Technology and Agency in International Relations

Marijn Hoijtink, Matthias Leese, Marijn Hoijtink, Matthias Leese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032093000
• eBook ISBN: 9780429871740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book responds to a gap in the literature in International Relations (IR) by integrating technology more systematically into analyses of global politics.

Technology facilitates, accelerates, automates, and exercises capabilities that are greater than human abilities. And yet, within IR, the role of technology often remains under-studied. Building on insights from science and technology studies (STS), assemblage theory and new materialism, this volume asks how international politics are made possible, knowable, and durable by and through technology. The contributors provide empirically rich and pertinent accounts of a variety of technologies relevant to the discipline, including drones, algorithms, satellite imagery, border management databases, and blockchains.

Problematizing various technologically mediated issues, such as secrecy, violence, and questions of how authority and evidence become constituted in international contexts, this book will be of interest to scholars in IR, in particular those who work in the subfields of (critical) security studies, International Political Economy, and Global Governance.

Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 How (not) to talk about technology

International Relations and the question of agency

Matthias Leese & Marijn Hoijtink

In recent years, advances in both physical (i.e. engineering and robotics) and digital (i.e. artificial intelligence and machine learning) aspects of technology have led to the development of powerful new technologies such as so-called Autonomous Weapons Systems (AWS), algorithmic software tools for counterterrorism and security, or “smart” CCTV surveillance. These and other technologies have potentially profound repercussions for the ways in which action in international politics becomes possible, the ways in which relations between states become structured, and the ways in which wars are fought, security is produced, and peace is made and maintained. Accordingly, algorithmic and robotic technologies¹ have received much attention from the discipline of International Relations (IR), but also from the policymaking world, the media, and the public. Debates thereby predominantly revolve around the claim that such technologies could to a large extent act autonomously, i.e. without human input when it comes to tasks like identifying and engaging military targets, searching for indicators of terrorist activity within large datasets, or analyzing live video footage for deviant behavior. This means that technologies are ascribed the general capacity to act and to create an impact in the world. In other words, they are believed to have agency that is predicated upon the ability to collect information about the world through sensors or data input, and to interact with the world on the basis of this information.

Such an assumption would run counter to the modernist presupposition that agency (defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “action or intervention producing a particular effect”) could be exclusively found in humans, as humans would be the only species capable of reflexive thinking capacities, and therefore self-consciousness and free will. From this perspective, ascribing agency to technologies (or other non-human elements) creates a set of quite fundamental problems: if – staying within the above examples – machines would make decisions about what to define as a legitimate military target, who should be considered a potential terrorist, or what kind of behavior would warrant interventions by state authorities, then who could and should be morally, legally, politically, or economically held accountable and responsible for these decisions and their consequences? In turn, these and similar considerations have direct implications for international politics. Should AWS, for example, be preventively banned or integrated into existing non-proliferation regimes? How are international security practices informed and structured by global data collection programs and algorithmic number-crunching? And what kind of public order is being engendered by behavioral analysis in CCTV systems, possibly combined with other features such as automated face recognition software? Presupposed machine agency in the sense of autonomous action would seriously challenge the status of (international) politics as a domain of human activity.

A closer look at how technologies “act” however usually reveals that they do not do so in an autonomous fashion, after all. Military drones are operated and supervised by a whole team of human staff on the ground. Counterterrorism software tools need to be developed, implemented, maintained, and fed with data on a daily basis by human analysts. And alerts produced by surveillance systems still need to be validated and acted upon by human security officers. This means that most technologies are, in fact, rather working with humans than in the place of humans. They assist, pre-structure, point out and make suggestions. They do the “heavy lifting,” take care of both complex and challenging tasks as well as dull and monotonous ones, and sometimes they “extend” human cognition by giving us access to additional information that we cannot sense ourselves. But in the end, humans and technologies enable each other in order to create an impact in the world. Technologies should therefore, in the sense of the workload distribution that characterizes them, best be conceptualized as “socio-technical systems” (Law, 1991) that are comprised of heterogeneous human and non-human elements.

Such an understanding of technology – while acknowledging complexity and context sensitivity of (political) action – does, however, not resolve the question of agency in relation to algorithmic and robotic technologies. Clearly, when machines or computer systems do things that their human operators cannot do (or do not want to do), they play a role in how action is constituted and how meaning is produced. Hence, there is a need to study the ways in which technologies have, and exercise, agency. Technologies are political agents – not in a liberal sense that would presuppose that they act as conscious subjects whose actions are predicated upon volition and free will, but in the sense that they have effects on political action. This may seem a banal claim. Yet, we find that in the discipline of IR two broader tendencies have long prevented such a conceptualization of technology within international politics.

