Negar Razavi, 2016

Abstract: This article traces the networks, practices, and forms of power of the “U.S. foreign policy establishment”, which gives them authority on a wide range of policy issues. Drawing on over a year of fieldwork in Washington DC among foreign policy professionals focused on the “Middle East” and more than ten years’ experience working and building relationships in this community, I set out in this article to demonstrate how power operates among foreign policy elites in the U.S. To do so, I interrogate the unique social geography of Washington DC along with the hierarchies, bureaucratic structures, affective relationships, subjectivities, and what I call the “in the loop and off the record” tools and techniques that reinforce the privileges and power of these policy elites. By ethnographically excavating these “insider” spaces, processes, and forms of power, this article contributes to our understandings of statecraft and policymaking, as it redirects our gaze solely from the “effects” of the state to the complex ways political subjects tied intimately with the state help produce and reproduce the “common sense” of foreign policy.

Link to AN article based on winning paper can be found here.