Graduation Year

2009

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

M.A.

Degree Granting Department

Political Science

Major Professor

Michael T. Gibbons, Ph.D.

Keywords

Foucault, Globalization, Governmentality, Postmodernism, Self-enactment

Abstract

The following project will consist in the study and examination of the concepts and theories that lie in the domain of political theory. The enquiry into the dimensions and complexities of the socio-political organization and the political substance of individual human agents will be conducted with the intellectual assistance of the postmodernist turn of thought. I will interrogate and develop a specifically Foucauldian reading of international politics and the emerging global world order as well as situate Foucault's insights and theorizing in a cosmopolitan framework, which calls for a progressive re-conceptualization of the dimensions of power and the modalities of state-citizen autonomy, and sovereignty.

The thesis will proceed through five stages of analysis: (i) examination of freedom and self-creation as foundational and fundamental to the cosmopolitan citizenship; (ii) investigation of governmentality, power and the role of personal and political resistance in shaping new horizons of political order (iii) development of a structural approach to cosmopolitan democracy; enhanced by (iv) decoupling of identity from citizenship, and prompted by (v) an inquiry into and recalibration of the political space and sovereignty of states and political agents. I will contend for a conception of citizenship, illuminated by a postmodernist lens of analysis, set in a cosmopolitan framework and premised upon a notion of a layered and constituted dialectic, as the most adroit model for a re-articulation of the spirit of democratic qua cosmopolitan citizenship in the world of increasingly displaced loyalties, porous identities, and atrophied civic commitments.

The study aims to inquire into the possibilities of meaningfully addressing the fundamental question in political theory, that of: how is the state to be organized in an era of globalization accompanied by an unprecedented compression of space and time, and re-spatialization of socio-economic and political relations. The thesis will conclude with a synthesis of proposed theoretical assumptions that are to serve as the structural basis and philosophical guidance for the institutionalization of measures conducive to the enactment and perpetuation of cosmopolitan consciousness and cosmopolitical practice.

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