ABSTRACT

This book responds to a gap in the literature in International Relations (IR) by integrating technology more systematically into analyses of global politics.

Technology facilitates, accelerates, automates, and exercises capabilities that are greater than human abilities. And yet, within IR, the role of technology often remains under-studied. Building on insights from science and technology studies (STS), assemblage theory and new materialism, this volume asks how international politics are made possible, knowable, and durable by and through technology. The contributors provide empirically rich and pertinent accounts of a variety of technologies relevant to the discipline, including drones, algorithms, satellite imagery, border management databases, and blockchains.

Problematizing various technologically mediated issues, such as secrecy, violence, and questions of how authority and evidence become constituted in international contexts, this book will be of interest to scholars in IR, in particular those who work in the subfields of (critical) security studies, International Political Economy, and Global Governance.

Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. 

chapter 1|23 pages

How (not) to talk about technology

International Relations and the question of agency

chapter 2|18 pages

Co-production

The study of productive processes at the level of materiality and discourse

chapter 3|24 pages

Configuring warfare

Automation, control, agency

chapter 4|22 pages

Security and technology

Unraveling the politics in satellite imagery of North Korea

chapter 6|28 pages

What does technology do?

Blockchains, co-production, and extensions of liberal market governance in Anglo-American finance

chapter 7|23 pages

Who connects the dots?

Agents and agency in predictive policing

chapter 8|24 pages

Designing digital borders

The Visa Information System (VIS)

chapter 9|16 pages

Technology, agency, critique

An interview with Claudia Aradau