Science, Technology, and Art in International Relations

J.P. Singh, Madeline Carr, Renée Marlin-Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317210733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume brings together 19 original chapters, plus four substantive introductions, which collectively provide a unique examination of the issues of science, technology, and art in international relations. The overarching theme of the book links global politics with human interventions in the world: We cannot disconnect how humans act on the world through science, technology, and artistic endeavors from the engagements and practices that together constitute IR. There is science, technology, and even artistry in the conduct of war—and in the conduct of peace as well. Scholars and students of international relations are beginning to explore these connections, and the authors of the chapters in this volume from around the world are at the forefront.

1
Science, Technology, and Art in International Relations

Origins and Prospects

J.P. Singh

The foundation and rapid expansion of the STAIR section in the International Studies Association (ISA) signifies both the maturity of this body of scholarship but also a challenge to specify our intellectual agendas and perspectives. The chapters in this volume move beyond the familiar incantation that science and technology are not studied in international relations. Inserting chapters on art next to those of science and technology could allow the editors of this volume to invoke similar warnings about the marginalization of art and aesthetics in international relations. The task in this volume is different: to chart the origins of the complex terrains of STAIR scholars, and point out the strengths, the challenges, and the prospects for our scholarship. Science, technology, and art are studied in international relations. Our task is to map that terrain.

This volume provides an overview of the state of STAIR scholarship but the pluralism makes it difficult to pinpoint core agendas. The three sections of this volume provide thematic clues. Foundations refer to the brick and mortar of international relations making it imperative to revisit the worlds of territory, borders, sovereignty, security, and power from STAIR perspectives. Sites refer to the zones of interactive spaces in global politics wherein STAIR scholars have re-imagined the foundations. These range from attention paid to science in trade negotiations to improvisation in music. Reflexivity refers to the intellectual standpoints for STAIR scholars including debates on epistemology and ontology.

This introduction contextualizes the three STAIR thematics of this volume within the broad story of science, technology, and arts studies in general. Second, the chapter proposes a typology for understanding STAIR scholarship on the thematics discussed from two important dimensions in international relations, namely actors’ interests and the institutional and ideological constraints within which these interests are articulated. The dynamic or variable dimensions of the thematics are: (1) the scope of interest articulation among actors ranging from adaptive to transformative, and (2) variations in institutionalization and ideology within which these interests must be articulated.¹ While deploying a familiar 2×2 matrix, the intent here is to suggest the hybrid dimensions and contributions of STAIR scholarship.

STAIR Origins

STAIR reflects the conflux of at least three broad intellectual histories that intersect with recent historical events. These are: (1) the place of science and technology within international relations and the emergence of digital technologies; (2) recent developments in science and technology studies that intersect with the rise of constructivism in international relations; and (3) the insertion of cultural identity and art as issue-areas in the study of international relations.

International relations inherited the role assigned to science and technology in social sciences such as economics. Here technology was treated as exogenous to the (market) system. Most early accounts of science and technology assigned to technology either an instrumental purpose in enhancing existing capabilities—mostly market actors or states—or constraining action as in Marxist or critical perspectives (Singh 2002). Beginning in the 1980s, economics moved toward endogenous and evolutionary models of technology, which viewed technology as a process embedded in its design and social contexts (Romer 1994; Barro and Sala i Martin 1992). Endogenous growth models incorporated tacit knowledge and learning, and the influence of institutions on economic growth. Parallel movements in traditional international relations scholarship reflected this focus in the studies that examined the co-constitution of technology and institutions. Outside of economics, sociologists, and political scientists had always critiqued the mechanical assumptions of technological diffusion. Nevertheless, international relations continued to lament the neglect of science and technology in international relations.²

The proliferation of digital and information technologies posed a challenge to IR researchers of all hues. The large-scale impact of these technologies—distributive or otherwise—was hard to accommodate within IR’s traditional perspectives. The early scholarship on these technologies, therefore, reexamined the epistemic and discursive contexts within which technology operated (Cowhey 1990), or re-inscribed of the ideological and discursive bounds of diplomacy and war (Der Derian 1990).

Similar moves in sociology had in the meantime questioned the exogenous and mostly “progressive” meanings assigned to science and technology. Well before the endogenous growth models in economics with their implicit knowledge and learning systems, sociology had both questioned as well as re-written the social meanings of science and technology. Anti-nuclear movements, rise of environmentalism, and rise of social movements in general in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to a field that came to be known as Science and Technology Studies (STS) (Kleinman and Moore 2014). By 1987, an influential volume put forth two intersecting paradigms within STS: those that study the social construction of the materials properties of large-scale technological systems (Hughes 2012), and those who studied the collective meaning formation from the human and non-human actor-networks around technology (Latour and Woolgar 1979). The latter school proliferated as Actor Network Theory along with the notion of the assemblage or a loose configuration of artifacts, actors, and understandings in technology. The term assemblage originates in art where it connotes a collage of found objects. Another concept that intersects with and flows from these perspectives is “affordance”, referring to the set of possibilities for human action from any artifact (Norman 1989/2013).

