4. Charting the Cartesian complex of IR
4.5 Coproductionist approaches
towards rational choice and inter-subjectivity.79 The consequences of dualism also have largely detached IR’s comprehension of technologies based on empirical field research.
Determinists do not offer a better recipe in this regard.
a purely technical world we would perpetuate the illusion of the “great divide”. Merely adding up social/material dichotomies or meshing together two inadequate notions does not produce an improved conceptual framework.
Instead, a viable conceptual language is capable of fusion or hybridization between the “material” and the “political”, the “technical” and the “social” as technological innovations often leave nothing unaltered. “The realities of human experience emerge as the joint achievements of scientific, technical and social enterprise” writes Sheila Jasanoff (2004a, p. 17), thereby questioning the conceptual appropriateness of prefixed agents, structures, or practices. Approaches that analyze “coproduction” focus on the nexus of society, nature, technology and science. Jasanoff distinguishes between two main varieties of coproduction: interactional and constitutive. The first group explores the interactions, boundary conflicts and entanglements among prior fixed entities, groups or processes such as social practices and technological artifacts. The second sheds light on the emergence, stabilization, and evolution of previously not existing things, groups, or practices such as scientific fields, objects, or technological systems. So, while interactional accounts carefully analyze the human activities, social practices or institutions interaction with scientific expertise or artificial objects without relying on social reductionism or determinism, constitutive accounts focus on intermingling of all
“domains” at the point of emergence and stabilization of the building blocks of human societies (Jasanoff 2004a, pp. 19-22). In short, coproductionist scholars conceptualize innovations either in a manner that challenges the idea-matter dichotomy or erase these categories altogether (see figure 3.1).
By applying a coproductionist lens one can divide the IR approaches to technological innovations, which go beyond externalism and determinism, into two groups. One group deals with the question how established practices or principles such as sovereignty, state authority or foreign policy are challenged by technological changes or scientific knowledge (Litfin 1997, Skolnikoff 1994).80 This literature comprises the examination of the consequences of the digital revolution and information technologies for the regulatory capacity, governance ability, and legitimacy of nation states (Mowlana
80 The impact of technological shifts on statecraft already was concern in earlier (see Deutsch 1957, Morgenthau 1964).
1997, Rosenau and Singh 2002, Drezner and Farrell 2004, Drezner 2004, Eriksson and Giacomello 2009). Other research asks how “national security” is affected by the emergence of data networks, cyber weapons, and cyber space in general (Eriksson and Giacomello 2006, Grobler and van Vuuren 2012) and how the conduct of warfare has changed through digital technologies (Cullather 2003, Halpin, Trevorrow, Webb and Wright 2006, Deibert, Rohozinski and Crete-Nishihata 2012, Manjikian 2010). In addition, scholars aim at reframing the realist concept of “power” to accommodate to the information age (Keohane and Nye 1998, Nye 2004, Mayer 2012b). The Internet, at the same time, has become the crystallization point for both hopes about the influence
“technologies of liberty” and fears of tools of suppression, control, and censorship (Deibert 2000, Warkentin and Mingst 2000, Boas 2004, Mueller and Chango 2008, Deibert and Rohozinski 2010, Diamond 2010, Drezner 2010, Mueller 2010). Perhaps the most systematic approach is Dan Deudney`s (2006) theorizing of security materialism which links the macro-level of security practices to the evolution of weapon systems.
Although all analyze the interplay between the “technical” and “social”, different authors put different emphasis on the respective sides of this equation. However, where
“inter-state” are relations selected as units of analysis, as it is here mostly the case, this leads to odd, yet, widely accepted vantage points to image research puzzles in which material objects such as satellites, strategic missiles, monitoring systems, super-computers, or simulation models, then, still appear as deus ex machina. Accordingly, sterile “technology” gets juxtaposed to equally sterile concepts of “sovereignty”,
“national security”, or “international relations”. This literature, by and large, is restricted to a few aspects of what would be potentially relevant when we approach the transformative effects of technological innovations. The authors advance puzzles that construe an interaction or influence between pre-given concepts such as “the state”,
“power capacities”, “society” or “national security” on the one hand, and certain technologies or rather often technology in general on the other. To the extent to which this sort of interplay leads to satisfying questions and puzzles the inherent perspectives are narrow in scope. While these approaches make the massless conceptual framework of IR a little “rasping”, they mostly remain tied to the conceptual straitjacket of the Westphalian System. But, as we have already seen above, it is exactly this sort of
conceptual framework, which is poisoned to produce paradoxes and dead ends when confronted with technological dynamics. It follows that the analytical stress on the interplay of fixed entities is somewhat misplaced. By appreciating the empirical evidence presented in Chapter 2, and knowledge of science and technology studies in particular, the problem of “interplay” that is typical to the above mentioned approaches is obvious.
