Socially Responsible Innovation in Security

Critical Reflections

J. Peter Burgess, Genserik Reniers, Koen Ponnet, Wim Hardyns, Wim Smit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815371397
• eBook ISBN: 9781351246880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the possibility of socially responsible innovation in security, using an interdisciplinary approach.

Responsible innovation in security refers to a comprehensive approach that aims to integrate knowledge related to stakeholders operating at both the demand and the supply side of security – technologists, citizens, policymakers and ethicists. Security innovations can only be successful in the long term if all the social, ethical and ecological impacts, and threats and opportunities, both short term and long term, are assessed and prioritized alongside technical and commercial impacts.

The first part of this volume focuses on security technology innovation and its perception and acceptance by the public, while the second part delves deeper into the processes of decision-making and democratic control, raising questions about the ethical implications of security ruling.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, sociology, technology studies and IR in general.

1 Danger, innovation, responsibility

Imagining future security

J. Peter Burgess

Introduction

Security research has intensified at a break-neck speed in the months and years since 11 September 2011, when terrorism became an agenda-setting, globalized phenomenon. The particularly European approach to this global challenge has, however, set itself apart. The master-narrative of security governance in Europe has since the early 2000s focused on the development of an autonomous European security industrial sector and a corresponding Europe-wide market for the industrial development of security technologies. Research and development in security technologies has flourished in the last decades, supported by the good will of an industrially oriented security research programme, and a robust palette of liberalizing initiatives for the new digital market. The common value supporting these initiatives is a reborn concept of security innovation. Through the instruments at its disposition, the European Commission has advanced an agenda where security, the well-being of peoples and property, has become virtually synonymous with security innovation. ‘Security’ has become a tag for security-industrial dominance in relation to potential security threats. In short, security does not simply benefit from innovation; it is innovation.

The overall set of issues addressed by this volume revolves in one way or another around the question of what innovation understood as a kind of security measure can be. A first-cut answer to this question would situate innovation in relation to our own history, to what has been and to what will be, to what has had value in the past, and to what we hope will or expect to have value in the future. It is the search for improvement, for a better future, better quality, better performance and better alignment with the values that we hold dear. Yet if this is innovation, then surely security innovation redoubles the complexity of the problem. This is because security and security governance are precisely about safeguarding those things.

In his recent book, Innovation Contested: The Idea of Innovation over the Centuries, Benoît Godin documents how in the European sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, innovation was widely regarded not as a virtue, but as an evil. An ‘innovator’, according to Godin, was considered a threat to the recalcitrant church doctrine, and ‘innovation’ was in some cases severely punished (Godin, 2015, pp. 75–101). What was new, uncharted, unthought or unrealized was regarded as detrimental to doctrine, a challenge to orthodoxy, even an existential threat to the institution of the church as it stood.

Today, on the scene of contemporary security research, the notion of innovation is of course regarded with unmitigated enthusiasm or even fetishized.¹ Innovation, an idea deployed with uncritical eyes, is a traditional key to understanding and analysing modernity. This fascination with the New has changed little, even while a multifaceted awareness of the limits and pitfalls of the pursuit of modernity and the critique of the modern remains an object of fascination and an axis of value and privilege. We seldom hear bad news about innovation. Even when the umbrella concept ‘modernity’ is subjected to post-modern critical scrutiny and the scepticism it provokes, ‘innovation’ as an idea and as an ideology seems to be an uncritical success.

What we do notice, however, is that the idea of innovation generates a range of secondary or adjacent questions. These questions concern, on the one hand, the sources of innovation, its motivations and justifications, its aims and ambitions; and on the other hand, the actual impact innovation has, how it affects the processes which it is meant to innovate, how it affects the consumers and citizens touched by it, how it influences the scientific or commercial environments where it functions and the natural environments in which it is played out.

It is one subset of these questions that leads us to the idea of ‘responsible innovation’, and to the question of how best to govern innovation for the benefit of both society and research itself. ‘Responsible innovation’ – as a concept and political strategy – seeks to take account of the criticisms of modernity, to counter-claims linked to the environment, development, health, safety and security, and builds an infrastructure of ethical consideration.

