Browsing by Author "Warro, Eeva"

This thesis scrutinises EU civilian crisis management as an instrument of global liberal governance. Critical Theorists’ views on peace operations form the starting point of the thesis. In their view peace operations are instrumental in spreading liberal common sense and state-centric and managerialist in nature turning subjects of security into objects. Instead they call for more complex operations based on local leadership and wide civil society engagement. This thesis sides, however, with an alternative problematisation of political power, government and war, namely the Foucaultian governmentality approach. Besides Foucault (1977; 1990; 2003; 2007) the theoretical background of this thesis is inspired especially by the works of Dillon and Reid (2008; 2009). With their advancements global liberal governance is seen as a security dispositif with which a biopolitical world order is upheld. EU civilian crisis management, itself a complex ensemble, is argued to be an instance of the dispositif and the analysis focuses on showing how. The research material of this thesis consists in speeches of the EU High Representative for ESDP, Javier Solana, in official EU policy documents, notably the European Security Strategy; in guidelines and policy documents pertaining more specifically to ESDP civilian crisis management and to civilian crisis management training as well as in documents and web-pages of the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo. The methodological orientation for scrutinising this material is the Foucaultian governmentality approach, relying mainly on works of Rose (1992; 1993; 1999; 2006; 2007). Political rationalities, governmental technologies and subjects are the central analytical concepts utilised for the analysis. The security rationality of the EU, in particular in the field of ESDP civilian crisis management, is biopolitical. Contingency and the Union’s ability to discern threatening developments from good ones figure as the greatest security concerns in the material analysed. These are addressed by emergency thinking, whereby the security of the governmental mechanisms of crisis management themselves becomes central. In order to be resilient in the face of contingency, the system needs to be in constant transformation. This logic of constant transformation and adaptation are governmentalised in the EU civilian crisis management system by various biopolitical techniques and mechanisms that in the discussion are grouped as technologies of reflexive government, harmonisation and co-location. These technologies are instrumental in producing also subjects, which are capable in living out the rationality of emergency and which thus reproduce it and maintain the governmental technologies. The civilian crisis management experts are articulated as relays and objects of governmental power. On one hand, they collect information through which different instances are made governable thus ensuring government without Government, and on another, mechanisms upon mechanisms are introduced to keep the experts and the civilian crisis management system itself on check in the fear of it turning acerbic. It is concluded that the thus biostrategised EU civilian crisis management is instrumental in mobilising different civilian sectors of societies to the biopolitical war waged by global liberal governance. Thereby, the view adopted is akin to that of the Critical Theorists about liberal peace operations, but this thesis goes into depth about the actual processes and techniques of global liberal governance and makes reference to no relation of subjugation, but sees power as productive, not merely restrictive.