This brings us to the second type of coproduction, which is the most promising.
While it accounts for the emergence of new structures, actors, practices, identities, it zooms in at the politics and sites of contestation, resistance and negotiation (Luke 1994, Barry 2001, Flyverbom 2011, Whatmore 2009, Home 2010). As such, Sheila Jasanoff’s exploration of the “biotechnological empire” and Karen T. Litfin’s analysis of space technologies are extraordinary. Litfin shows how satellites, being a technology of surveillance, have socialized a global gaze that made possible arms control psychologically and technically. At the same time, this military dominated technology has given rise to a plethora of non-state actors, which use images or real time footage to reinforce environmental protection or monitor human rights (Litfin 1999, 2002).
Ultimately, Litfin retains a state focus, whereas Jasanoff unearths with notable theoretical rigor a vast structure that reaches across national boundaries tying together human bodies, metropolitan lifestyles, peripheral agricultural practices, national security policies, high-tech science, and profit strategies of large multinationals (Jasanoff 2005, 2006). Similarly, Andrew Barry and others (2001, Barry and Walters 2003, Bellanova and Duez 2012) demonstrate that the technological fundament – including infrastructures, networks, zones – although getting almost no attention from analysts of the European Union, is particularly critical for the success and trajectory of European integration.
A few studies have seriously tried to tackle the contingent relationship and the heterogeneous intertwining between the proliferation of material artifacts, extensive use of technological infrastructures, and group formations in a manner that goes beyond conceptual reenactments of the “great divide” between the political and the technological (see e.g. Buzan and Lawson 2015). For example, Rosenau’s brilliant Distant Proximities shows that new actors, social constellations, and political connections emerge through global technological processes (Rosenau 2003). But, his work does not suggest a more systematic view on the unit of analysis problem. In addition, he conceptually maintains a
marked distinction between the social and technical domains, clearly granting the former preponderance. Strange’s work (1988, 1996) addresses the delicate state of epistemology of technological innovation: The blurring of the taken-for-granted lines between
“security” and “economy”, which Strange stressed as the signature gesture of the field of IPE. Today, contradictions of the analytical clarity of IR’s conceptual language is perhaps nowhere more obvious than with respect to telecommunication and cyber-technologies (Deibert 2013, DeNardis 2014). For instance, the immense digital infrastructure of the US constitutes a thriving private-public partnership based on Evgeny Morozov (2013) calls “a social contract between Silicon Valley and Washington”. Yet much of the research on the Internet overlooks the crucial physical infrastructure and, more importantly, the evolving intersection of the virtual and the physical (see Stevens 2012).
In short, even some coproduction approaches fall back into dichotomist thinking.
Another major example for the ambivalent effects of new technologies is the connection between nuclear weapons and weather monitoring. Because the cold war was conceptualized as “global struggle, reading all conflicts everywhere in the world as part of the contest for military and ideological advantage (…)”, notes Paul N. Edwards,
“military technological change also increased the superpowers’ appetites for global weather data and forecasts. (…) Tactical nuclear strategy depended on knowing the likely path of fallout clouds and the distances they might travel on the wind.” (Edwards 2006, pp. 242-243) However, rather than deepening international conflict lines, “geostrategy and technological change”, paradoxically, “aligned military interests with the informational globalism of scientists” (Edwards 2006, p. 243). The exchange of monitoring weather data went on nearly uninterrupted during the Cold War while collaborative efforts to simulate weather and climate eventually transformed the understanding of the earth.81 Today, the enormous influence of the scientific ensembles—
81 Moreover, while the US army waged weather warfare over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia between 1967 and 1972 (Flemming 2007, p. 55), computer models that showed the planetary consequences of nuclear explosions provided increasingly sophisticated simulation of the global climate system. The crucial lesson was that all nations depend on intractably interconnected ecological systems—the climate and the atmosphere just being one among others. The “consequences of a nuclear war”, warned Carl Sagan (1983) in Foreign Affairs “could constitute a global climatic catastrophe”. Nuclear weapons and climate science have a history intimately intertwined. In a twist reminiscent of Einstein’s commentary, their confluence led the international spread of consciousness about planetary fragility on the one hand, and to legitimizing
consisting of data collection technologies, computer models and shared expertise, international research bodies—is best exemplified by the IPCC. Its ability to assert global political changes is indicative for the contested removal of power from governments to international scientific organizations (Edwards 2012).
