beyond our examples, enabling a deeper understanding not only of citizen protection abroad, but also of the broader relations between diplomacy and society in contemporary international relations.
The Transformations of the Notion of Care
The concept of duty of care, as established by the contributors to this special issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, implies that ‘states and other principals’ have some sort of duty of protection ‘towards their subordinates’ abroad, thus extrapolating ‘territorially defined state practices, as they are exported beyond the border’.7 Indeed, the protection of citizens abroad is one of the core functions of foreign ministries, and some level of assistance and protection of their employees abroad is common for most international organisations, non-governmental organisations (
To explore ‘[w]here our notions of “care” come from?’ and why ‘the state should care for the welfare of its citizens’, it is useful to begin with Michel Foucault’s concept of pastoral power.11 This concept, which was developed as part of a genealogy of the Western state in his Collège de France lectures between 1977-1978, implies that our contemporary ideas of care, like many other political concepts, have religious origins. Specifically, Foucault analysed how the ancient Hebraic notion of pastoral care — that is, the relationship between the representative of God and the community captured through the shepherd–flock metaphor — was adopted by early Christianity as a general model of government. Later, through the historical process of secularisation, this model was adopted by the modern sovereign state, becoming the basic paradigm for state–society relations. At the risk of oversimplification, pastoral power relations are based on reciprocity between the pastor and the flock, where, in return for total submission, continuous care is guaranteed. However, the specific understanding of what it means to care for a population changed significantly throughout history. For example, Christian care was universalistic, creating inclusive solidarity between the rich and the poor across political boundaries. Yet as the sovereign state assumed this pastoral power from the church, thus becoming the ‘shepherd’ caring for the population, sovereign care became particularistic, through the exclusionary practices of citizenship. Furthermore, while Christian care was conditioned on utter submission, sovereign care, particularly in Europe, became intertwined with the liberal art of government emphasising individual freedom. This led to forms of power in exercising care within the pastorate, best captured by the concept of governmentality.12
Unlike other forms of power emerging within the state-pastorate discussed by Foucault,13 such as the sovereign (juridical) or the disciplinary, governmentality emerged as a response to the problem of liberal government by steering the behaviour of the population ‘indirectly, through techniques that will make possible, without the full awareness of the people […] the directing of the flow of population into certain […] activities’.14 In other words, governmentality refers to the indirect conduct of behaviour at a distance in order to achieve certain political objectives.15 According to Foucault, such exercise of power emerged during the eighteenth century as part of a broader historical transition towards biopolitics — a central concept in his work referring to the ‘the attempt […] to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of […] a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race’,16 and so on. The historical need to govern larger groups of people thus ‘brought life and its mechanism into the realm of explicit calculation’,17 and power and knowledge became increasingly intertwined in modern government. For example, the development of modern medicine and the economy created new forms of knowledge about a population, enabling the exercise of political power, through indirect steering, in hitherto ungovernable domains. Consequently, as the model for the modern sovereign state consolidated through the need to govern larger populations, biopolitics were increasingly introduced into the pastoral matrix of governance.18
From the nineteenth century onwards, Western sovereignty increasingly relied on such power, as tension between pastoral and liberal commitments to caring for populations was resolved through what became the ideal of the welfare state and its unique state–society relations. As explained by Mitchell Dean, the state understood itself to be the protector of society, providing ‘care for the welfare of the population “from the cradle to the grave”’.19 Through Keynesian governmental interventions such as the management of unemployment, health and education, ‘the national welfare state [was thus] acting as a unified body upon and in defence of a unitary domain: society’.20 However, these state–society relations were also increasingly criticised for lack of economic efficiency, by maintaining the tension between the universalist notion of pastoral care and the particularism of citizenship. Nonetheless, this pastoral logic of care reached a peak under the welfare state, and care for the population became a source of moral, political and legal legitimacy. As discussed later in this article, it was precisely in this context that contemporary practices of duty of care in relations with citizens abroad also emerged.21
