Technology and World Politics

An Introduction

Daniel R. McCarthy

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138955837
• eBook ISBN: 9781317353836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume provides a convenient entry point to the cutting-edge field of the international politics of technology, in an interesting and informative manner. Technology and World Politics introduces its readers to different approaches to technology in global politics through a survey of emerging fusions of Science and Technology Studies and International Relations. The theoretical approaches to the subject include the Social Construction of Technology, Actor-Network Theory, the Critical Theory of Technology, and New Materialist and Posthumanist approaches.

Considering how such theoretical approaches can be used to analyse concrete political issues such as the politics of nuclear weapons, Internet governance, shipping containers, the revolution in military affairs, space technologies, and the geopolitics of the Anthropocene, the volume stresses the socially constructed and inherently political nature of technological objects.

Providing the theoretical background to approach the politics of technology in a sophisticated manner alongside a glossary and guide to further reading for newcomers, this volume is a vital resource for both students and scholars focusing on politics and international relations.

1

Introduction

Technology in world politics

Daniel R. McCarthy

It would be difficult to overestimate the place of technology in our daily lives. From the moment we wake in the morning (assisted by alarm clocks) to trips to work or school on trains, buses, cars and bikes (where we use laptops or coal-diggers or barcode scanners, before enjoying an increasingly mediatized leisure time), technological objects structure and shape every aspect of our existence. Indeed, simply trying to imagine human existence without the material objects that extend our reach, augment our eyesight, aid our strength, create our clothing or cook our food is a near impossibility. An indication of the centrality of the non-human world to our everyday lives is found in the often-noted – if slightly misleading – attempt to define the human species as the ‘tool-making animal’.¹

Practices in world politics are, similarly, always composed of our relationship to and use of technological objects and systems.² A cursory examination of news headlines illustrates how deeply international politics is inflected by the politics of technology. American shuttle diplomacy relies upon jet technologies that were the product of massive geopolitical upheaval during the Second World War. European Union (EU) reactions to crises in Eastern Europe and Russia are inflected by the natural-gas pipelines bringing heat to European homes. Deeply integrated production networks – reliant on heavily automated just-in-time manufacturing technologies and shipping container, road and rail complexes – connect Western consumers to developing state producers ever more tightly. The interdependence of these networks shapes the macroeconomic policy range of governments across the world. Warfighters extend their reach from Nevada to Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen by means of drone technologies, while those targeted respond via propaganda campaigns on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Telling any story about international relations requires paying significant attention to the technological objects and large technical systems (LTS) that comprise it. Given our inescapably technological existence, studying how technological objects come into being and their role in social action is a central task of social inquiry.

The past 30 years have witnessed an explosion of interest in these issues. Emerging from the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), the history of science and post-positivist philosophy (Kuhn 1962; Berger and Luckmann 1967; Bloor 1976; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Hughes 1983; Shapin and Schaffer 1985),³ interest in the social shaping of technology has resulted in the creation of a distinct subfield of sociology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), with its own professional associations, journals, conferences, academic departments and disciplinary debates. STS has become one of the most theoretically dynamic and empirically productive fields in the social sciences; its interdisciplinary approach has encouraged fruitful exchanges across academic boundaries. One result of this process is that theories and methods developed within STS are increasingly influential in studies of world politics. International historians and International Relations (IR) theorists are drawing upon STS approaches in an effort to develop holistic accounts of how global political conduct creates, and is created by, the politics of technological artefacts.⁴

This is a positive development, and students of International Relations will benefit from the influence of STS in IR. For most of its history as a discipline the study of technology has been of marginal interest to IR, resulting in under-theorized treatments of non-human objects. Empirically, technology has primarily been treated as an already given variable, with the politics of technological design sidelined. The result has been ahistorical and deterministic readings of technology, with the social and the technological kept resolutely separate. Technology is more than a variable, though. Social practices are not caused by technology in a linear temporal sequence: driving a car or fighting a war are human actions that not only use cars or tanks but also are composed of them. Technology is, to use the favoured clichéd expression of the 1990s, socially constructed (cf. Hacking 1999). Acknowledging this does not settle the issue of how we should think about the relationship between technology and global politics. It does, though, point readers away from simple technological determinisms. To this end, the approaches surveyed in this volume engage with STS scholarship and its related strands in social and political theory in order to examine how we can begin to think about the materiality of global politics beyond the traditional coordinates set by International Relations.

