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Governing society today: editors' introduction.

Article Excerpt
The notion of governing society has for a long time seemed self-evident. Society was conceived as a totality coincident with a certain space, a territory, and occupied by a population. Governing was undertaken by a unified agency that acted upon the society of which it was also a specialized part--the government, or, more broadly, "the state." The notion of "governing society" thus referred unproblematically to the binary of state and society. The articles in this special issue of Alternatives, however, each in its own and different way, address the question of "governing society today."

The 1990s, by contrast with earlier times, witnessed a widespread calling into question of both sides of the above-mentioned binary. On the one hand, the idea of a self-contained unity was undermined by the perception of "globalization." The "second age of modernity," as Ulrich Beck called it, (1) was to be one in which the unit of analysis must shift to the features of global change and their local impacts, rather than focusing on the endogenous processes occurring within particular societies. In fact, the processes of globalization were held to have shown that the notion of society depended upon the identification of society with the nation. Society, it seemed, was an artifact of political modernity.

On the other hand, "governance" tended to displace the notion of the state. (2) Against the image of a unitary locus of power and government in the state, focus was shifted onto the diverse and heterogeneous agencies through which governance and ordering was achieved. Governance was something undertaken by corporations, public and private institutions, and nongovernment agencies working above and below the nation-state. Indeed, in its most radical and perhaps consistent formulation, inspired by Michel Foucault's lectures on "governmentality," governing was undertaken by any kind of social, political, or economic actor, ranging from international organizations to corporations to the actions of the conscious self over its desires, aspirations, and conduct. (3)

In the world sketched by the twin themes of governance and globalization, the role of states was sidelined, and the related themes of their claims to sovereignty and violence at the very least was attenuated. The world of the second age of modernity might appear to be a risky one with new inequalities, but from most accounts it presaged greater possibilities of individual self-fulfillment and collective self-determination. Compared with the old world of state and domination, the new world of globalization and governance would appear to be relatively benign.

Suddenly, this felicitous scenario looks suspiciously naive. This is due not simply to the events of September 11, 2001, and their apparent ramifications, but a confluence of happenings that reaches back rather further. The public consciousness of antiglobalization protests since the 1999 protests in Seattle came to highlight the lack of necessity of many of the policies conducted in the name of globalization. Similarly, the phenomenon of mass refugee movements showed both the limits to the globalization thesis and the effects of not belonging to a viable nation-state or society. The use of detention and sometimes military and police force to deter "asylum seekers" also suggested that sovereignty and its powers were far from peripheral to the operation of contemporary governance. Further, war remains a fairly basic feature of our contemporaneity, whatever set of purposes are pursued by it and whatever agencies authorize it. The 1990s saw United Nations-sanctioned, multilateral limited military operations in the defense of human rights--with the United States operating according to Clintonian doctrine. The present decade, by contrast, has witnessed the United States and its closest allies employing a doctrine of preemptive strike to conduct a war on terrorism.

The widespread deployment of the language of security to rethink all kinds of issues from food to the internet to the environment--and to bring about the most extensive post-World War II reform of U.S. federal government--suggests that the language of governance is at best partial. (4) All these events and processes in sum indicate that the pacific model of a deliberative liberal democracy governing in the name of freedom and open to the civilizing flows of global commerce is also at best partial and at worst a foolish chimera.

The articles in this issue are all written within this context and remain skeptical of much of the literature on governance and on...

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