However, since the 1970s, the state–society relations upon which Western contemporary understanding of duty of care relies have been challenged, and increasingly inversed. Captured in British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s statement ‘there is no such thing as society’,22 a new political rationality emerged in policy-making circles, where society should no longer be seen as a consolidated object for state protection, but rather as a source of productive forces, waiting to be unleashed through state withdrawal. That is to say, it was best for the state not to care directly for the needs of society, but rather to enable society to care for itself.23 This inversion in state–society relations was animated by the idea of homo œconomicus — an ideal of a rational individual ‘who pursues his own interest, and whose interest is such that it converges spontaneously with the interests of others’ — wherein the policy implications are that ‘[w]ith regards to homo œconomicus, one must laissez-faire’.24 Paradoxically, this increase in freedom is only apparent since the newly constructed rational subject,25 by responding ‘systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment’, also becomes ‘eminently governable, […] the correlate of governmentality’.26 However, while in liberal thought the ideal of the homo œconomicus was reserved to the domain of the market, in this new emerging rationality it is extrapolated to various other forms of human activity, such as education and health care.27 Foucault thus defines this form of neoliberalism as the ‘exercise of political power […] modelled on the principles of a market economy [and] projecting them on to a general art of government’.28
With the proliferation of neoliberalism, the notion of care is thereby radically transformed, and the implications of this inversion in state–society relations have been a hotbed for academic debate in social science since the 1990s. Traditionally, in the liberal art of government, the market pre-exists the state as a separate domain, ensuring specific distribution between the state and private forces. Neoliberalism, however, prescribes the construction of market-like assemblages of discourses, practices, subject positions and so on, in other social domains that were previously governed through different logics.29 Illustrated vividly through the new public-management approach, citizens became increasingly reconceptualised as customers, various bureaucratic routines were replaced with competitive market-like structures, and a spirit of enterprise and innovation was constituted as a guiding principle for a ‘modernized government’.30 As such, it has had revolutionary implications for public policies, ranging from health care, unemployment, education, crime prevention and even national security. Many scholars have criticised these developments, pointing out both instrumental inefficiency and democratic deficit.31 As mentioned earlier, the implications of this profound change in relations between state and society have so far been largely ignored in Diplomatic Studies.32 Nonetheless, the next section argues that the ways in which care is understood within the prevailing state–society relations have significant implications for how care is exercised in relation to the protection of compatriots abroad. Thus, the radical inversion of state–society relations that neoliberalism entails is central to understanding contemporary practices of duty of care in diplomacy.
The Rationalities of Care in Protecting Citizens Abroad
While various forms of protection for compatriots abroad have existed for centuries,33 the origins of contemporary practices of diplomatic protection are deeply linked to the consolidation of the modern sovereign state. Clearly capturing the fundamental logic of pastoral care and its reciprocal power relations, in 1758 the Swiss jurist Emmerich Vattel clarified the principle of diplomatic protection when he wrote ‘Whoever ill-treats a citizen indirectly injures the State, which must protect that citizen’,34 thus reflecting ‘a particular conception of relations between the state and its citizens, one based on a sense of reciprocity or mutual obligation’.35 Nonetheless, the exact nature of this protection changed significantly over the last few centuries. Until the seventeenth century, for example, the protection of compatriots travelling abroad, who were mainly merchants, was divorced from the state, and the consuls responsible for their protection were elected by the merchants themselves. However, with the consolidation of the sovereign state in the seventeenth century, this practice was discontinued and ‘consuls were increasingly appointed by the state [and] thereby [the states] confirmed their responsibility for, and control over, compatriots in foreign ports, and gave consuls clearer responsibilities for the general interest of the polity’.36 This consolidation of the consular service was driven mainly by mercantilist policies, designed to maximise state power through trade. For many years, the protection of compatriots abroad was thus essentially linked to the economic interests of the state. In such rationality of care, consular work mainly concentrated on assisting nationals involved in trading interests, with a focus on issues such as promoting shipping and protecting merchant navigation and colonies.37
Since the nineteenth century, however, following a wave of liberal reforms and democratisation processes, state–society relations, particularly in Europe, increasingly converged around the ideals of the welfare state. In tandem with these developments, the ‘focus of assistance changed from representing traders’ interests to responding to the interests of leisure travellers and the general public’.38 With the development of the Western welfare state, travelling abroad was no longer limited to merchants, but was extended to ordinary workers, who were entitled to paid holiday. The wider public thus increasingly began to travel abroad,39 particularly with the arrival of passenger aircraft and the beginning of mass tourism in the 1960s and 1970s. This led to an increasing demand for consular assistance, involving more direct intervention by the state in helping its population abroad with all kinds of everyday issues, including lost passports, assistance in the case of rape, drugs or sickness, and emergency evacuation. In 1963, following the signing of the Vienna Convention on Consular Affairs, the central rights and responsibilities concerning the protection of citizens abroad became part of conventional international law, providing exclusive rights to the consular staff. The diplomatic consular service thus essentially became the face of the welfare state abroad, dealing with an increasing public expectation for protection.40 Moving away from the instrumentalism of mercantilist care, the underlying rationality of care essentially conceptualises — in and of itself — citizens travelling abroad as an object for protection by the state.
