O método e o poder em Michel Foucault e suas implicações nas Relações Internacionais

Abstract

The mainstream theories of international relations based on a positivist epistemology formulates political concepts aiming at their neutrality in an immutable and quantifiable historicism. This dissertation seeks to use Michel Foucault's thinking to challenge these hegemonic theories and to understand the articulations with which the various powers - or its microphysics -, permeating all social relations, articulate and produce a symbiosis between knowledge and power. For this, Foucault develops concepts such as power, sovereignty, freedom and others genuinely Modern to understand the microphysics of powers. Thus, it invokes concepts such as vigilance, discipline and punishment, which present themselves in society, dedicating themselves to an original methodology and epistemology, investigating the construction of a concept of power based on genealogical research. From the destabilization of the traditional theories of International Relations identified in Foucauldian thinking, contemporary cases stand out that can be apprehended from this theoretical and methodological framework, being useful the contributions to the concept of biopolitics developed by Giorgio Agamben, which uses the concept de homo sacer, admitting the possibility to kill - matability - and insacrifiability of human beings stripped of their political qualities, and also using the perspective built by Carl Schmitt on sovereignty and the state of exception, which is seen as a government paradigm. In this way, concepts such as war, enemies, surveillance and elimination go from the binary simplism of traditional theories to more subtle, sophisticated and efficient forms of the presence of power in daily life, as observed in cases such as the Guantánamo Bay Prison, the War Against the Terror, and the cases reported by WikiLeaks.