The Political Economy of Security/Development in the Neoliberal Age

This book builds upon Foucauldian scholarships compelling interrogations that have contributed to the changing conceptualization of the premises of the discipline of International Relations. This epistemological glasnost facilitates the analysis of the United Nations General Assembly endorsed responsibility to protect (R2P) as not merely a security but a security/development measure. This book unpacks the conditions that on one hand necessitate such measures and on the other hand, allow the subsequent dilution of their radical promise. This framing and analysis of R2P has implications beyond R2P. Increasingly, citizens converted into populations are shepherded by the state to chambers of partial, if not total surrender of civil liberties, standard of living, and well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated such measures for people in the Global South, who since the inception of the post Second World War order continue to await their turn to be the beneficiary ofdevelopment. The development, initially prescribed by the modernization theorists, echoed subsequently in the 1980s by the good governance promoterWorld Bankcontinues to elude most in the Global South. Indeed, the regions political and economic instability is often the site that renders as a truism, Foucaults upending of Clausewitzs dictumWar is the pursuit of politics by other meanswith Politics is the pursuit of war by other means. The thanatopolitics (politics of death) of these failed, failing, or flailing, states, is the reason why their populations are seen to be in frequent need for the operationalization of the international communitys responsibility to protect.