STS has been a beneficial source of inspiration and engagement for IR scholars, but we should be wary of casting aside the insights of IR tout court. If IR has not adequately theorized or studied the role of technological objects in world politics, STS has largely neglected the specific role of ‘the International’ in processes of social development (Rosenberg 2006). Competition and cooperation between multiple political communities, the place of foreign policy interests, the norms of international society; all of these are central to the character of technology and science. For example, the shift from ‘small science’ to ‘big science’ in the field of particle physics had a significant impact on the course of its development, altering the kind of problems that scientists would, and could, pursue and their access to cutting-edge technologies that enabled this (Pickering 1993). This process emerged from the transition in government funding for scientific research in the United States during the Second World War, a shift that favoured large and expensive research projects and equipment over the ‘small science’ that ‘was the traditional work style of experimental physics’ (Pickering 1993: 572). The role of inter-state competition and war was central to this development, as was the subsequent prestige attached to science in the Cold War. Yet geopolitical competition and the presence of multiple political communities are not theorized in the classic STS account of this process. Technological development is always modulated by the specific dynamics of cooperation and competition between political communities within a global system of states. Various traditions of IR theory offer resources for a sustained interdisciplinary dialogue with STS centred on the global politics of technology.

With these thoughts in mind, this volume is designed to provide students and scholars of International Relations with an introduction to the emerging interdisciplinary scholarship in this area. The remainder of this introductory chapter will outline these preliminary remarks in greater depth, before turning to discuss the structure of the book as a whole. First, we will note the twin technological determinisms that have dominated IR theory until quite recently – instrumentalism and essentialism. A brief discussion of these determinisms points to the elaboration of alternative perspectives in Part I of the book. Second, the introduction will outline some shared epistemological, ontological and methodological guidelines central to Science and Technology Studies. This will allow us to locate where STS-IR sits in relation to other approaches to International Relations. Finally, we will outline how the volume as a whole fits together. This section will clarify the relationship between the theoretical sections of the book and the chapters dealing with empirical issues, noting how the former informs the latter, and vice versa.

‘God from the machine’: traditional approaches to technology in International Relations

It may seem a bit unusual to claim that the field of International Relations has neglected technology as an important element of global politics. Since the inception of the discipline of IR in the second decade of the twentieth century, technology has been of central concern to the field. Alfred Zimmern, holder of the world’s first chair in International Politics (created in 1919), was not alone in placing his theorization of the international within the context of rapid technological change (Zimmern 1928). Norman Angell, E.H. Carr, Halford Mackinder, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr and Leonard Woolf all stressed the central role of technology in shaping international political life (Carr 1939: 228–230; Niebuhr 1932; Morgenthau 1946, 1949; cf. Ashworth 2011; Craig 2003; Osiander 1998; Scheuerman 2007). Technology – and particularly transport and communications technologies – were viewed as a force driving global politics towards greater integration (although not necessarily greater harmony). Carr, in an argument echoed by other authors, asserted that ongoing industrialization, new military technologies and the expanding reach of transportation and communications posed a profound challenge to existing forms of territorial state sovereignty. A technologically driven reshaping of the size and nature of political units was ‘perhaps likely to be more decisive than any other for the course of world history in the next few generations’ (Carr 1939: 230).

Understood as a causal variable or as a background context, technology has never really lost this central place in IR. Barring the occasional claim that material objects are entirely indeterminate, and that IR theory should concentrate on ideas as the driving force of social action (Wendt 1999: 256),⁵ technological artefacts and systems continue to be recognized, both theoretically and empirically, as an important factor influencing actors’ decisions and their subsequent outcomes. Indeed, at times certain prominent approaches to IR have been criticized for being far too focused on technology, such as neorealist international security studies or ‘globalization theory’ (Buzan 1991; Rosenberg 2005: 3, 6, 55). Critics suggest that, in paying too much attention to the number of tanks, bombs and bullets a state possesses, we miss other, equally important, forms of power or sources of social action. The determining quality of technology is, it is claimed, overrated. Culture, ideas, institutions – or any number of other aspects of social life – should be granted far greater attention in accounting for the character of global politics.