The co-productive set of approaches also ties into the growing concern with complexity and hybridity of agential forces within IR and historical global studies (see Urry 2007; Youngs 1999, Chudworth and Hobden 2013). This has two major consequences. On the one hand, the sensitivity for the ambiguity of technology and its multipurposeness is growing. In contrast to determinist assumptions, the political results of technological innovations remain—despite immense efforts put into simulations and scenario building—underdetermined. This is not only due to the mostly unknown socio-material feedback mechanisms and interlinkages operating at various levels, but results from human ingenuity and creative reappropriations and repurposings of technologies (Connolly 2013; Cole 2013; Teschke 2014). On the other hand, coproduction calls for amore sophisticated articulation of the agency-structure problem and new forms of power. STS and geography scholars have illuminated how the locus of agency that was usually assumed to lie within individuals, groups, or states moved into hybrid, networked and mediated forms of agential power (Bijker et al. 1987, Latour 1987, Whatmore 2002, Dittmer 2014). Research from fields such as security, energy, environment and elsewhere, drawing from coproductionist accounts, illustrates that agency is increasingly enriched by ensembles, actor-networks, and non-human actors.82 These studies do no longer grant the unified actor “state” a central analytical place. In this line, JP Singh’s idea of “meta-power” articulates a form of influence that emerges through information technologies but outside the classical confines of states (Singh 2013, see also Ansorge 2011).
The interweaving of technology and social practices creates a hybrid world in which the neat separation in human and non-human is often challenged and undermined.
This is most discernible in the military. Der Derian (1990) argues that chrono-politics
“technocratic futurology” and earth system management on the other hand (Ross 1991, p. 14, Edwards 2012, Miller 2004).
82 See e.g. Aradau (2010), Mayer and Schouten (2011), Squire (2014), and Salter (2013).
have unleashed forces which essential transform the spatial and temporal aspects of international politics.
„Space is no longer primarily territorial in the late-or postmodern condition. Geographical space has been considerably challenged by the triad chrono-cyber-hypertransparent space.
The latter provokes geospace by understanding distance in terms of time rather than geography, by substituting hyperreal, simulated space for real space, and by radically disclosing a wellshaded space. The forces of production—speed, simulation and surveillance—of the challenge create new forms of estrangement while simultaneously mediating these estrangements.“ (Huysmans, 1997, p. 376)
At the same time, technological innovations in warfare have produced semi-autonomous machines, semi-cyborgs, and human-machine combinations that are connected on the battlefields and with the command centers back in the military headquarters. This has brought about profound and unforeseen change in surveillance, warfare, and power projection (Dillon 2003, Der Derian 2009). As a result, the boundaries between war and peace, the domestic and the foreign, humans and non-humans are becoming increasingly blurred and indistinguishable (Singer 2009, Stroeken 2013). Antoine Bousquet, employing a Foucauldian approach, shows how the employment of new technical devices and systems recurrently transformed warfare. Among the examples are clocks, airplanes, missiles, barbed wire, diesel engines, drones, hacking software, and so forth. At the same time, a substantial share of scientific inquiry and commercial research and development came to serve the needs and desires of national armed forces, creating distinct types and discourses of warfare (Bousquet 2009). The idea of “becoming” is also animating Der Derian’s work military revolutions:
“As the infosphere engulfs the biosphere, as the global struggle for ‘full spectrum dominance’ supplants discrete battlefields, as transnational business, criminal, and terrorist networks challenge the supremacy and sovereignty of the territorial state, information warfare has ascended as a significant site for the struggle of power and knowledge. Infowar wages an epistemic battle for reality in which opinions, beliefs, and decisions are created and destroyed by a contest of networked information and communication systems. (Der Derian 2003, p. 452)
While this kind of empirical field research on was for a long time relatively rare in IR, it
is based on an under-conceptualization of technological innovations. Der Derian, who depicted the confusing networks of global high-tech warfare, deliberately chooses “to avoid the vices of academic abstraction” alongside, as he apparently notes with irony, with Pentagon propaganda and journalism (2009, p. xxxvii). It is not really surprising, thus, that mainstream theories were unable to adopt these perspectives.