Description
Critical approaches to IR have often been criticized for lacking methodological rigor. (Aradau & Huysmans 2014) Especially, authors informed by the works of Michel Foucault have faced challenges to justify their methodology, given that Foucault did not provide scholars with a methodological blueprint. This article argues that Carol Bacchi´s ´What´s the problem represented to be?´ (WPR) approach, provides a robust critical methodology for policy analysis. WPR is a method that facilitates the critical examination of public policies to analyze ‘how the “problem” is represented within them and to subject this problem representation to critical scrutiny’. (Bacchi, 2012) This way of questioning differs from other forms of policy analysis in that it ‘shifts the focus of analysis from policy as a “problem solving” exercise, a technical, neutral and responsive process, to a mode of thinking that sees policy as an act which is constructive of “problems”’ (Marshall 2012). Policies are therefore not analyzed from a problem-solving perspective, but from a problem-questioning perspective. By making the ‘problem’ itself the focus of analysis, it becomes possible to uncover the political, epistemological and historical contexts which are constitutive of the problem representation. I demonstrate the value of this approach by subjecting the Cure Violence (CV) NGO to a WPR analysis. CV argues that ‘violence is a disease’ that can be cured via epidemiological methods used in disease control. A WPR analysis of CV’s ‘violence as disease’ narrative shows how its medicalization of violence is tied to a neoliberal rationality of governing that disentangles violence from structural factors and explains violence solely by reference to individual pathology. In doing so, CV produces new identities based on assumptions concerning biological infection or immunity resistance, which, as its visual language shows, are grounded in race. Through a politics of exclusion, CV turns these ‘at risk’ identities into appropriate targets for health intervention, with the aim of encouraging these to act upon themselves to improve or restore their productive capacities in order to achieve the idealized form of healthy citizenship that CV propagates. The paper will conclude with recommendation for the application of WPR in IR.
