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Governmentalizing the post-cold war international regime: the UN debate on democratization and good governance.
This article examines a range of "good governance" discourses and practices at the United Nations as elements of global governmentality. It explores the emergence of "good governance" as a political rational for the UN, the mechanisms of governmentality that have been promoted as a consequence, and some of their most important effects. KEYWORDS: good governance, democratization, United Nations, global governmentality, post-Cold-War international regime
********** In the post-Cold War era, the debate on democratization converged with the debate on security and development. Discourses on ways for achieving prosperity and peace shifted their focus from economic factors or the structure of the international arena to the quality of state institutions. In academia, democratic peace theories explained states' behavior with regard to war and peace as the outcomes of their internal political and institutional arrangements. (1) In policymaking, international organizations were increasingly called to improve the quality of state institutions as part of development programs and peacekeeping. (2) In response to the new challenges it had to face, the United Nations developed an intense institutional debate about democracy, its connections with development and peace, and the organization's role in bringing it about. In a process that was not free of contradictions, conundrums, and setbacks, "good governance" was adopted and adapted as the framework within which the United Nations organized and operationalized its activities in the 1990s. Democratization, good governance, and the role of the United Nations in promoting them have been extensively discussed in the literature. Legal and normative approaches stressed the need for improving international institutions and increasing international rule of law; realist approaches maintained instead that these institutions reproduce and reinforce relations of power and that they cannot really function as independent factors of change; Marxist critiques argued that institutional reforms are meaningless without changing structural economic relations. (3) This article analyzes UN "good governance" discourses and programs as elements of global governmentality. Instead of asking under which conditions and through what kind of interventions democratization can best be achieved, it uses the tools developed by Foucaultian studies on government to explore the conditions of emergence of good governance as the UN political rational, the mechanisms of government it promotes, and the political effects it produces. It therefore contributes to an innovative body of inquiries that applies concepts that have been mostly used to address domestic power formations and social dynamics to the analysis of various aspects of international life and international relations. (4) The first section of this article outlines elements of the Foucaultian analyses of government that are useful for understanding the post-Cold War UN debate on democracy and governance. The second part explores the process by which, at the United Nations, the language of governance colonized the discourse on democracy, peace, and development and demonstrates the governmental character of the mechanisms of government promoted within this approach. In a final section, I explore the political effects of "good governance" and its connections with the post-Cold War international regime. Governmental International Regime: The Enlightenment Project Revisited While Foucault does not use the word governance, his analyses of "government" and "governmentality" provide useful tools for understanding the techniques of government spelled out within the "good governance" framework adopted by the United Nations in the last decade of the twentieth century. Foucault defined government as ...See the full content of this document
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