The first tendency is the predominantly determinist reading of technology throughout the history of IR. From classic works such as Ogburn’s Technology and International Relations (1949b) or Skolnikoff’s Science, Technology, and American Foreign Policy (1967) to more recent contributions, most analyses are in fact predicated upon the assumption that technology is either fully controlled by humans or alternatively placed outside of human agency (McCarthy, 2013, 2018). While neatly fitting in with a prevailing scientific understanding of analysis (i.e. causal and mechanistic) throughout mainstream IR (Jackson, 2017), such a treatment of technology does however not sit well vis-à-vis algorithmic and robotic technologies and the acknowledgment of complexity and human-machine interactions within socio-technical systems. In order to overcome the externalization of technology as an explanatory variable in IR and to render it “endogeneous” to international politics, a number of scholars have thus suggested to unpack technology by foregrounding its construction, implementation, and use. Such a holistic approach would then enable us to account for the politics that go into technology, as well as for the politics that emanate from technology (e.g., Herrera, 2003; Fritsch, 2011).²

The second tendency that has prevented a stronger analytical appreciation of technology in international politics is the conceptualization of agency within IR. IR scholars have long been concerned with the “agent-structure problem” (Wendt, 1987), i.e. the question of whether human action should be seen as the decisive element for the analysis of international politics, or whether human action would always already be pre-defined and constrained by the social structures in which it is embedded. In an attempt to overcome this duality of agency and structure, Jackson and Nexon (1999) have proposed to turn to a relational analysis of action that, rather than asking what international actors do, foregrounds who these actors are and how their agency is produced. This relationalist turn has paved the way for a re-appreciation of (political) agency as emergent and dynamic rather than static and pre-determined. Moreover, it allows us to move away from an understanding of agency as an attribute (that would need to be located within someone or something) and towards an understanding of agency as a product of interaction. In other words: agency does not precede action, but action constitutes agency. Most importantly, however, it speaks to the acknowledgment that agency must not necessarily be exclusive to humans enables us to account for technology and its politicality through the study of interaction within socio-technical systems.

The aim of this book – based on the premises to (1) unpack technologies in order to render them political, and (2) to understand agency as something that is produced through interaction – is to ask how technologies (co-)produce, alter, transform, and distribute agency within international politics. Working through the notion of agency and its transformations against the backdrop of algorithmic and robotic technologies thereby allows us to reconsider the ways in which technology has been treated in IR. A focus on agency moreover serves as a common denominator for the variegated theoretical and conceptual approaches that scholars in IR have more recently taken up to study technology, including the likes of “Social Construction of Technology” (SCOT, Bijker et al., 1987), “Actor-Network Theory” (ANT, Callon, 1984; Latour, 2005), “co-production” (Jasanoff, 2004), “performativity” (Butler, 2010), “vibrancy” (Bennett, 2010), “mangle” (Pickering, 1993), “intra-action” (Barad, 2007), “configuration” (Suchman, 2007), or post-human approaches (Cudworth and Hobden, 2013).

The contributions to the book provide in-depth explorations of the entangled and multi-layered ways in which humans and technologies interact, work together, and mutually empower and/or constrain each other. In this vein they offer a variety of theoretical and empirical accounts of Technology and Agency in International Relations, including questions of theory-building and empirical analysis that emanate from Jasanoff’s notion of “co-construction” (Jacobsen and Monsees), the boundary work between humans and non-humans in military weapons systems (Leese), the mediation of security governance through the production and analysis of satellite imagery (Olbrich), the effects of practices of drone warfare on how military operators perceive the world (Edney-Browne), the role of blockchain technology for international financial regulation (Campbell-Verduyn), the design of algorithms for crime forecasting and intelligence (Kaufmann), and the emergence of large IT infrastructure systems for border management (Glouftsios). The book concludes with an interview with Claudia Aradau, who discusses technology and agency in relation to her own work on materiality, Big Data and algorithmic security, and explores a number of questions concerning politics, ethics, and methodology vis-à-vis the discipline of IR.

This introduction proceeds in three steps. First, we briefly revisit IR’s grand theoretical debates (i.e. realism, liberalism, and constructivism) and pay specific attention to the ways in which technology within these frameworks has been treated in a deterministic and externalized fashion. Subsequently, we discuss the agency-structure debate and the turn towards relational analyses. We then explore more recent influences from STS and New Materialism into IR, and analyze how these approaches help us to study technology and agency in international politics.

