Transnational Sociotechnical Imaginaries

As I have shown throughout this thesis, ^S&T and global politics come to matter to each other through multiple and complex interactions and on a variety of different scales, with collective imaginations about attainable socio-technical futures figuring prominently among them. Earlier work in ^STS (Castoriadis 1987; Anderson 1991; Taylor 2004, 2007;

Jasanoff and Kim 2009, Kim 2013; Mikami 2014) has dealt extensively with questions about how identity formations are constructed and institutionally stabilized with regard to techno-political change, mainly by focusing on the national level, asking for instance “how [do] national science and technology projects encode and reinforce particular conceptions of what a nation stands for?” (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, 120). However, the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries has also acknowledged from the beginning that national sociotechnical imaginaries are not only formed on the respective national level but also contain experiences, expectations, perceptions and imaginations about other nations or collectives, too (cf. McNeil et al 2017). Sociotechnical imaginaries are thus intrinsically international, as collective imaginations and issues of political statehood always also include an imagination of the other, of the outside of a given collective.

In a recent edited volume, Jasanoff and Kim have bought together an inspiring collection of ^STS contributions to further refine and extend the concept of imaginaries (2015). Here, the authors shared an enhanced appreciation of the ways that imaginaries are developed beyond the level of the nation state, for example by organized groups, corporations and social movements (cf. 2015: 4). Such an extended perspective is particularly promising for being able to grasp the variety of scales on which imaginaries are shaped and stabilized in the context of international relations.

Appadurai (1996: 33) has most explicitly addressed the globality of imaginaries by referring to the notion of “imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe.”⁴³ Contributing to this stream of work, I suggest to more explicitly explore the ways in which sociotechnical imaginaries frequently emerge in response to, or at least incorporate a particular interpretation of, sociotechnical developments in other countries. In an increasingly interdependent world, it will be necessary to also investigate which kind of work transnationalized sociotechnical imaginaries might do for different actor configurations in global politics.

Bowman has already alluded to how such external influences can shape national imaginaries in her chapter on sociotechnical imaginaries about ICT in Rwanda. (2015).

Here, she traces the ways in which Rwandan state planners and policy makers of the first elected government envisioned the internet after the 1994 Civil War. Pointing to the government’s ambition to become the “African Singapore,” Bowman argues that Rwanda’s ICT policy-making initially attempted to mimic the economically wealthy and technologically advanced city-state. The Singaporean approach to the internet as a medium of control, however, was eventually seen as contradictory to a more transformative vision of the internet as contributing to the Rwandan rebuilding process (2015: 96). It is precisely these intersections of increased internationalization of S&T, technology transfer and related processes of state-making that call for more attention from STS and IR in order to explore in depth how sociotechnical imaginaries respond to and incorporate visions of the

“other.” Here, two interlinked processes seem particularly promising for doing so.

First, taking up the example of Rwanda, socio-technical imaginaries have international points of reference, which is to say that collective self-imaginations and identity-making processes take place vis-à-vis other countries, in particular as they pertain to S&T. This was also shown in the paper regarding cooperation in S&T between Austria and China, where the Austrian socio-technical imaginary of environmental awareness and expertise was

43 Imagined worlds, in his understanding, are constituted by “five dimensions of global cultural flows that can be termed (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes.” (Appadurai 1996: 33).

constructed as a way to relate to China. Here, sociotechnical imaginaries at once support the processes by which different social actors find common ground by drawing on a shared socio-technical history and by opening up opportunities to address an envisioned future relationship.

By drawing on different repertoires of knowledge and imagination, actors can relate to the current and past techno-political development of another country as a frame of reference that is worthy of either emulation or rejection or inspires the development of alternative visions. Through these processes, the “other”⁴⁴ is actively constructed.

However, approaching imaginaries as transnational by no means assumes that these are reciprocal or homogenous: The observed society will not necessarily share this image as part of its own imagination, and indeed the imaginaries may not be universally held by members of the observing societies. Instead, different imaginations about other countries can also compete with each other as a consequence of different political views within a given society⁴⁵. As Jasanoff has argued, “multiple imaginaries can coexist within a society in tension or in a productive dialectical relationship” (2015: 5), thus a country or region can simultaneously be perceived as a positive and a negative point of reference, given the political or cultural attitudes held by different societal actors and stakeholders within the observing society. More generally, tracing these different perspectives would make it possible to understand how transnationalized sociotechnical imaginaries are co-produced through mutually stabilizing and dynamically changing communities and collectives on the international level.

44 The term “imaginations of the other,” as I suggest employing it here, differs in a way from the processes of othering as they have been described most prominently by Said (1978) in his account of Orientalism, the discourse of colonialism and eurocentrism. I agree with the notion that processes of othering are closely entangled with issues of power and knowledge, almost always implying a hierarchy favoring those already in power.

However, in the context of transnationalized imaginaries, I argue that the constructed view towards others can also be one of inspiration or admiration instead of deprivation.

45 Of course, as Jasanoff has pointed out, the “viewer’s capacity for observation (…) socially trained in ways that delimit what she can perceive”. In this context, the state also disposes over a variety of devices, as she calls it, to determine what is visible at all. (2015: 13). In any case, such a constructed view of other countries must be seen as also deeply embedded in past and current bi- and international relations, which again closely intertwining

technological and political choices. For example, the ways that emerging spacefaring nations imagine their space programs are also entangled with collective memories about the perceived space-race between the former Soviet Union and the USA and competing ideological systems. Such perceived histories and imagined futures provide the

Second, we might want to think of imaginaries as also being transnational because their constituencies have an international reach. Both Miller and Lakoff (2015) have recently pointed in this direction in their work on imagined forms of globalism as transcending older imaginaries based on the nation state. For Miller, globalism imagines “that human societies and economies, the systems they create, the environments within which they flourish and the risks and threats to security they experience are increasingly global, capable of being understood and governed on scales no smaller than the planet” (2004; 2015:277).

Lakoff, in turn, sees an imaginary of global health security emerging, constructed and stabilized by transnational institutions of global governance like the WHO (2015).

Imaginaries of the global, encompassing transnational financial markets, cultural practices in the context of diasporas or the formation of political institutions and many more manifest themselves differently in different places, often without having a specific national origin. Simultaneously, such transnationalized imaginaries might also re-enforce nationally grounded imaginations of identity and territorial boundaries.

For instance, while cosmopolitanism has become a widespread imaginary among a variety of social groups in different places, at the same time, paramilitary border regimes have been established worldwide. These are regimes that often brutally distinguish between insiders and outsiders, thus very much thwarting an imagination of a shared planet. Transnational imaginaries thus link particular national and transnational responses to each other, and they are blurring, possibly also obscuring, the boundaries and contradictions between them. Drawing more explicit attention to the transnational politics of scientific-technological projects and how these connect countries and collectives at a supra-national scale would then also make it possible to more fully understand the co-production of science, technology and international relations. With regard to methodological considerations, the current concept of sociotechnical imaginaries already embraces transnational comparison and is thus more than prepared to include the multiple perspectives that are at play in transnationalized imaginaries.

3.2.2.International STI Cooperation as “extrastatecraft” in Global Politics