Search results

The task of overseeing food security at an international scale is complicated by the multi-variable and complex nature of the problem. Nevertheless, much policy and governance work has been done through international, most of all through the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Within the FAO, the Committee for World Food Security (CFS) formalizes food security policy, guidelines, and assessments, acting as the main food security governance body within the much broader FAO. Previous research has pointed out the presence of a food security governance system but has not interrogated how power can be understood within this system. I use Foucault's theory of biopolitics, along with critical discourse analysis and discursive institutionalism, to determine how the CFS enacts biopolitical governance through its discursive framework, and what tools the CFS uses to achieve this governance. I find that through both the CFS' heavy emphasis on food production as a solution to food insecurity and the comprehensive use of statistical analysis, a system of biopolitical governance is achieved.

Abstract
Most foreign ministries use a rotational system in deploying personnel abroad, with diplomats moving between foreign posts every few years and earning salary premiums based on the risks, dangers, and hardships associated with different foreign posts. We examine rotationality and hardship in diplomacy, identifying these as spatial and institutional practices for managing a global network of diplomatic personnel and sites. These are institutionalized in foreign ministries' processes for assessing and compensating hardship and danger, and embodied in the design, function, and locational contexts of embassy buildings in foreign capitals. We rely on empirical examples from the US and Canadian foreign services, looking at US embassies in Berlin and Baghdad, and "Havana syndrome" among American and Canadian diplomats and their family members. We conclude that security-heavy forms of hardship assessment and management can limit diplomats' ability to build local knowledge and constrain the interaction and openness usually prized in diplomatic practice.