governmentality A concept devised by the
French thinker Michel Foucault (1926–84) to
describe the practices of government of a
population as they emerged ineuropein the
modern period. Foucault used the term to
describe the particular practices of thestate
under the organizational regime that he
termed ‘security’. Government is thus not a
property of the space, but theperformance
of its power in a historically and geogra-
phically specific way. Foucault’s notion of
disciplinary powerrequired the enclosure,
circumscription, partition and control of
space, whilesecuritywas concerned with open-
ing up spaces to allow circulation and passage.
This requires regulation, but of a minimal
kind. In Foucault’s terms, discipline is isolat-
ing, working on measures of segmentation,
while security seeks to incorporate and to dis-
tribute more widely (see alsosecurity). The
practices particular to this model of govern-
mental organization are what Foucault means
by governmentality.
Foucault’s researches on governmentality
emerged in the late 1970s as part of his project
of understanding the birth of the modern
humansubject. He was therefore interested
in the way in which humans – both as individ-
ualbodiesand as the collective body of popu-
lation – were governed. This government
was both government of the self by the self,
to which his last works on technologies of
the self andethicsspeak, and government by
others. His works on governmentality itself, in
lecture courses from 1978 and 1979 (Fou-
cault, 2007 [2004], 2008 [2004]), from
which the lecture ‘Governmentality’ (1991) is
extracted, concentrate on government is as it
is exercised in politicalsovereignty, political
rule.
Foucault traces the emergence of govern-
mentality historically, suggesting three main
sources: the Christian pastoral, diplomatic–
military techniques in early modern Europe
and the police. The first provides a model for
codes of conduct and the concern for the
population as a flock; the second looks at the
techniques of external governmental relations;
and the third at internal mechanisms of the
policing or ordering of a society. Foucault
understands the ‘police’ as something much
more than a uniformed force for the preven-
tion and detection of crime but, rather, as
what allows the functioning of asocietyor
polity as a whole (cf.policing). In this sense
it is closer to the analyses of Hegel, Adam
Smith or Adam Ferguson, with a concern for
things including public infrastructure such as
roads and bridges, pricing mechanisms, and
public health and property. In each, he is con-
cerned with how government is interested in
‘each and all’ – individual bodies subject to
governmental procedures, and the population
measured and calculated through larger scale
campaigns (Foucault, 1988). In both, the
practices are tied to the development of know-
ledge, which in turn conditions the practices
themselves.
In order to understand the transition from
earlier sovereign models of political power
to discipline and security or government,
Foucault does not propose a linear narrative.
Rather, he suggests that we understand this
model as a triangle of sovereignty–discipline–
government (governmental management),
whose primary target is population, whose
principal form of knowledge is political
economy, and whose essential mechanism or
technical means of operating are apparatuses
of security. Conceiving of these three ‘soci-
eties’ not on a linear model but, rather, as a
space of political action allows us to inject
historical and geographical specificity into
Foucault’s narrative. Different places and
different times might be closer to one node
or another, while recognizing that this is a
generally useful and transferable model of
analysis. Although Foucault’s work is largely
tied to France and Germany, and dependent
on better known historical transitions such
as that betweenfeudalismand capitalism,
the birth of modernphilosophyand schisms
in the church, some writers have used his
ideas to look at places that did not follow such
chronologies.
Foucault’s work on governmentality has
been widely taken up across the human
sciences, includinghuman geography. Key
works by his colleagues in France have been
collected in The Foucault effect (Burchell,
Gordon and Miller, 1991) and collections
of writings developing and augmenting his
researches have continued to appear (see,
e.g., Barry, Osborne and Rose, 1996; Dean,
1999; Walters and Larner, 2004). Geogra-
phers have looked at a range of spaces
through a governmentality perspective, in-
cluding those that exceed Foucault’s largely
eurocentric perspective (Braun, 2000;
Hannah, 2000, Corbridge, Williams, Srivas-
tava and Veron, 2005). These have largely
been developments of the original lecture on
the topic, and related writings (i.e. Foucault,
1988), so it is likely that the publication of the
full lecture courses (Foucault, 2007 [2004],
2008 [2004]), with their rich analyses, willGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_G Final Proof page 314 2.4.2009 6:30pmGOVERNMENTALITY