Governing (Through) Rights: Statistics as Technologies of Governmentality
| Published date | 01 June 2011 |
| Date | 01 June 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663910391520 |
| Author | Bal Sokhi-Bulley |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
20(2) 139–155
Governing (Through)
ª The Author(s) 2011
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Rights: Statistics as
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663910391520
Technologies of
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Governmentality
Bal Sokhi-Bulley
Queen’s University Belfast
Abstract
An increasing amount of attention is being given to the use of human rights measurement
indicators in monitoring ‘progress’ in rights and there is consequently a growing focus on
statistics and information. This article concentrates on the use of statistics in rights
discourse, with reference to the new human rights institution for the European Union:
the Fundamental Rights Agency. The article has two main objectives: first, to show that
statistics operate as technologies of governmentality – by explaining that statistics both
govern rights and govern through rights. Second, the article discusses the implications
that this has for rights discourse – rights become a discourse of governmentality, that is
a normalizing and regulating discourse. In doing so, the article stresses the importance
of critique and questioning new socio-legal methodologies, which involve the collection and
dissemination of information and data (statistics), in rights discourse.
Keywords
European Union, Foucault Fundamental Rights Agency, governance, governmentality,
human rights, indicators, statistics, technologies
Introduction
Human rights measurement indicators are considered useful for the overarching reason
that they ‘provide a methodology for monitoring progressive realisation’ (Hunt and
Corresponding author:
Bal Sokhi-Bulley, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland
Email address: b.sokhibulley@qub.ac.uk
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Social & Legal Studies 20(2)
McNaughton, 2007: 303) of human rights, to their highest attainable standard. As such,
they represent the use of socio-legal techniques to understand rights, and consequently
the focus on measurement indicators of human rights may be directly on statistics. The
use of statistical data as a powerful tool in the struggle for human rights has been iden-
tified by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 2000: Chapter 5). This
article develops these analyses further by suggesting that statistics are technologies of
governmentality. Not only do statistics allow us to monitor (the ‘progressive realisation’
of) rights but they allow for the government of rights and of government through rights.
That is, they construct a discourse of rights (governing rights) and they govern the con-
duct of individuals through rights (governing through rights).
I focus on the particular example of the rights discourse of the European Union and its
Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA). According to founding Regulation 168/2007, this new
institution has as its specific task to ‘collect, record, analyse and disseminate’ information
and data in fulfilment of its objective of providing ‘assistance and expertise’ to Union
bodies and its Member States (Articles 2 and 4(1)(a)). As the head of the Agency (its Direc-
tor, Morten Kjærum) has recognized, ‘the Fundamental Rights Agency is working towards
the development of robust indicators in different fields of fundamental rights’ (speech at
opening ceremony of the European Institute for Gender Equality, 2010: 3, emphasis
added). He explains that this means the Agency is using data ‘from the ground about peo-
ple’s situation concerning key fundamental rights abuses’, citing the examples of recent
surveys undertaken on ethnic minorities and discrimination, and on violence against
women (Kjærum, speech at opening ceremony of the European Institute for Gender Equal-
ity, 2010). This data, for example, from the surveys, is in the form of statistics. Statistics
help to ‘strengthen the fundamental rights architecture’1 of the EU – as the title of recent
reports of the FRA denote – creating a solid, evidence-based foundation on which to build
progress in EU human rights policy. The FRA’s statistical data, in the form of its reports
and documents, is intended to ensure that ‘regular health checks’ on the fundamental rights
architecture are carried out (FRA, ‘National Human Rights Institutions in the EU Member
States’, 2010). I analyse the significance of statistics in the FRA’s rights discourse, exam-
ining the production in statistical data in the first two years of the Agency’s existence.2
The association of statistics (or measurement indicators as they have been called by
both UN and EU bodies)3 with the FRA comes from a converging of rights and govern-
ance discourses. The FRA was established as part of the new modes of governance trend
that has swept across the EU in recent years, where novel methods are used to move
away from ‘government’ towards ‘governance’ (see ‘New Modes of Governance
Project’, available at http://ec.europa.eu/governance/index_en.htm and Commission
White Paper, 2001). ‘Governance’ involves power sharing, multi-level integration,
decentralization, deliberation, participation, flexibility and knowledge-creation (Scott
and Trubek, 2002). The White Paper on European Governance (Commission, 2001) pro-
vides ‘the most explicit use of governance in the European context’ (Mo¨llers, 2006: 324)
and states that governance means: ‘rules, procedures and behaviour that affect the way in
which powers are exercised at the European level, and particularly as regards openness,
participation, accountability, effectiveness and coherence’ (Commission, 2001: footnote
1, emphasis added). As an agency made up of networks of actors and circulating large
amounts of statistical information, the FRA thus represents a governance structure.
