The Unbearable Lightness of International Relations

Abstract

How could one oversee the monumental modern landscape that has been created by over 250 years of 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 absent from textbooks and introductions to IR. Neither exists 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. I argue that the general framework of IR is untenable because it 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 notions, concepts and practices, which ultimately sustain and legitimize this lightness, are interrogated. It is shown that 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 radical 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 sustain 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 the interrelated concepts of “assemblages” and “creative destruction”. The former term signifies actor-networks entailing both humans and non-humans. The latter captures the ways in which technological innovations 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 open-ended classifications and 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 on global transformations and 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 is productive and challenging. It leads to the discovery of novel empirical landscapes and inspires a creative questioning of IR’s foundations. As such, while responding to the stunning absence of theoretical approaches in IR that make sense of technological innovations, this study contributes to the articulation of both a post-international and post-Cartesian version of IR.