Identities and Global Inequalities in Science and Technology

By using this pattern, Weiss describes how technological advances in infrastructural technologies and politics have paved the way for globalization (see also Jasanoff and Martello 2004, Bayly 2004, Barry 2001, Sassen 2006) by referring to the pattern “science and technology as a key dimension of international macro issues and as a source of understanding or an enabler of new macro phenomena” (Weiss 2015: 411). More precisely, he refers to the social, economic and political changes that have been brought on by information and communication technologies (^ICT) and their role in power struggles among various actors (Singh 2002). A recent example of this is the web of complex and contingent architectures, infrastructures and institutions that are concerned with internet governance and their impact on nation states and international treaties (De Nardis 2014).

More generally, Weiss sees the international division of labor as shaped by the “relative capacity in different countries to manage technology” (2015: 420). This is one of the very few references he makes to global inequalities and the uneven distribution of (technology-related) power and influence. Nearly absent from all of the examples given in his paper is a perspective that takes into account the role of the places and spaces where these emerging

international macro issues are played out, in particular with regard to the ambivalent relationship between developing and developed countries, or what is often termed the

“Global South.”

Relevant questions to ask here also include how technological advances themselves impact social orders in developing countries as well as in relation to other, technologically more advanced, parts of the world. What does the notion of “a globalization of knowledge” or the concept of global knowledge economies actually mean for non-Western countries?

While on the one hand science is constructed more and more as something global or transnational, the location or spatiality of scientific knowledge production is still an issue of major importance, especially if we think of its validation in terms of publications or patents or the reputation within the international scientific community. In their profound analysis of the internationalization of the social sciences, Kuhn and Weidemann found that the mainstream research agenda is still created in the West “from and for the intellectual needs of Western societies” (2010: 390).

They argue that since the scientific progress of the science communities around the world is measured with respect to its contributions to “science fashions of this Western mainstream agenda, the participation of academics from non Western-societies […] results in the alienation of major parts of national science communities from their own research priorities” (2010: 390, see also Scott 2011). For this reason, they argue, major parts of scientific communities from non-Western locations are excluded from what is termed the

“global scientific community.” Or, as Abraham has stated, “in the metropolis they ‘do theory’ and in the colonies they gather data” (1983).

This is also in line with what the UNESCO World Science report concluded in 2010, stating that the concept of knowledge societies is “one that looks very different depending on one’s regional perspective (where) global divides reproduce themselves in each generation, in our institutions and in our methods of creating and using knowledge”

(UNESCO 2010: 4). As Anderson and Adam pointedly remark in their contribution on postcolonial techno-science, in Latour’s claim that “we” have never been modern, we “may have missed the real action: those of us outside Paris have never had so many ways of being modern, so many ways of being scientific!” (Anderson & Adams 2008: 183).

In general, postcolonial approaches to science and technology offer important insights that address the issues of universal knowledge claims, the geographies and global power relations in which scientific knowledge production is embedded, the contact zones of

different forms of knowledge and the ways in which knowledge and ideas travel from one context into another (Keim 2010). Here, two issues were and are central in postcolonial approaches to science and technology. One stream of work focuses mainly on the histories of Western science and technologies in colonialism, as well as on the role that colonialism played in the histories of Western science and technologies (Harding 2011: 5, Adas 1989, 2006; Anderson 2002; Anderson and Adams 2008; McNeil 2005; Seth 2009). Another stream of work explores the role that science and technology policies play in countries that gained independence from their colonizers. Work in this realm is particularly interested in how to integrate S&T into programs and concepts of state-making.

Abraham (1999) provides an invaluable account of the making of the Indian atomic bomb.

Combining insights from science and technology studies, international relations theory and history, among other fields, he analyzes the various narratives that different Indian governments have created regarding the civilian purposes of the Indian nuclear program.

Abraham draws on Nehru’s vision of science, most notably civilian nuclear physics, as helping to constitute the new nation state.

In the cases of France and the Soviet Union, respectively, an extensive nuclear program was envisioned as being the proof of relative ideological superiority (1999:101), showing again how visions and articulations of social order and technological progress are not only entangled with each other but are also created together in processes of state-making and identity formation. Others have focused on development cooperation, reminding us of the crucial fact that the former colonial powers are now the main funders of development programs in the fields of science and higher education (Kothari 2004). More recently, postcolonial STS scholars have drawn the field’s attention towards the “contradictory tendencies” in techno-science, that are simultanously seen as being at path towards

“national scientific and commercial autonomy” and increasing the “dependence on global knowledge networks and foreign capital’’ (Benjamin 2009: 341; cf. Pollock &

Subramanian 2016: 955). Postcolonial studies, as they speak to both STS and IR, offer a fruitful approach to bringing these two fields into closer conversation, contributing in particular to opening up spaces for alternative knowledges and their transnational circulation in multiple forms.