On videocameralistics: the geopolitics of failed states, the CNN International and (UN) governmentality

The discourse of state failure is a post-Cold War era phenomenon which provides a point of entry into the problematic of global regulation and governance after the Cold War. The mass media spectacles of chaos in the 1990s-in Iraq, Somalia and Rwanda-are windows into three overlap ping dynamics which are re-mastering regulation and governance in the post-Cold War world. The first of these dynamics is the specter of state failure in international politics. The second is the power of global media machines as omnipresent visualization technologies, which are infecting and disrupting the political project of envisioning global order by hegemonic institutions and actors. The third dynamic is the regulatory imperatives of economic growth and political stability exerted by hege monic states and institutions upon the strong and the weak alike. This article seeks to theorize critically the webs of power spun by all three, elaborating in the process a Foucauldian-inspired concept-videocamer alistics-to describe their interweaving operation.