From Bio-power to Psyche-power: The Catholic Church and Global Governmentality.

Tis paper discusses the role that the Catholic Church has played as a Global Governance institution before and after the Peace of Westphalia. Te Catholic Church is in the unusual situation of having been the sole worldly international institution to function as a de facto world government. Moreover, the system of modern sovereignty was constructed in direct opposition to the rule of the Church. Unlike other institutions one must explain how the Catholic Church has survived as an institution given the changes within the international order, as opposed to accounting for how it came into being in a system of competitive sovereign states. Tis paper employs Foucauldian ideas of governmentality and bio-power to understand the survival and performance of the Catholic Church as an international regime. I contend that the biopolitics employed is better understood as psychepower: the infuence of the Church goes beyond disciplining bodily and political behaviours and seeks to strike at something far more normative, ideological, and ideational than other international institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]