Michel Foucault and International Relations: Cannibal relations Didier Bigo Introduction: cannibal relations Political science has framed the topic of the way people are governed and govern themselves by distinguishing power inside the state, and power between states, separating government studies and international relations. This is so “natural” for us as scholars that we forget this initial split whose consequences have been nevertheless immense for the study of dynamics of power and politics and their inscription into space. The distinction between an inside and an outside of the state has organised both sub-disciplines as Siamese twins, hating each other but attached forever and waiting for a surgery (Walker, R. B. J. 1993, Bigo, D. 2001). Michel Foucault, on his own work, never considered this split as relevant. He considered that political science was just a follow-up and an extension of the science of the “state” and the “raison d’Etat”. He was not interested to discuss with IR scholars and was not sure it could be organised as a specific field of study grasping a form of knowledge of its own. Political science looked for him like a school to produce politicians, not to study politics. At the college de France, during the mid seventies, because of a large group of students coming from political studies populated the amphitheatre, he felt obliged to explain after the course that his indifference towards political science and its rhetoric was, for him, the best way to work seriously on the topic of territory, population, and security. Engaging a dialogue would have been hopeless. He was, however, absolutely fascinated by the object of political science as a science of government and decided to do his own enquiry, with other methods, genealogical ones. He insisted also on a study of politics as practice. “War is too important to be left to military studies, this is the same for politics…engage with the topics, with the texts, not with the today commentators; engage with politics in practice, on their effects instead of generalising to find an essence of politics” 1 . Concerning the international, despite many critiques that he did not engaged with it, developed later on by some post colonial scholars, looking at a subject of international dimension, he had an answer from the very beginning to this objection. “If you analyse death penalty, you are dealing with the international, if you discuss jails, also, but you don’t recognise it. You look for comparative politics and other states behaviour, but this is not how I do it”. Later on, in 1982, he will insist on the historical circumstances (as Canguilhem called them) of his different lectures of the seventies. As signalled by Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani when they present the series of lectures at the college de France, it is necessary to read the text of these lectures having in mind the permanent back and forth between the writing and the existence of international conflicts of the time (Viet Nam, Palestine, Chile, Northern Ireland) and social struggles in France after 1968, because the implicit references permeate the tone and explain much of the metaphors which are used. 1 Conversation with a group of students 1977.