Technology in IR: determinism and externalization

IR’s answers to “the question concerning technology,” to borrow from Heidegger’s (1977) seminal essay, have come with quite a degree of variance, depending on assumptions about the essence of the international system, the possibilities and conditions for change or stability, and the general relationship between technology, politics, and society. As Ogburn (1949a: 18) has argued as early as in 1949, “in international relations the variables often stressed are leaders, personalities, social movements, and organizations. These are important variables in explaining particular actions and specific achievements. But because of their significance the variations of technological factors should not be obscured.” In Technology and International Relations – an early attempt to create a systematized account of the role of technology in global affairs – Ogburn (1949a: 16) illustrates the presumed causal influence of technological tools on world politics as follows:

Few doubt that the early acquisition of steam power by the British before other states acquired it helped them to become the leading world power of the nineteenth century and thereby made the task of British diplomacy much easier. Britain’s steel mills, with their products for peace and for war, enabled her to spread much more effectively the ways of European civilization into Africa and southern and southeastern Asia.

Ogburn’s account notably set the tone for ensuing realist engagements with technology – and particularly military technology – as a capabilities-enhancing variable that provides states with a power edge vis-à-vis other states in the international arena. As for realist and neorealist IR scholars, the international system is characterized by an anarchic structure that produces fierce competition between rivaling nation–states (Morgenthau, 1948; Waltz, 1979), the absence of rules (and/or their enforceability), the will to survive, and the lack of certainty about the intentions of other states (Mearsheimer, 1994). As the hierarchy within the international system is determined by the power capacities of states, the question of power and its acquisition is central. Power is in this sense usually conceptualized in terms of military and economic capacities. Technology is within realist and neorealist accounts of international politics then mainly treated as a tool that enhances state power, for instance through upgrades of military equipment (e.g., longer missile range, higher firing rates, more protective armor), or improved efficiency of economic means of production.

In the realist paradigm, technology has the capacity to become a game changer within the international system and its study has been put center stage by many during the Cold War period. Against the backdrop of technological competition between the West and the East (e.g., the arms race, the space race), the (sub-)discipline of Strategic Studies primarily evolved around the study of the influence of military technologies on power distribution within global politics. As Buzan (1987: 6) argues, “the subject matter of Strategic Studies arises from two fundamental variables affecting the international system: its political structure, and the nature of the prevailing technologies available to the political actors within it.” Whereas questions of the political structure of the international sphere were considered a task for traditional IR, the technological component of international security had to be, according to Buzan (1987: 8), discussed by scholars of Strategic Studies focusing on the “variable of military technology.” Independent of whether one considers the study of technology to be a unique feature of the dedicated (sub-)field of Security Studies, or alternatively as a core concern of IR, the distinction made by Buzan indicates that the political structure of the international system is itself not affected by the availability of technology – an argument that, thus, treats technology as an externalized explanatory variable for change/stability in the international system.

This does, of course, not mean that technology would not be seen as important for international politics. For realists, the political structure influences the development and implementation of technology, and technology, in turn, is widely regarded as a factor determining the military capacities of states and their strategic options in an international system that is characterized by anarchy. During the Cold War period, large parts of the IR literature were in fact dominated by questions about military capacity and the control thereof, with a particular focus on nuclear technology and the implications of the availability of the atomic bomb as an unprecedented means of mass destruction. After the end of the Cold War, the focus of analysis – following new military strategies vis-à-vis newly available technologies – shifted increasingly towards the incorporation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) into military equipment in order to enhance warfighting capacities of the US military. This so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) corresponded closely with more risk-averse political strategies of Western states that sought to avoid military fatalities, as well as a turn towards more specialized high-tech troops that would be able to conduct combat with precision and efficiency (Shaw, 2005). Within concepts of RMA, information is regarded as the key component that create...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables and figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• 1. How (not) to talk about technology: International Relations and the question of agency
• 2. Co-production: The study of productive processes at the level of materiality and discourse
• 3. Configuring warfare: Automation, control, agency
• 4. Security and technology: Unraveling the politics in satellite imagery of North Korea
• 5. Vision, visuality, and agency in the US drone program
• 6. What does technology do? Blockchains, co-production, and extensions of liberal market governance in Anglo-American finance
• 7. Who connects the dots? Agents and agency in predictive policing
• 8. Designing digital borders: The Visa Information System (VIS)
• 9. Technology, agency, critique: An interview with Claudia Aradau
• Index