*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

There’s a quiet unease that settles in when the language of ‘security’ begins to sound indistinguishable from the language of care. In recent years, as misinformation has been framed as a global crisis, echoed most recently in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2025, which warns of its potential to undermine societal trust and destabilize governance by deepening divisions (WEF, 2025), states have responded not just with concern but with increasingly elaborate digital regulations. It’s difficult not to notice how quickly the language of safety becomes the language of control. Pakistan’s 2025 amendments to the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA), like many such measures worldwide, are framed as pragmatic responses to the dangers of online extremism, disinformation, and moral corrosion. But this framing, while seemingly rational, calls for a deeper interrogation. What does it mean when the state not only polices actions, but begins to quietly shape the terms of speech, the contours of dissent, and even the bounds of thought?

This piece approaches PECA 2025 not simply as a legal reform, but as an entry point into what Michel Foucault describes as ‘governmentality’, a form of governance that works not through overt force, but by subtly cultivating behaviors, norms, and subjectivities (Foucault, 1991). What I argue here is that PECA 2025 (National Assembly of Pakistan, 2025) functions less as a shield against cybercrime and more as a digital architecture of discipline. It codifies who gets to speak, what can be said, and how people come to see themselves as governable subjects, often in the name of the national good.

When Michel Foucault first introduced the idea of governmentality, he wasn’t offering a neat theory of power: he was troubling it. He was asking us to pay attention to how power works not just through commands or prohibitions, but through more invisible means: routines, habits, institutions, even care. As he put it, governmentality describes a form of governance that goes beyond laws and coercion, involving the shaping of conduct through subtle, indirect techniques (Foucault, 1991; Stanford, 2025).

The word itself fuses government and mentality, a reminder that ruling is never just about institutions, but about ways of thinking. Government, in this sense, is not limited to states, it’s also about how individuals come to govern themselves in line with certain rationalities, ways of seeing, judging, and acting (Britannica, 2025). This makes the concept especially useful in understanding digital regulation, where the state does not always need to censor or arrest. Sometimes, it simply needs to structure the space in which people learn to monitor themselves.

In his 1978 lecture at the College de France, Foucault laid out three elements of governmentality that feel particularly resonant in the age of algorithmic governance (Lawlor & Nale, 2014). First, he described governmentality as a broad system of power, diffused, institutionally embedded and often non-coercive. It operates through policies, bureaucracies, technologies, and discourses that regulate populations without the appearance of domination. Second, he pointed to a historical transformation from sovereign power, which punished visibly, to governance, that shapes conduct through normalization, data, and surveillance. And third, he reminded us that this mode of power didn’t appear overnight. It evolved through histories of religion, economics, and political thought, transforming into a sedimented form of power that becomes most oppressive precisely when it feels ordinary.

A key element that makes governmentality so unsettling and so analytically powerful is its productive nature. Power, in Foucault’s formulation, doesn’t simply repress, but it also produces. It forms subjects. It shapes desires, habits, and fears. And most crucially, it teaches individuals to participate in their own governance. What Foucault called “the conduct of conduct” or “the art of government” is precisely this, the process by which individuals come to internalize norms and regulate themselves (Dryzek, Honig & Phillips, 2006).

This idea is closely linked to Foucault’s earlier work on disciplinary power and normalization. From schools and prisons to bureaucracies and legal regimes, modern institutions quietly instill expected forms of behavior, rewarding conformity and punishing........

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