Despite the predominance of this rationality during most of the twentieth century, citizens abroad were also occasionally treated through more managerial logics. For example, during the Cold War there was systemic use of citizens in public diplomacy, with various attempts by the United States and the Soviet Union to facilitate citizen-to-citizen engagements across the Iron Curtain.41 For early protagonists, such as
Indeed, by the 1990s, what it meant to care for citizens abroad, and by whom, began to mutate, as the state was seemingly retreating from its duty-of-care tasks. Instead, responsibility was increasingly placed on the shoulders of the citizens travelling abroad, through new trends of privatisation and public–private partnerships. The literature often ascribes this change to managerial factors such as resource efficiency and technological innovation.47 On the face of it, with the exploding demand for protection abroad, budgetary constraints became a major concern for foreign ministries. In response, economic considerations became central to policy-makers in transferring responsibility from the state and involving citizens in their own protection. The emerging trend of travel warnings, for example, could be seen as a way to save costs, since a more informed traveller would be able to take care of him or herself by avoiding travelling to dangerous areas, and thus reducing the risk of potentially expensive evacuation operations.48 For similar reasons, some argue that governments increasingly encourage multinational corporations to use private security and insurance companies in the protection of ‘worker-citizens’, with the assumption that more calculated responsibility by the private firm will reduce the risk of future governmental intervention.49
Beyond economic efficiency, the second common explanation for the increased shift to a citizen-driven practice of duty of care relates to the affordances created by new communication technologies. New digital technologies create new possibilities for citizen engagement where ‘the information revolution and the direct involvement of publics in transnational engagement’ become closely intertwined.50 Social media is thus seen as ‘a potential game changer for how international relations can be pursued’,51 and various new terms such as ‘eDiplomacy’52 and ‘digital diplomacy’53 are often invoked to capture how technology enables new forms of diplomacy. Indeed, consular services have often been the forerunners within ministries of foreign affairs (
Of course, as already seen with the mercantilist care and the Cold War’s citizen-diplomacy, managerial considerations have always shaped diplomacy and its relations with citizens. However, what has radically changed in recent years, and this is precisely what Foucault’s concepts enable us to analyse,57 is the underlying political rationality that shapes general relations between the state and society and consequently the distribution of responsibility for the duty of care. In other words, what has changed is the generic mentality of government — that is, the ‘particular way of thinking about the kinds of problems that can and should be addressed by various authorities […] a kind of political a priori that allows the tasks of such authorities to be seen in terms of […] calculated supervision, administration and maximization’.58 Indeed, it is evident that economic concerns find an easy ally in the new technological affordances and their participatory and communicative culture, which enable citizens to engage in diplomatic practices on unprecedented scale. However, it is only through the specificity of the neoliberal political rationality that the ability to assert responsibility, to connect, to gather data and to co-create becomes a resource that the government can mobilise towards its ends. As the next section illustrates, such attempts to govern at a distance have become central in contemporary duty-of-care practices.
The Neoliberal Inversion of the Duty of Care in Diplomatic Practice
The proliferation of a neoliberal rationality in diplomatic circles can be traced back to the beginning of the 1990s and the wave of new public-management reforms that attempted to reshape the public sector in the image of the private sector. It was commonly believed that by adopting practices from private companies, governments would be able to reduce costs and become more efficient, and these reforms also became apparent in ministries of foreign affairs. For example, in 1993 the
In practice, neoliberal governmentality operates through a double movement: the population is encouraged to assume more responsibility for domains previously cared for by the state through privatisation or engagement in public–private partnerships; while, at the same time, new forms of knowledge are produced, through which the behaviour of the population can be steered towards specific governmental ends.62 A paradigmatic example of how this has been exercised in duty-of-care practices is the emergence of travel warnings. As illustrated by Oded Löwenheim, the proliferation of travel warnings peaked towards the end of the 1990s with increased globalisation and trans-border movement of civilians. However, beyond the aforementioned economic concerns, the new challenges to the state’s duty of care were evidently met through the emerging neoliberal rationality. On the one hand, the issuing of travel warnings by foreign services creates more responsible subjects, who are capable of making their own informed decisions and protecting themselves. On the other hand, this increase in the freedom of the travelling homo œconomicus is instrumental. By creating a certain kind of knowledge through travel warnings, consular services can steer the behaviour of populations at a distance towards specific ends, such as avoiding particular places. While there are many limitations to this technique,63 from the perspective of the consular services, travel warnings manage simultaneously to provide protection and reduce costs. Many thus believe today that ‘helping individuals help themselves is the best way to care for citizens’ abroad64 and, in this way, the means through which the ends of government are achieved become inversed.
