International Relations Perspectives on Technology

"Power creates technology" or "Technology creates power"? This paper analyses the relations between power and technology. It argues that technology is a product of power while comparing different power conceptions between SCOT and ANT.

Technology and International Relations, 2021

This chapter presents an introduction to and brief overview of the study of technology and international relations, including a discussion of research gaps and new horizons. In particular, this contribution addresses whether and how prevailing theoretical approaches have been able to analyze the relationship between technological and international political change. This includes how the personal, social, societal, and, to an extent, also biological worlds are becoming increasingly interconnected through new technologies – what has been referred to as the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. How then is technology addressed within the field of international relations (IR)? Given the considerable attention IR literature pays to globalization and global structural change – core themes of contemporary IR – it might be expected that the role of technology in world politics would be a major focus. What would global politics and globalization be if the rapid development and diffusion of global information and communications technologies (ICTs) were not taken into account?

Technology and World Politics: An Introduction, 2017

Contemporary world politics seems mired in a series of complex governance challenges for which no simple answers are present. Whether the problem is climate change, nuclear proliferation, migration, terrorism or economic instability, we increasingly seem to lack the intellectual or political resources to deal with these problems. Divisions of academic labour established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which different disciplines focused on their specific sphere of social lifepolitics, economics, culture, geographyare increasingly struggling to provide adequate explanations for these crises within their own disciplinary terms. As the chapters in this volume have demonstrated, if we want an adequate explanation of the central dynamics in international politics it is necessary to engage in sustained interdisciplinary scholarship; this is a problem-driven rather than a theory-driven endeavour. By integrating Science and Technology Studies (STS) and International Relations (IR) into a productive synthesis we can begin to think through the compound socio-technical character of governance challenges facing our contemporary world.

2011

Technology has always played an important role in global politics, economics, security, and culture. It has continuously shaped the structure of the global system, its actors, and the interactions between them and vice versa. However, theories of International Relations (IR), and in particular those of International Political Economy (IPE), have performed little to theoretically conceptualize technology as a powerful factor within explanations of change in global affairs. Although technology often is implicitly present in the theories of IR and IPE, it is often interpreted as an external, passive, apolitical, and residual factor. This essay argues that to develop a better understanding of transformation in global affairs, technology has to be integrated more systematically into the theoretical discussions of IR ⁄ IPE. Technology should be understood as a highly political and integral core component of the global system that shapes global affairs and itself is shaped by global economics, politics, and culture. This paper makes the case for an interdisciplinary approach, which systematically incorporates insights of Science and Technology Studies (S&TS) to provide a better understanding of how technology and the global system and politics interact with each other. In so doing, it opens the field to a richer understanding of how global systemic change is impacted by technology and how global politics, economics, and culture impact technological evolution.

Globalization has led to a profound diffusion of technological innovations among State and Non-state actors. This has a resultant impact on the arrangement of the distribution of power in the International System. History captures continuous transition in the distribution of power between states in the International System; from a multi-polar system during the first and Second World War, to the bipolar system of the cold war and the uni-polar system that emerged in the aftermath of the cold war. The emergence of new actors in the international system and the change in technological nature and application is ushering in a new era of 'Non-polarity' in the International System. The aim of this paper is to consider the evolving dynamics of the distribution of power in the International System while considering the roles technology has to play. The paper relays the conceptualization of basic terms, and then applies the 'Balance of Power theory' as its theoretical thrust. ...

This book provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the multidimensional influences of technological development on contemporary international relations. The contributions here are drawn from different disciplines, including political science, international relations, sociology, economy, law, biochemistry and bioethics, as well as from different locations, including Poland, the US, Brazil and Israel. This variety allows the complexity of the issues, challenges and implications of technological changes on the structure, functioning and substantive scope of international relations to be fully presented and explored. This collection represents essential reading for anyone with an interest in the dynamic interplay between modern technologies and the transformation of the contemporary international system, and especially for international relations scholars and students.