Responsible innovation is thus both the name of a kind of modernity and the name of a normative project, a project to be realized, an impulse and proposition for change. On the one hand, it is an analytic tool, the specification of a subset of the modern project, of creating new knowledge and new practices in which commercial progress and economic modernization are key points of valorization. On the other hand, it is a campaign designed to reinvent the fading momentum of modernity. It is a strategy for addressing one of the many political criticisms of modernization, namely its indifference to morality, its disdain for spirituality, its pretence of superiority in relation to human values. While it is more or less clear that all of these criticisms are problematic in their own way, the project of responsible innovation suspends these issues and forges on autonomously.

Another, highly relevant, subset of the general modernization project is the considerable research, development and investment that have taken place in security and security research in the last decades. While responsible innovation comprises a set of principles that might very well be applied to any project of Western industrial development, few such projects hold the same force and political sway as security. No other subfield of industrial innovation offers the same promise, political impact or economic consequences as security research and development.

Even though it is clear that there are distinct similarities between industrial innovation in security and industrial innovation in other fields, the aim of this chapter is to argue that the focus on responsible innovation in security research and development is a very different kind of problem, more convoluted and complex than responsible innovation in general, requiring a different kind of analysis than what we have seen in recent scholarship and policy work on responsible innovation.

This is because security is not just any one consumer item among others. Security is not – despite what we see all around us – a product or a service that can be bought and sold in any simple way. Security in its essence is something wider and deeper. It is a phenomenon that stems from and dialogues with our deepest humanity, with our hopes and fears, our ambitions and anxieties. For this reason, responsible innovation in security research requires us to look more closely at the nature of security and its relation to research and innovation.

In this chapter, we begin by looking more closely at the new landscape of security in Europe, the new security threats perceived by Europeans. We then return to a more detailed analysis of the concept of innovation and its history in the European context, charting its transition from its origins towards the idea of ‘responsible innovation’ in European Union-supported research and development. We conclude by examining how security and responsible innovation both diverge and come together in the European Union’s struggle to understand itself by understanding what is threatening it.

What is under threat when Europe is under threat?

The starting point of the analysis of the responsible innovation in security research is naturally the new security reality in Europe and the West. This new reality consists of a perception of a new set of threats and an amalgam of dangers large and small, personal and collective, that populate and shape our world, a kind of ambient landscape of unease. We sketch this new security landscape along three dimensions: (1) the nearly ubiquitous mass of threats, real and imagined, that forms the backdrop of our lives; (2) the changes brought about in our way of understanding security and insecurity; and (3) the political consequences of the powerful new discourse of security.

To judge by the words and actions of the general public, pundits and public officials, Europe is under threat. But this threat is of a new kind, with a new structure and new components.

For the last year or so, migration has become an object of security analysis. The international balance of peoples and their movement is now under intense scrutiny as the European Union scrambles to put in place a coherent immigration policy while at the same time developing new technologies of surveillance of individuals and new legal paradigms for the juridical control of populations.

This sense of threat and insecurity is, however, not restricted to popular experiences of migration. It also leaves its mark on research and policy formation in this area. Unfortunately, this association of migration with security dissuades critical scrutiny of policy formulation and practice even while it shows a certain disregard for widely held European values.

In Europe today, migration from the war-torn Middle East and developing regions of the world to Europe is widely experienced as a threat, revealing a profound feeling of insecurity, which translates into a wide variety of political consequences.

We often hear of the way in which migration can have a threatening impact on societies, how it can introduce economic competition and undermine job security for nationals, how it can be associated with particular health risks, how it can have implications for security where it involves criminal activities, how it can affect national identity, and how it can be associated with the rise of xenophobia and discrimination.

The concept of security has traditionally referred to the status of sovereign states in a closed international system. In this system, the state is assumed to be both the object of security and the primary provider of security. But today, a wide range of security threats, both new and traditional, confront Europe. According to many, new forms of nationalism, ethnic conflict and civil war, information technology, biological and chemical warfare, resource conflicts, pandemics, mass migrations, transnational terrorism, and environmental dangers challenge the limits of our ability to safeguard the values upon which European society is based.

The growing awareness of these new threats has brought about a change in the way we understand the very concept of security. Consequently, our understanding of the security landscape needs to be nuanced. First, attention needs to be drawn to the complex and composite nature of the state’s security, complicating the assumption that the state can be understood as a simple object of security. Second, the importance of non-state objects of security needs to be better conceptualized; that is, security that is related to that of state security but not identical to it. These objects can be divided into two kinds: on the one hand, individuals and sub-state groups, and, on the other, trans-state entities.