Interestingly, in tandem with the rise of internet usage, many states that had never before issued analogue travel warnings began issuing travel warnings in digital forms,65 illustrating the significance of technological affordances for the proliferation of neoliberal care. As Jan Melissen and Matthew Caesar-Gordon observe, ‘[n]ew communication technologies are changing the playing field […] for the “duty of care” [and] digital tools can be of assistance in making individuals more responsible’.66 For example, after the 2015 Nepal earthquake, social media was particularly useful in this time of crisis, as
Contrary to many conceptualisations of the neoliberal era, where it is assumed that the state is retreating from its previous functions,69 the concept of governmentality — through the technique of governing at a distance — illustrates how state power can in fact be extended to new societal domains, and even beyond state borders. The protection of citizens abroad is thus deeply intertwined with state control, and this is particularly evident in the context of migrant workers, where the protection of citizens abroad often becomes explicitly intertwined with other governmental goals. For example, as illustrated by Rahel Kunz in the context of Mexican consulates in the United States and Canada, Mexican citizens working abroad were reframed by the Mexican government as a resource of productive forces, in tandem with neoliberal reforms.70 In order to govern these forces, more information was collected about the expatriate population, and consulates began seeking more direct engagement through ‘information days’. However, while the Mexican expatriates were ‘courted’ by the Mexican state, for example by acknowledging their achievements and providing them with information about new protective services, they were also incentivised to spread certain norms regarding desirable expatriate behaviour, to send remittances back to poor regions of Mexico, and to promote trade and tourism. As Kunz argues, governing at a distance thus fosters individual and collective responsibilities, as the expatriates became more responsible not only for their own well-being, but also for the welfare of their communities back in Mexico.71
An even more striking example of such entanglement of the duty of care with the extension of state power can be found in the case of labour brokerage by the Philippines. As argued by Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, following neoliberal reforms, the Philippine state increasingly ‘mobilizes, exports, and regulates migrant labor’.72 Similarly to Mexico, citizens working abroad thus become a resource for the state,73 represented as the ‘new national heroes’ who fulfil their duty by working overseas and supporting the homeland through their remittance earnings.74 At the same time, in order to legitimise migrant labour and enable the Philippines to ‘represent itself as a caring and virtuous’ state, extensive forms of protection are promised to the workers, such as ‘extraterritorial intervention in contractual disputes’, creating a form of ‘portable set of “rights”’.75 These rights, however, also come with duties, and the migrants are expected to be ‘law-abiding, diligent workers’ with ‘numerous mechanisms to discipline them transnationally’ in case they ‘fail in their nationalist duties’.76 As illustrated by Rodriguez in the context of the Philippine garment workers’ strike in Brunei, the Philippine consular service compelled the workers to end their protest, and to accept whatever terms their employer offered, in order to secure the commercial interests of the state. In this form of ‘care’, the state not only protects the workers, but also ‘disciplines those who threaten the Philippines’ relations with foreign employers and host countries through forced repatriation and other sanctions’.77 Taken together, these examples illustrate how in contemporary duty-of-care practices, ‘governing “the state” and “the diaspora” do not necessarily stand in opposition’,78 but rather operate in concert, thus blurring the traditional inside/outside boundaries in international relations.