It was only a matter of time before constructivism in general and constructivist studies of technology proliferated in international relations. One of the first was from Finnemore (1993) who showed how states are socialized into science and technology norms through global governance processes. Finnemore examined how UNESCO officials educated post-colonial states toward the formation of science ministries at national levels. The diffusion of norms literatures in constructivism, in general, assigned progressive meanings to social ingenuity and artifacts (Keck and Sikkink 1997; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). Critical constructivism instead showed the re-inscribing of oppressive meanings in technology and international relations (Doty 1996).

The third parallel movement, intersecting especially with constructivism, is the rise of cultural identity politics in world affairs. It would be hard to summarize this scholarship in a few sentences but a few broad trends stand out for international relations. First, cultural identity politics made IR question fundamental assumptions about the actors and issues in which they operated. For example, was the nation-state a masculinist and patriarchal project? Was the notion of sovereignty a constructed project? Second, cultural identity politics brought to fore cultural symbols, including those from art, which were often featured in global debates. The most important of these debates was at the World Trade Organization on the status of cultural objects such as films and whether they ought to be freely traded on not during the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations (1986–94), and the subsequent moves at the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization that led to the framing of the 2005 Convention in the Protection and Promotion of a Diversity of Cultural Relations (Singh 2011a). Briefly, the United States and a few other states viewed these objects as tradable, while the European Union and other states argued that as symbolic of cultural identity and values, they should be excluded from trade.

The last decade of international relations scholarship has led to an increasing number of works examining the role of art in international relations in general (Bleiker 2001; Singh 2011b). Many of these scholars, including myself, have worked at the intersection of science, technology, and the arts. This intersection is common sense for those of us analyzing creative industries where it is hard to distinguish between technology and (digital) arts. At a deeper level, a focus on cultural understandings, in general, is about cultural symbols and their politics, and these have arguably always been important in international relations. An organization such as UNESCO embodies the confluence of arts, science, and technology. Its leading efforts include the World Heritage Programme and the International Oceanographic Commission. Cultural understandings about the role of science technology and arts in global affairs provide the organic unity for UNESCO’s projects. Etymologically, techné is art.

STAIR Agendas and Prospects

STAIR scholars have applied the three historical themes outlined to the building blocks of international relations (foundations), from their unique perspectives in science, technology, and arts (sites) and from varied viewpoints and methodologies (reflexivity). Underlying these three thematics are issues IR scholars would recognize: understandings of power, the varied mix of IR actors, and the evolution of issue-areas to which IR accords attention.

It would be fair to ask if science, technology, and arts are like other issues in IR? If so, then in a discipline that assigns paradigmatic debates high status, the “weak” contribution of STAIR scholars would be to apply known theory to issues in science, technology, and the arts. In many ways, STAIR scholars apply known theory to new issues and that in itself is an important contribution. Historically, an IR that only focused on security or international political economy, ignored for a long time subfields such as global environmental studies, global development, or global health. Now we study these subfields not just because the existing isms of IR can be applied to them but also because these disciplines bring in other relevant conceptualizations and issues into IR and, in turn, make us question IR’s isms.³ They are, foremost, important questions, regardless of their status in ontological debates in international relations.

STAIR scholars, however, are not just applying known theory. They deepen and question IR’s fundamental understandings about how global politics happen. The interplay of deepening and questioning of STAIR foundations, sites, and reflexivity yield insights both for STA and IR. The 2x2 matrix in Table 1.1 encapsulates one way of understanding these parallel movements from the perspective of the building blocks of international relations: interests, institutions, and ideology.

Most of the chapters address the scope of interactions between actor interests, ideologies, and institutions to specify either a narrow, incremental, evolutionary change or they speak to disruptive and transformational change. In many of the chapters in the foundations section, the scope of change can be understood, for example, as technologies enhancing the capabilities of actors (Kosal, Chapter 5) while others introduce new actors into politics, many of which may not be human (Bellanova and Sætnan, Chapter 3). In the sites sec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Science, Technology, and Art in International Relations: Origins and Prospects
• PART I Foundations of STAIR Scholarship
• PART II Sites and Demonstrations in STAIR Scholarship
• PART III Reflexivity in STAIR: Social Context and Ethics for the Future
• Index