Across this wide horizon of insecurity, two distinct features characterize perceived threats to security: they surpass the boundaries of the nation-state and they are interconnected through processes of globalization. No one state can manage the array of threats to its own security, and nor can any one state manage the threats to the security of its neighbours both inside and outside Europe. In the globalized setting, the challenge of maintaining security is no longer limited to the traditional foreign-policy and military tools of the nation-state. Since at least the mid-1990s, security and insecurity are no longer considered as conditioned only upon geopolitics and military strength, but on social, economic, environmental, moral and cultural issues.

There is therefore widespread disagreement today about what security is, what threats contribute to making us insecure and how one should best seek to enhance security through research and development, communication policy, legal instruments and practice on the ground. This contention forms the backdrop for innovation today. To the degree that this security reality is perceived and understood as being new, it generates a perceived need for novel approaches to addressing the new reality. The novelty of the threat landscape obliges novelty in security measures. At the same time, the experience of novelty is part and parcel of an experience of the unknown, and with it, a notion of unease. Novelty as unease is the well-known affective negation of progress and the support of cultural conservatism. When, in addition, novelty comes in the form of danger, uncertain threat from unknown nefarious forces with unfamiliar motives, the unease of novelty intensifies. Popular openness, industrial optimism and financial bullishness towards innovative responses to the new security reality become enhanced in kind.

This dynamic intensifies the sense that Europe finds itself at a crossroads with respect to the principles, values, means and methods of security policy, and research and development. The considerable shift in the security landscape has not yet been met with a corresponding renewed reflection on how security research and development should be organized, the type of security research policy that should be implemented to guide it and what kind of political structures – and safeguards – are needed to support it.

Despite this indecision, the novelty of threats and the force of events have meant that more resources than ever before are being committed to security research and development, often with the wrong focus. Crucial decisions are being taken over what security innovation policies should be chosen, how they should be implemented, who should fund them and who should benefit from them, without sufficient understanding of the social, political, cultural, ethical and scientific environments that surround them. There is increasing concern at the political level over the methods and aims of security policy and security research, reflecting a fundamental lack of consensus about what security actually is, how it should best be provided and how security research can best contribute to it. Against this backdrop, in what terms should we understand and seek innovation in security research and development?

Responsible innovation in Europe

The idea of innovation as a virtue first took root in the nineteenth century when it was associated with the industrialization process, and was synonymous with ‘invention’. Under the new doctrine of industrial progress, the invention of technical solutions to technical problems was regarded as indispensable.

It was around the turn of the twentieth century that something closer to our contemporary usage of the term ‘innovation’ came into circulation. In his classic analysis of capitalism, Theory of Economic Development, published in German in 1911 (first published in English in 1934), the Austrian economist Joseph P. Schumpeter famously differentiated between ‘invention’, understood as an act of intellectual creativity, and ‘innovation’, understood as the moment when invention is inserted into changes in a business model (Schumpeter, 2012 [1911]).

This basic distinction remains with us today. It is that distinction between the human, creative invention of something whose value is regarded as implicit, inherent, unconditional, unqualified, self-determined and indeed self-affirming, and the creation of something new through its insertion into a social and material process, a system, a context. In contrast to the idea of invention, which refers to the creation of something new and valuable, which can subsequently be integrated into some context where it can meet concrete needs, an innovation has no value before it meets the context of its use. In other words, it derives its value in part from the context in which it is useful.

As mentioned above, few seem to hold criticism of innovation; we don’t often hear bad news about innovation. Critical response to the notion of innovation has been rare. On the contrary, innovation somehow encapsulates implicit goodness, rightness. It is the story of history flowing in one direction, rationality evolving in one direction, progress towards change and the novelty implied by change; leaving behind, interrupting, disrupting or even destroying the past (as in Schumpeter’s famous formulation) is largely taken for granted. Even in the terms of ‘responsible innovati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: responsible innovation in security – setting the scene
• 1 Danger, innovation, responsibility: imagining future security
• PART I Security technology, public perception and acceptance
• PART II Public and private decision-making
• PART III Democratic control and ethical implications
• Index