Indeed, governmentality can often become entangled both with sovereign and disciplinary power. This entanglement becomes particularly complex in the context of the duty of care of multinational corporations towards their employees. As illustrated by the In Amenas attacks in Algeria in 2013, some multinational corporations — particularly in the energy sector — operate in high-risk areas, and the protection of employees falls into a complex area of overlapping responsibilities between the public and the private sector.79 While theoretically, by using the broader term ‘population’, Foucault did not explicitly differentiate between private citizens and business firms, the state in practice does seem to govern private citizens and business firms through a different mixture of techniques. In Britain, for example, like many other European states, a firm’s duty of care towards its employees is written into law.80 Employers are thus formally ‘responsibilized’ by sovereign power for protecting their employees abroad. However, similar to the technique of travel warnings, in cases of emergency, such as terror attacks, the state still has to intervene directly. As such, the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office (
These accounts illustrate the changing relations between the ends and the means of government in the neoliberal era. From the perspective of Foucauldian analytics, the question is, of course, how well these new techniques in fact achieve their ends83 — that is to say, applied to the duty of care, whether it became inversed or merely entangled with other rationalities, it begs the questions of how effectively this technique or the other provides protection to citizens abroad. Although the answer is contextual, and beyond the scope of this enquiry, it is worth mentioning that while reliance on the private sector has been the trend in Europe, it is not the only logic through which the duty of care can be provided to ‘worker-citizens’ in high-risk areas. In fact, as argued by Maaike Okano-Heijmans and Matthew Caesar-Gordon, in countries such as China and Japan, the predominant trend is placing ‘the duty of care firmly under the umbrella of security, […] denoting a high level of governmental involvement’.84 While both China and Japan face similar problems to European states, such as attacks on their installations with complex evacuation operations, problems of care here are channelled through a different political rationality, leading to the ‘securitization of worker-citizen safety’.85
By placing the duty of care for ‘worker-citizens’ within the public rather than the private sector, such a prism of sovereign intervention prescribes an almost oppositional solution to the problem of care, since securitisation and liberalism — and in particular neoliberalism — are founded on mutually exclusive logics, wherein the proliferation of one limits the scope for legitimate exercise of the other.86 Hence, while it is increasingly assumed that corporations and citizens should be made more responsible for their own protection, this is evidently only one particular solution for the protection of compatriots abroad, for which there is always an alternative. Foucauldian analytics of government cannot prescribe one solution over the other.87 Instead, these studies encourage us to ask political questions in domains that are often assumed to be natural and depoliticised, thereby opening up new terrains for alternative solutions to governing various state functions, such as the duty of care. Nina Græger and Halvard Leira have already suggested several potential problems that emerge from outsourcing state responsibilities, and in this context much could be gained from studies of governmentality in other domains of public administration, and more broadly the dynamics frequently involved in neoliberal inversions such as the tension between economic efficiency (or often lack thereof) and democratic accountability.88
Conclusion
The underlying assumption in both the practice and theory of the duty of care is that the state sees society and its citizens as objects of protection. Such a notion of care stems from the pastoral power associated with the modern (welfare) state — an art of government where care of the population by the state is the main political rationality for how things should be done within the polity. However, this notion of care, like a shepherd protecting the flock, does not stand alone in contemporary diplomatic thinking and practice. A new political rationality has emerged, where the state no longer sees the population only as an object for pastoral protection. Instead, following the neoliberal art of government, the population is increasingly perceived as a resource of productive forces to be mobilised for governmental purposes, rather than merely protected. While social theorists, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists have imported this insight into a range of studies, the concept of neoliberal governmentality has so far only had limited impact in Diplomatic Studies. By showing theoretically and empirically how the duty of care is inversed, this article has argued that diplomatic practices are shaped by broader social and political transformations of state–society relations, which Diplomatic Studies need to take into account.
This argument was illustrated by examples from recent scholarly work on consular protection and the duty of care, where citizens, empowered through information and various digital tools, can become a resource to be mobilized by consular services and used in duty-of-care practices. Conflating consular affairs with the practices of citizen-diplomacy, through ‘responsibilization’ and production of ‘appropriate’ knowledge, these examples illustrate how diplomacy, and consular services more specifically, can exercise power at a distance and steer the behaviour of the population beyond state borders. While governmentality is still entangled with older forms of power, such as in the context of multinational corporations, it is evident that understanding the population as an object for pastoral protection by the state is no longer the predominant way in which states relate to their compatriots abroad. Taken together, these examples suggest that the concept of neoliberal governmentality can help us to understand not only how the duty of care is being inversed or entangled, but also, more broadly, how the relationship between citizens and diplomacy may be changing.
On the one hand, such exercise of power can in many ways address major concerns facing consular services today, including budgetary constraints and increased mobility (and expectations) of citizens. However, on the other hand, viewing the population instrumentally can also come at the expense of other societal values. Governmentality studies do not a priori reaffirm or negate any given technique. Instead, by contextually examining whether the means of government in fact meet their ends, future research could ask: how does the inversion of care affect the boundaries of political communities established through various practices of citizenship? Does the inversion of care apply not just to ordinary citizens, but also to the way in which the state governs its diplomats and consular officials?89 What are the implications of the inversion of care for democratic accountability? Some of these questions have already been indirectly touched upon by scholars interested in the topic, and we hope that the theoretical tools provided here will further advance a more critical approach to diplomacy.