How could one oversee the monumental modern landscape that has been created by continuous technological innovations? Notwithstanding a few students of international relations who have insisted in taking notice, technology has remained an exotic subject matter in International Relations theory (IR). While the interest in technologies is recently growing most IR scholarship remains silent: the fact that we live in a fully integrated and interconnected technological world is largely absent from textbooks and introductions to IR. Neither exist theoretical approaches and paradigmatic debates that are concerned with technologies, nor a specific intra-disciplinary subfield. Against this background, this book explores how technological innovations could be theorized and integrated into IR theories. Revisiting the inroads of theoretical approaches to technologies, it highlights the lightness of IR scholarship. The general framework of IR looks at the world as if there were no materials or rather, as if the pervasive presence of artifacts and infrastructures would have no theoretical relevance for conceptualizing and examining world politics. Drawing on ontological and epistemological understandings from anthropology, innovation economics, and science and technology studies, I take issue with the philosophical foundations of the discipline. The concepts and practices which ultimately sustain this lightness are interrogated: the neglect of technological innovation does not merely result from coincidental intellectual moves. It is rather the result of the “Cartesian complex”—the foundational commitment that renders IR a purely social science that deliberately excludes non-humans and hybrid material modes of agency. A conceptual refashioning is therefore required to the extent to which IR theory aims to accommodate the highly complex and elusive subject matter of technological innovations. This conceptual catharsis does not primarily touch upon epistemological concerns. What is at stake is the limitation of ontological parameters that underpin IR theories. To make sense of the messy technological landscapes, the material agency, and the technologically mediated practices, the prevailing logocentric wisdom needs to be transcended. Against premature metaphysical closure, this book thus contributes to the task of ontological expansion. Firstly, it develops an alternative meta-theoretical foundation coined “explorative realism”. A new meta-theoretical matrix is proposed that renders wider ontological parameters intelligible. Especially, the “double-mixed” zone encourages ontological expansion via notions of heterogeneous agency and process philosophy. This implies that IR scholars avoid treating time, space, knowledge, artificial objects, and built environments as constants but as always croproduced. A coproductive commitment opens up new empirical issues and concerns as well as radically different theoretical puzzles. It also implies overcoming Cartesian dualism, abandoning intentionality-based notions of agency, and forgetting the “level of analysis” assumption. Secondly, this book advances a theoretical toolbox consisting of two interrelated concepts: “assemblages” and “creative destruction”. The former term signifies evolving actor-networks as unit of analysis entailing both humans and non-humans. The latter captures the ways in which technological innovations give rise to, alter or destabilize assemblages across all levels through a process of translation. This theoretical vocabulary also reconceptualizes the meaning of “power”, “authority” with reference to technological innovations. Three models of creative destruction enable the mapping of magnitudes of translations, the changing size and topologies of assemblages and the shifting power and authority. These efforts to theorize technological innovations, then, support empirical research about global transformations as processes of emergence with a set of conceptual tools that allows locating and systematizing cases, puzzles, and scales in relation to assemblages. The study of technological innovations leads to the discovery of novel empirical landscapes and inspires a creative questioning of IR’s foundations. As such, while responding to the dearth of theoretical approaches in IR that make sense of technological innovations, this study contributes to the articulation of both a materialist and a post-Cartesian version of IR.

2019

How do technologies and material assemblages perform power? How are their designs and uses shaped by social, cultural, and political dynamics? How do they shape those dynamics? The course draws on an interdisciplinary body of literature in humanities and social science, mixing theoretical material with more empirically oriented studies, and including a mix of classics and new scholarship.

Technology and World Politics: An Introduction, 2017

Globalization has led to a profound diffusion of technological innovations to both State and Nonstate actors; this has had a resultant impact on the arrangement of the distribution of power in International System. History captures continuous transition in the distribution of power between states in the International System; from a multi-polar system during the first and Second World War, to the bipolar system of the cold war and the unipolar system that emerged in the aftermath of the cold war. The emergence of new actors in the international system and the change in technological nature and application is ushering in a new era of ‘Nonpolarity’ in the International System. The aim of this paper is to consider the evolving dynamics of the distribution of power in the International System while considering the roles, technology has to play. The paper relays the conceptualization of basic terms, and then applies the ‘Balance of Power theory’ as its theoretical thrust. Finally, it expands on the role of technology in the distribution of power in the International System and what this entails for the future. Keywords: Technology, Stability, International System, Polarity, Power