This article seeks to contribute to opening up a space of possibility for the state to become something other than a competitive entity in and through a critical (re)problematisation of ‘international competitiveness’ as a governmental problem. In more specific terms, it inquires into how international competitiveness was constituted as such a problem in the first place; how both the meaning of international competitiveness and the terms of the ‘competitiveness problem’ have been transformed by globalisation talk and multilateral efforts at neoliberal global governance; and how the discourse of international competitiveness works to (re)produce the state as a competitive entity on a continuous basis.
This article engages in a critical analysis of two of the most influential contemporary economic publications — namely, the competitiveness reports published annually by the World Economic Forum and the International Institute for Management Development. Drawing on Michel Foucault's work on governmentality, it emphasises the governmental work that these reports do in relation to ongoing efforts aimed at governing states in a neoliberal fashion. In and through competitiveness indexing and country benchmarking, they are argued to contribute not only to constitute states as flexible market subjects, but also to guide their `rational' conduct thus constituted. Acknowledging that there is nothing natural or given about states striving to improve their `national competitiveness', the article concludes with some broader reflections on the future prospects for neoliberal governance of states.
By raising the “animal question” in International Relations (IR), this essay seeks to contribute not only to put animals and human–animal relations on the IR agenda, but also to move the field in a less anthropocentric and non-speciesist direction. More specifically, the essay does three things: First, it makes animals visible within some of the main empirical realms conventionally treated as the subject matter of IR. Second, it reflects on IR's neglect of animals and human–animal relations in relation to both how IR has been constituted as a field and the broader socio-cultural context in which it is embedded. Third, it explores various ways in which IR scholars can start incorporating and take animals and human–animal relations seriously in studies on international relations.
While celebrating recent efforts to redefine 'economic nationalism' by placing nationalism and national identity -rather than the state or illiberal economic policies -at its core, this article takes issue with the tendency to provide an unnecessarily narrow specification of a new research agenda on economic nationalism. More specifically, it argues that the agenda should concern not merely how national identities and nationalism influence economic policies and processes, but also how the latter can influence the former. An argument is also made for this twoway relationship to be conceived in constitutive terms, and a study of the efforts to develop a maritime policy in Norway in the mid-1990s is presented to show the usefulness of this reformulated research agenda on economic nationalism.
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