Neoliberalism has increasingly become one of the most powerful concepts to emerge within the IR in the last two decades, and indeed the number of scholars who have particularly provoked an interest into its intractable ascendance to global and hegemonic political discourse is astonishing. Even more surprising, though, is that there has, until now, hardly any sustained intellectual and historical analysis on neoliberalism, beyond the confused discussion of neoliberalism as authoritarian policy prescriptions but rather as a governmental rationality as unmistakably drawn out in the material on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund structural adjustment policies in Ghana. Understanding Neoliberalism as Governmentality engages with the theory and practice of neoliberalism by deploying a Foucauldian conceptual-theoretical framework to scrutinise the Bretton-Woods institutions policies in Africa using Ghana as an empirical case study. It sets forward a governmentality approach to understand neoliberalism as not one of readily identifiable political ideology or imposition, but rather as that of the examination of a discursive formation of ideas and practices that together normalise a way of doing governance, enabling certain forms of expertise and knowledge hierarchies. This book also provides a very rich material and critical engagement with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund discourses of “good governance” that developed in the 1990s as a partial readjustment of the so-called Washington Consensus. Using concrete examples and detailed illustrations throughout, this book broadens and deepens the extant literature on governmentality and biopolitics and, in so doing; it has helped extend our theoretical understanding of neoliberalism as sooner example of a governmental rationality shaping our times. This book will serve as an invaluable resource for students, scholars of International Relations, International Development and the wider public interested in a rapidly growing interdisciplinary work focusing on Foucault, biopolitics, neoliberalism and governmentality.