Alexei Tsinovoi is a Ph.D. Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. His research interests are political philosophy,
Rebecca Adler-Nissen is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on
Rob B.J. Walker, ‘Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics’, Alternatives, vol. 128, no. 2 (1990), pp. 3-27; and Rebecca Adler-Nissen, ’Late Sovereign Diplomacy’, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, vol. 4, no. 2 (2009), pp. 121-141.
For example, see Xavier Guillaume, Governing and Caring for Citizens Abroad, paper presented at the DoC:
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London:
Dean, Governmentality; Mark Duffield, ‘Governing the Borderlands: Decoding the Power of Aid’, Disasters, vol. 25, no. 4 (2001), pp. 308-320; Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, ‘Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 43, no. 2 (1992), pp. 173-205; William Walters, ‘Unemployment and Government: Genealogies of the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mark Salter, ‘Governmentalities of the Airport’, International Political Sociology, vol. 1, no. 1 (2007), pp. 49-66; and Didier Bigo, ‘When Two become One: Internal and External Securitizations in Europe’, in Morten Kelstrup and Michael C. Williams (eds.), International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration (London: Routledge, 2000).
There are important exceptions to which we will return, including Ole Jacob Sending and Iver B. Neumann, ‘Governance to Governmentality: Analyzing
Christopher S. Browning, ‘Nation Branding, National Self-Esteem, and the Constitution of Subjectivity in Late Modernity’, Foreign Policy Analysis, vol. 1, no. 2 (2013), pp. 195-214; Andrew Graan, ‘Counterfeiting the Nation? Skopje 2014 and the Politics of Nation Branding in Macedonia’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 28, no. 1 (2013), pp. 161-179.
Nina Græger, ‘Duty of Care: Protection of Citizens Abroad’, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, retrieved online from http://www.nupi.no/en/About-NUPI/Projects-centres-and-programmes/Duty-of-Care-Protection-of-Citizens-Abroad.
Maaike Okano-Heijmans, ‘Consular Affairs’, in Andrew F. Cooper, Jorge Heine and Ramesh Thakur (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 473-474.
Græger and Leira, The State’s Duty of Care in International Relations; see also Halvard Leira, ‘Taking Foucault Beyond Foucault: Inter-state Governmentality in Early Modern Europe’, Global Society, vol. 23, no. 4 (2009), pp. 475-495.
For examples, see Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago,
Dean, Governmentality, p. 90.
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population; Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics; Dean, Governmentality; and Thomas Biebricher, ‘Faith-based Initiatives and Pastoral Power’, Economy and Society, vol. 40, no. 3 (2011), pp. 399-420.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 202-203.
Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in James D. Faubion (ed.), Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984 (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 217.
Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, ‘Governing Economic Life’, Economy and Society, vol. 19, no. 1 (1990), pp. 1-30.
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 317.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (New York,
Biebricher, ‘Faith-based Initiatives and Pastoral Power’; and Dean, Governmentality.
Dean, Governmentality, p. 176.
Dean, Governmentality, p. 176.
Græger and Leira, The State’s Duty of Care in International Relations.
Quoted in Dean, Governmentality, p. 177.
While this ‘pure’ form of neoliberalism drew much critique, the ‘Third Way’ policy solutions in the 1990s illustrate that such radical processes of inversion cannot be simply reversed. For more, see Anthony Giddens, The Third Way and its Critics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 270.
This is a truncated form of agency, acting unknowingly towards externally defined ends. Freedom here is instrumental rather than a value in and of itself. For more, see Dean, Governmentality.
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 270-271; see also Graham Burchell, ‘Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self’, in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds.), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government (Chicago,
Governmentality, however, does not a priori prescribe any specific goals towards which the population should be steered, and as such it is a neutral concept with regard to any specific policy objectives. See footnote 30 for more examples.
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 131.
Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2009); Dean, Governmentality; and Paddy Ireland and Reginee G. Pillay, ‘Corporate Social Responsibility in a Neoliberal Age’, in José Carlos Marques and Peter Utting (eds.), Corporate Social Responsibility and Regulatory Governance: Towards Inclusive Development? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 77-104.
