Postmodernist View Of Power In International Relations

Any definition of a “postmodernist view” in international relations (IR) would hardly do any justice to the diversity of views and approaches existing in postmodern IR theorizing. Yet, it can be confidently argued that postmodern approaches to power in international relations, as in many other academic disciplines, have been influenced heavily by the thought of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, and especially his writings on discourse, disciplinary power, governmentality, biopower, and resistance.

The discipline of international relations has traditionally been dominated by a material, capability-based, instrumental, and top-down understanding of power, which is the approach adopted by realism, the dominant school of thought in IR. The dominant realist approach to power has been challenged both by neoliberal and Gramscian approaches. The former focuses on the importance of socialization and “soft power” (see, for instance, the work of John Ikenberry and Joseph Nye) while the latter focuses on Gramscian hegemony (i.e., on the mechanisms through which a ruling class transforms its own interests and values into “common sense” for all the members of a society) and its reproduction. It can be argued that while neoliberal and Gramscian approaches depart from the material and capability-based realist approach to power, they seem to share with the latter, if in different degrees and ways, an instrumental and top-down understanding of power. Postmodern approaches, on the other hand, offer a radically different understanding of power.

For postmodern approaches power is a relation, not a commodity or a capability; power is dispersed and diffused, and it is activated from all the constitutive elements of the body politic, rather then being unidirectional, centralized, and controlled and exercised by a single actor (e.g., a king, a state, a ruling class, a coalition of states); thus, power is not something that operates or is used instrumentally in a top-down way, but a force that [Page 498]operates bottom-up. Similarly, power is not a force that is exercised instrumentally upon its target audience, violating that audience's autonomy from an exterior point. Rather, as mentioned above, power is a force that is enacted by each and every individual; power is thus a force that attempts to regulate life from within. Power, then, is a productive phenomenon—it is not only produced by the interaction of different actors/subjects and forces, but it also generates and produces actors/subjects and forces. In this way power can be thought as both a condition of existence as well as an object of resistance in the multidimensional universe of international relations. Based on this conceptualization of power, the key question for postmodern IR is not who has power in international relations, but how does power operate and how is it exercised?

Thus the postmodernist view and analysis of power in IR is guided by the question how rather than who. In postmodern analyses the concept of discourse is central. (Foucault defines a discourse as a set of practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.) Discourse is a key analytical tool that allows postmodern scholars to identify institutionalized forms of power relations in world politics, and to examine their disciplinary power and the dispersed social practices, rules, principles, institutions, or structures through which such power relations operate. The aim of this research is to identify and interrogate how specific interests or power relations have been institutionalized and are reproduced. The nature and implications of the interplay between specific discourses and identity/reality formation is a focal issue here. David Campbell, for instance, has analyzed how U.S. identity has been written and rewritten through foreign policies and practices that operated in its name, and Steve Smith has attempted to demonstrate how IR as a discipline helped to produce the tragic events of September 11, 2001.

...