Conceptualising Foreign Policy and Social Control

Abstract

This chapter examines a number of critical theories that highlight the effects of foreign policy on domestic social order. It foregrounds a range of methods that will be used in Chapter 3 to develop a framework that will be employed in the case study chapters of Part II. These approaches demonstrate the effects of foreign policy on social order by shedding light on the way that Enlightenment rationality and modern techniques of social regulation act upon the self. As discussed in Chapter 1, the advent of modern subjectivity enabled reason in individuals and productivity throughout society; an emancipation that was, however, subject to its own internal constraints and regulations. It is this other ‘dark side’, the dynamic of control and regulation within modern social processes, that this chapter is concerned with.