There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy making has progressively reached into the structure and fabric of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, constraining or confined to static texts; rather, they are productive, continually contested and able to create new social and semantic spaces and new sets of relations. Anthropologists do not stand outside or above systems of governance but are themselves subject to the rhetoric and rationalities of policy. The analyses of policy worlds presented by the contributors to this volume open up new possibilities for understanding systems of knowledge and power and the positioning of academics within them.
Introduction
Chapter 1. Conceptualising Policy: Technologies of Governance and the Politics of VisibilityCris Shore and Susan Wright
Section I: Studying Policy: Methods, Paradigms, Perspectives
IntroductionSusan Wright
Chapter 2. Illuminating the Apparatus: Steps toward a Nonlocal Ethnography of Global GovernanceGreg Feldman, University of British Columbia
Chapter 3. Politics and Ethics: Ethnographies of Expert Knowledge and Professional IdentitiesDavid Mosse, SOAS, London
Chapter 4. Peopling Policy: on Conflicting Subjectivities of Fee-Paying StudentsGritt B. Nielsen, Aarhus University
Chapter 5. Studying through: a Strategy for Studying Political Transformations. Or Sex, Lies and British PoliticsSusan Wright andSue Reinhold (North BerkeleyInvestment Partners)
Chapter 6. What was Neo-liberalism and what Comes Next? The Transformation of Citizenship in the Law-and-Order StateSusanHyatt, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
Section II: Studying Governance: Policy as a Window onto the Modern State
IntroductionCris Shore
Chapter 7.Intimate Knowledge and the Politics of Policy Convergence: The World Bank and Social Security Reform in MexicoTara Schwegler, University of Chicago
Chapter 8.Shadow Governing: What the Neocon Core Reveals About Power and Influence in AmericaJanine Wedel, George Mason University
Chapter 9.Espionage, Policy and the Art of Government: The British Secret Services and the War on Iraq Cris Shore
Chapter 10. The (Un)making of Policy in the Shadow of the World Bank: Infrastructure Development, Urban Resettlement and the Cunning State in IndiaShalini RanderiaandCiara Grunder, University of Zurich
Chapter 11. Swedens National Pension System as a Political TechnologyAnette Nyqvist, Stockholm University
Section III: Subjects of Policy: Construction and Contestation
Introduction Davide Però
Chapter 12. The Case of Scanzano: Raison dEtat and the Reasons for RebellionDorothy Louise Zinn, Università degli Studi della Basilicata
Chapter 13.Migrants Practices of Citizenship and Policy ChangeDavide Però
Chapter 14.Integration Policy and Ethnic Minority AssociationsClarissa Kugelberg Upsala University
Chapter 15.The Elephant in the Room. Multi-stakeholder Dialogue on Agricultural Biotechnology in the Food and Agriculture OrganisationBirgit Müller, LAIOS-CNRS Paris
Afterword
Chapter 16. A policy ethnographers reading of policy anthropologyDvora Yanow, Vrije University
Notes on Contributors Ends Index