Sokhi-Bulle
141
Statistics are therefore, according to the academic and institutional literature, a govern-
ance feature (de Bu´rca, 2005; de Schutter 2006–7; Rhodes, 1996; Scott, 2002). I argue
that statistics are tools of governmentality and not simply governance.
‘Governmentality’ is understood here in the sense described by Michel Foucault, as
‘the conduct of conduct’ (Gordon, 1991: 2) – a form of controlling the conduct, or action,
of individuals (see Foucault, 2002, 2007: 87). In contrast to governance, governmentality
refers to an ‘ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, reflections, cal-
culations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of
power’ (Foucault, 2007: 219–220, emphasis added). These procedures and tactics form
the practices, or technologies of government – and statistics are a form of the technol-
ogies of government. Statistics represent ‘a set of technological knowledges’ (Foucault,
2007: 274) that describe a reality – they make possible a knowledge of the population.
Statistics were, as Foucault describes, in fact ‘the secrets of power’ (Foucault, 2007:
275) that the sovereign did not divulge, since they enabled the specific phenomena of
the population to be qualified and managed. This knowledge of the population consisted
of, for example, its quantity, mortality and natality; the various categories of individuals
within a state; their wealth and wealth in circulation. The ‘technological’ refers to:
that domain of practical mechanisms, devices, calculations, procedures, apparatuses, and
documents through which authorities seek to shape and instrumentalize human conduct.
It is that complex of techniques, instruments and agents that endeavours to translate thought
into practice and thus actualize political rationalities and abstract programs. (Inda, 2006: 6)
The most important technological instruments are to be found nowhere more than in the
mundane practices that make up the business of governing everyday social and political life.
That is, ‘all the mundane tools – surveys, reports, statistical methodologies, pamphlets, man-
uals, architectural plans, written reports, drawings, pictures, numbers, bureaucratic rules and
guidelines, charts, graphs, statistics, and so forth – that represent events and phenomena as
information, data and knowledge’ (Inda, 2006: 7). These are the processes through which
the FRA performs its advisory function and which would be associated with ‘governance’
processes in the EU’s institutional discourse. They do not operate via a top-down hierarchy
of control but through networks of actors and experts (Sokhi-Bulley, 2011).
These mundane practices are important not only because they make possible a know-
ledge of the subject but also because they thereby make objects visible, shaping them into
forms that are calculable and able to be regulated (Inda, 2006: 65). Within the model of the
FRA and its rights discourse, statistics therefore translate reality into documentary form,
defining trends in (the FRA’s and therefore the EU’s) rights discourse. Furthermore,
statistics represent good practice and progress, and they allow for the normalization of the
identities of both the ‘victim’ of rights violations and the ‘guardian’ of rights (the
FRA/EU). I show how this is occurring using examples from recent information and data
collected by the FRA in the form of three major sets of documents and reports: the 2008
Annual Report (2009), the FRA’s first major thematic report on homophobia and discrim-
ination on the grounds of sexual orientation (hereafter the ‘Homophobia Report’, FRA:
2008 and 2009) and the FRA’s first EU-wide survey on minorities and discrimination
(‘European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey’, or EU-MIDIS). Examining
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Social & Legal Studies 20(2)
these materials allows me to address the first objective of this article: to...
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