Christopher Hood, ‘A Public Management for All Seasons?’, Public Administration, vol. 69, no. 1 (1991), pp. 3-19; Juha Siltala, ‘New Public Management: The Evidence-Based Worst Practice?’, Administration & Society, vol. 45, no. 4 (2013), pp. 468-493; and Paul Du Gay, ‘Against “Enterprise” (but Not against “Enterprise”, for That Would Make No Sense)’, Organization, vol. 11, no. 1 (2004), pp. 37-57.
Matthew Flinders, ‘The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 7, no. 2 (2005), pp. 215-239; Lars Thorup Larsen and Deborah Stone, ‘Governing Health Care through Free Choice: Neoliberal Reforms in Denmark and the United States’, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, vol. 40, no. 5 (2015), pp. 941-970; Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording and Sanford F. Schram, Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race (Chicago,
With the exceptions of Browning, ‘Nation Branding, National Self-Esteem, and the Constitution of Subjectivity in Late Modernity’; Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending, ‘The International as Governmentality’, Millennium, vol. 35, no. 3 (2007), pp. 677-701; Oded Löwenheim, ‘The Responsibility to Responsibilize: Foreign Offices and the Issuing of Travel Warnings’, International Political Sociology, vol. 1, no. 3 (2007), pp. 203-221; and Zala Volcic and Mark Andrejevic, ‘Nation Branding in the Era of Commercial Nationalism’, International Journal of Communication, vol. 5 (2011), pp. 598-618.
Halvard Leira and Iver B. Neumann, ‘The Many Past Lives of the Consul’, in Jan Melissen and Ana Mar Fernández (eds.), Consular Affairs and Diplomacy (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 225-246.
Edwin Borchard, ‘The Protection of Citizens Abroad and Change of Original Nationality’, The Yale Law Journal, vol. 43, no. 3 (1934), p. 361.
William Maley, ‘Risk, Populism, and the Evolution of Consular Responsibilities’, in Jan Melissen and Ana Mar Fernández (eds.), Consular Affairs and Diplomacy (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 46.
Leira and Neumann, ‘The Many Past Lives of the Consul’, p. 238.
Jörg Ulbert, ‘A History of the French Consular Services’, in Jan Melissen and Ana Mar Fernández (eds.), Consular Affairs and Diplomacy, (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 303-324; Leos Müller, ‘The Swedish Consular Service in Southern Europe, 1720-1815’, Scandinavian Journal of History, vol. 31, no. 2 (2006), pp. 186-195; and Tatiana Zonova, ‘The Consular Service in Russia: Past Problems, New Challenges’, in Jan Melissen and Ana Mar Fernández (eds.), Consular Affairs and Diplomacy (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 173-198.
Maaike Okano-Heijmans, ‘Consular Affairs’, in Andrew F. Cooper, Jorge Heine, and Ramesh Thakur (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University, 2013), p. 475.
Chris Cooper, Essentials of Tourism (Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd, 2012).
Maaike Okano-Heijmans, ‘Changes in Consular Assistance and the Emergence of Consular Diplomacy’, in Jan Melissen and Ana Mar Fernández (eds.), Consular Affairs and Diplomacy (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 19-42.
Liam Kennedy and Scott Lucas, ‘Enduring Freedom: Public Diplomacy and
Liping Bu, ‘Educational Exchange and Cultural Diplomacy in the Cold War’, Journal of American Studies, vol. 33, no. 3 (1999), pp. 393-415; see also ‘People-to-People Program’, retrieved online from https://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/people_to_people.html.
Kennedy and Lucas, ‘Enduring Freedom’, p. 314.
Kennedy and Lucas, ‘Enduring Freedom’, p. 316.
Paul Sharp, ‘Making Sense of Citizen Diplomats: The People of Duluth, Minnesota as International Actors’, International Studies Perspectives, vol. 2, no. 2 (2001), pp. 131-150.
A clear example for this can be found in nation-branding literature; see, for example, Browning, ‘Nation Branding, National Self-Esteem, and the Constitution of Subjectivity in Late Modernity’.
See also Okano-Heijmans, ‘Changes in Consular Assistance and the Emergence of Consular Diplomacy’; Donna Hamilton, ‘The Transformation of Consular Affairs: The United States Experience’, in Jan Melissen and Ana Mar Fernández (eds.), Consular Affairs and Diplomacy (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 145-172.
Löwenheim, ‘The Responsibility to Responsibilize’.
Okano-Heijmans and Caesar-Gordon, ‘Protecting the Worker-Citizen Abroad’.
