Estado moderno, civilização e colonialismo: uma análise foucaultiana do exercício do poder nas Relações Econômicas Internacionais

From Foucault’s point of view, the modern nation-state, its legal structures and its rationality of government are the results of a long historical process that culminates in the technologies of power and knowledge inaugurated by European modernity. The political category of ‘nation-state’ that operates as the main exponent of the modern International System was responsible for positioning the West at the center of the current world-system capitalist political-economic dynamics, and those nation-states that were formerly subject to a regime of colonial administration are still legal, political and economic remnants (superstructures) of a “colonial device” that developed under the rationality of conquest of the modern state and its specific technologies.