| In the context of development and poverty alleviation, women's empowerment along with community participation and the idea of self-help is the new global orthodoxy. The rhetoric of radical women's development groups has been co-opted by international development agencies, powerful international financial institutions, states, NGOs and social movements alike. How do International Relations scholars understand this consensus around the notion of women's empowerment? Within International Relations literature this consensus is either interpreted as an example of the increasing isomorphism among nation-states, or alternatively as a new liberal-democratic norm for civilized and modern states to follow.;Based on Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality, I will analyze four empowerment projects for women in India to show that their central goal is to constitute the subjects of intervention (mostly poor rural women) as active and responsible, rational, productive individuals with the ability to govern their own lives. Within this context empowerment is a technique of governance that seeks to create self-governing modern, responsible, and productive citizens. Existing accounts of the global women's empowerment movement present it as a veritable panacea for the social and economic predicament of the Third World. I contend that they obscure or underestimate the disciplinary techniques inherent in the empowerment solution. The central argument here is that women's empowerment is better analyzed as a technique of governmentality than a catholicon for the predicament of development. |
