French, of Oak Park, and former visiting professor Samsang Jo co-authored a 30-page paper titled "Conceptualizing American Hegemony: Towards Foucauldean Hegemony" over the course of this academic year. The paper was presented last month in San Francisco as part of the annual meeting of the International Studies Association’s 49th Annual Convention, which is the largest annual international studies conference in the nation.

Hegemony is the concept of dominance of one social group over another. French and Jo used the work of post-modern historian and philosopher Michel Foucault to rethink theories of hegemony and empire that are currently used by the International Relations Theory.

"This entailed identifying the history of how certain types of power have been created, alongside the modern discovery of the national population as the natural basis of society, and how this power has been used as a tool to govern that population," said French. "In particular, we asked ‘How has this power become used to govern the global population and why did certain governments after the Second World War become concerned with this global population? What explains this transition?’"

French said the paper’s thesis was that this transition has not only been the result of American hegemony but also its foundation.

"Thus," he added, "the decline of American power in the world can be measured by its increasing inability to govern the global population, as indicated by its growing reliance on military force, and the global population’s refusal to be governed by American power."

The paper, which was delivered to an audience of orthodox International Relations Theorists, was received with a high degree of resistance, according to French, whose portion of the paper was the culmination of two years of research that began as an independent study project.

"They responded largely by defending the International Relations Theory’s ability to answer these sorts of questions," he said. "They seemed displeased by our suggestion that their discipline plays an active role in studying the global population for the purpose of making it governable by informing the levers of power in American and worldwide political, economic, military, and information institutions. This emboldened us and gave us ideas on how to rewrite our paper taking their criticisms – some of which were very constructive – into account."

French concluded, "I should add that this is typical of the so-called ‘third debate’ in international relations, which is currently between orthodox International Relations Theory and post-modern theory. It seems we flung ourselves into the center of the ring."

French, who hopes to enter Monmouth’s post-baccalaureate program in 2009 before heading off to graduate school, said he has always been attracted to international relations, "even before I knew international relations was a field of study. I recall watching the first Persian Gulf War in 1991 and being awestruck as to what made something like that possible. Given my age, I had a few childish questions and no answers. The same is true today. Compared to the complexity of the social world my questions of ‘what makes such and such possible’ are as childish as they were then and the few answers I’ve found are just as unbearably sparse."