Archeology as a critical mode of inquiry in global politics

The reception of Michel Foucault’s work has been extensive in International Relations (IR). Yet the bulk of Foucauldian scholarship has favored genealogy, discourse, and governmentality at the expense of archeology. As a result, the discipline’s engagement with Foucault’s early writings and the elaborate meta-theoretical reflections he assembled in The Archeology of Knowledge has remained sporadic and dispersed. Despite decades of productive Foucauldian research agendas in IR, the question what an archeological outlook entails and what it might offer to the discipline therefore remains unanswered. In this article, I address this research gap by exploring what is at stake in archeology as a mode of inquiry and I argue that it bears unrealized critical and creative potentials for IR, International Political Sociology, and the study of global politics. Specifically, I aim to show that archeology aids in the craft of political ontologies: it can be mobilized to formulate interpretive strategies and conceptual tools for rendering visible the relational constitution and power-ridden emergence of the social worlds that we study and inhabit. The article critically interrogates the reception of Foucauldian ideas in IR and formulates an innovative plea for (re)turning to archeology and taking it seriously as a way of conducting critical IR research. Moreover, the article also contributes to conversations on critical methodology and the art of scholarly inquiry in IR and beyond by providing an in-depth discussion of how archeology can be mobilized and what work it may perform in empirical research endeavors.