How is it possible, then, to suggest that technology has been neglected as an area of study in International Relations? This rests on the argument that a predominantly determinist theory of technology has been held by IR scholars. Two examples of how IR theorists have studied technology and international politics are helpful in illustrating this claim. First, IR scholars have argued, over a long period of time, that new information technologies are changing the shape of global politics (Keohane and Nye 1977; Scholte 2005; Schweller 2014). Claiming that satellite television, mobile communications and the Internet were overcoming geographical distance, such work has asserted that ‘traditional’ structures of global politics – anarchy, sovereignty and the primacy of inter-state relations – were, and are, being eroded.

Information technology is cast as an agent in this process, driving forward social change. Yet this work has not investigated the innovation process itself – the micro-politics of design that shaped how these large technological systems came into being. Artefacts and their (purported) properties have been taken as given, with analysts treating them as established facts rather than objects subject to ongoing contestation and interpretation of their design, purposes and uses. Not accounting for the social, political, economic and cultural dynamics that have shaped the design of new information technologies leaves the story of globalization incomplete. Technological responses to reconstitute sovereignty, such as Internet filtering (see Deibert et al. 2012), illustrate this effectively.

Second, there has been sustained examination in IR and the subfield of strategic studies of nuclear weapons and the revolutionary impact they have had on inter-state relations (Herz 1950; Waltz 1981; cf. Buzan and Hansen 2009: 66–100; Craig 2003; cf. Sylvest 2013). But, despite all this attention, the majority of scholarship on this topic has not considered the politics of nuclear weapons creation and reproduction – the ‘laboratory politics’ of weapons creation (see Chapter 6). Nuclear weapons require continuous efforts to maintain them, and the weapons themselves can take any number of different forms depending on the strategic, cultural or economic goals they are designed to meet (Mackenzie 1990; Masco 2006; Peoples 2010; Sims and Henke 2013). Attending to the large-scale systemic impact of nuclear weapons – treating them as a variable in altering the trajectory of world order – as IR has conventionally done is very important (e.g. Waltz 1981); but the precise shape of this altered trajectory is dependent on the micro-politics of technological design and development.

In sum, until quite recently, technology featured in explaining outcomes in global politics; but analysis never extended to ask how technology artefacts are created, why they are created, by whom and what norms or values objects embody. To use a favourite expression of STS scholars, technology remained the unopened black box that could be used in explanation but was never itself explained – a deus ex machina, as it were.⁶ A generic understanding of the generative forces of technological development has certainly been present in International Relations, with, for example, inter-state security competition theorized as the structural pressure pushing states to pursue technological innovation. Grasping such generative mechanisms is certainly important. However, it is equally important to also understand how structural pressures interact with the micro-politics of innovation and technological design to produce world orders that are, at their foundation, always socio-technical.

What accounts for this blind spot? Numerous possible factors present themselves: the generic reification of technology in contemporary social usages (Marx 2010: 576–577); an understanding of science in IR derived from physics rather than, say, biology; the dominance of positivist epistemology in defining ‘theory’ in IR; and the centrality of Humean accounts of causation. We will examine these in more detail shortly.⁷ Regardless of the root causes of IR black boxing technology, the general result has been ahistorical, technologically determinist positions (Herrera 2006; Fritsch 2011).⁸ Technological determinism may be ‘patently bizarre’ on the surface (Winner 1977: 13), but determinist ideas have guided most IR treatments of technology, if often only implicitly. At its core, the basic claim of technological determinism is that technology is beyond the control of human agents (Winner 1977: 15; Wyatt 2008: 168).⁹ Technology is treated as separate from society: it may or may not influence the course of social development, but it is not itself the product of social construction as such.

Determinism has two primary variants, technological instrumentalism and technological essentialism. These perspectives occasionally feature as opposing points of contention in IR debates, as in the structural realist dispute over the importance of the ‘offense–defense balance’ of military technology on state conduct and the structure of international politics (Jervis 1978; Levy 1984; Lynn-Jones 1995; Lieber 2000; Glaser 2010). In this literature, the ‘offense–defense’ balance of military technology is claimed, by proponents of the theory, to be a central factor in deciding both whether the international system as a whole is more violent or more stable and whether individual states act aggressively or defensively. New military technologies are asserted to alter the ‘relative ease of attack or defense’, a ‘concept meant to capture the objective effects of military technology on war and politics’ (Lieber 2000: 75)....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Technology in world politics
• PART I: Theories
• PART II: Illustrations
• Glossary
• Guide to further reading
• Index