Mai’a K. Davis Cross and Jan Melissen, ‘Introduction’, in Mai’a K. Davis Cross and Jan Melissen (eds.), European Public Diplomacy: Soft Power at Work (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. xviii.
Corneliu Bjola and Marcus Holmes, Digital Diplomacy: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 4.
See Fergus Hanson, ‘eDiplomacy: How the State Department Uses Social Media’, Up Front Blog (Washington,
Bjola and Holmes, Digital Diplomacy.
Jan Melissen and Matthew Caesar-Gordon, ‘“Digital Diplomacy” and the Securing of Nationals in a Citizen-Centric World’, Global Affairs, vol. 2, no. 3 (2016), p. 321.
For example, Melissen and Caesar-Gordon mention the Nepal earthquake in 2015, as well as the 2015 Paris attacks.
Melissen and Caesar-Gordon, ‘“Digital Diplomacy” and the Securing of Nationals in a Citizen-Centric World’.
A central concern in Foucault’s philosophy is the recovery of political considerations in domains we commonsensically assume to be non-political.
Miller and Rose, ‘Governing Economic Life’, p. 2.
For more background, see Hamilton, ‘The Transformation of Consular Affairs’.
See also Donna Lee and David Hudson ‘The Old and New Significance of Political Economy in Diplomacy’, Review of International Studies, vol. 30, no. 3 (2004), pp. 343-360.
See Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle, ‘Competing Responsibilities: Moving beyond Neoliberal Responsibilization’, Anthropological Forum, vol. 24, no. 2 (2014), pp. 136-153; and Löwenheim, ‘The Responsibility to Responsibilize’.
See, for example, Maley, ‘Risk, Populism, and the Evolution of Consular Responsibilities’.
Löwenheim, ‘The Responsibility to Responsibilize’, p. 209.
For example, while the
Melissen and Caesar-Gordon, M, ‘“Digital Diplomacy” and the Securing of Nationals in a Citizen-Centric World’, p. 322.
Melissen and Caesar-Gordon, M, ‘“Digital Diplomacy” and the Securing of Nationals in a Citizen-Centric World’, p. 326.
Melissen and Caesar-Gordon, M, ‘“Digital Diplomacy” and the Securing of Nationals in a Citizen-Centric World’, p. 322.
For example, see Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
For example, expatriates were reframed from being represented as ‘traitors’ to more positive terms such as ‘development agents’ and ‘entrepreneurs’; see Rahel Kunz, ‘The Discovery of the Diaspora’, International Political Sociology, vol. 6, no. 1 (2012), p. 104.
Kunz, ‘The Discovery of the Diaspora’.
Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis,
As explained by Rodriguez, wages earned abroad are meant to finance services previously provided by the state, and thus the state in fact ‘responsibilizes’ the citizens for the costs of its own neoliberal restructuring.
Rodriguez, Migrants for Export, p. xxi.
Rodriguez, Migrants for Export, p. xx.
Rodriguez, Migrants for Export, p. xxi.
Rodriguez, Migrants for Export, p. xxviii.
Kunz, ‘The Discovery of the Diaspora’, p. 106.
Okano-Heijmans and Caesar-Gordon, ‘Protecting the Worker-Citizen Abroad’.
Okano-Heijmans and Caesar-Gordon, ‘Protecting the Worker-Citizen Abroad’.
Foreign & Commonwealth Office, ‘Operating in High-Risk Environments: Advice for Business’ (London:
On the link between neoliberal governance and corporate risk management, see Michael Power, Organized Uncertainty: Designing a World of Risk Management (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Dean, Governmentality.
Okano-Heijmans and Caesar-Gordon, ‘Protecting the Worker-Citizen Abroad’, p. 438.
Okano-Heijmans and Caesar-Gordon, ‘Protecting the Worker-Citizen Abroad’, p. 438. It should be noted that privatization in the context of this reference refers to a broad trend towards dealing with issues through the private rather than the public sector.
Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder,
Dean, Governmentality.
Flinders, ‘The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships’; Soss, Fording and Schram, Disciplining the Poor; Gotham, ‘Disaster, Inc.’; Larsen and Stone, ‘Governing Health Care through Free Choice’.
See, for example, Didier Bigo and Eslpeth Guild, ‘Policing at Distance: Schengen Visa Policies’, in Didier Bigo and Eslpeth Guild (eds.), Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement into and within Europe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), pp. 233-263.