Emerging Technologies and International Security

Machines, the State, and War

Reuben Steff, Joe Burton, Simona R. Soare, Reuben Steff, Joe Burton, Simona R. Soare

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000284577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a multidisciplinary analysis of emerging technologies and their impact on the new international security environment across three levels of analysis.

While recent technological developments, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics and automation, have the potential to transform international relations in positive ways, they also pose challenges to peace and security and raise new ethical, legal and political questions about the use of power and the role of humans in war and conflict. This book makes a contribution to these debates by considering emerging technologies across three levels of analysis: (1) the international system ( systemic level ) including the balance of power; (2) the state and its role in international affairs and how these technologies are redefining and challenging the state's traditional roles; and (3) the relationship between the state and society, including how these technologies affect individuals and non-state actors. This provides specific insights at each of these levels and generates a better understanding of the connections between the international and the local when it comes to technological advance across time and space

The chapters examine the implications of these technologies for the balance of power, examining the strategies of the US, Russia, and China to harness AI, robotics and automation (and how their militaries and private corporations are responding); how smaller and less powerful states and non-state actors are adjusting; the political, ethical and legal implications of AI and automation; what these technologies mean for how war and power is understood and utilized in the 21st century; and how these technologies diffuse power away from the state to society, individuals and non-state actors.

This volume will be of much interest to students of international security, science and technology studies, law, philosophy, and international relations.

1 Histories of technologies

Society, the state, and the emergence of postmodern warfare

Joe Burton^*

* Research for this chapter received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 844129.

Introduction

The history of the last century is in many ways a history of technological change. Technology has played a profound role in the emergence of the modern international system, including the states that populate it and the relationship between those states and their citizens. The Cold War, for example, was shaped by the emergence of nuclear technologies. Nuclear weapons brought an end to the Second World War in the Pacific theatre, and the threat of their use in the European context ushered in a new age of atomic diplomacy. But the advent of the nuclear age also had an effect on the internal nature of states, with a marked change in culture and media, the emergence of an increasingly centralized and powerful “national security state”, and a securitized relationship between citizens and their governments. The end of the Cold War was similarly defined by technology. It was precipitated by an increased awareness of the difference in living standards between west and east due to advances in information and communications technologies, and the strategic competition between the superpowers over new space-based technologies, which contributed to the Soviet demise. The emergence of air power in the 20th century had a similarly profound impact. Consider the advancement from zeppelins and biplanes in World War I, which were fairly negligible in determining the outcome of that war, to the pivotal aerial battles in the Pacific and Europe that so defined World War II, including the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, and the use of air power at Pearl Harbor, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Fast forward to the 21st century and drones capable of fully autonomous use of force have emerged as tools for assassination, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency and represent powerful symbols of the technological prowess of the states that possess them and their ability to coerce and surveil societies.

This chapter seeks to lay a historical foundation for this book by placing the latest trends in emerging technologies in a broader historical and theoretical context. It does this because too many contemporary debates about emerging technologies have been ahistorical – without due regard to the interrelationship between technology and history and its role in shaping the present. The aims of the chapter are threefold: First, to determine whether historical lessons can indeed be learned and applied to emerging technological trends; second, to assess the ways in which technologies have shaped the different levels of analysis that are the focus of the book – society, state, and the international system (including the relationships between them); and third, to build a more nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between technology and history.

The chapter proceeds in three main sections. The first section outlines how history itself has become increasingly contested and highlights some of the different theoretical approaches to history and technology that now populate academia. In doing so, it builds the argument that there are multiple understandings and interpretations of histories “out there” and that attempts to derive concrete lessons have been complicated by this theoretical diversity. The second section questions the extent to which revolutions in military affairs (RMAs) have driven technological progress and reshaped war, the state, and the international system. In doing so, it highlights that many of the technologies that have emerged over the last century have been based on long term accumulations of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, because they have been “dual use” – that is to say they have had both applications in the military and civilian fields of action – they have resulted in changes in war and conflict but also in the broader political relationships between states and their citizens. The final section of the chapter reflects on whether we are indeed witnessing another profound techno-historical shift by focusing on the concept of postmodern warfare and its relevance to the emerging security environment.

Histories of technological change

In “The History Boys”, a play depicting the experiences of a group of British schoolboys, a student is asked by his teacher, “What is history?”. The student pauses, reflects for a moment, and then replies, “It’s just one f**king thing after another”. The same response could be applied to the seemingly relentless advances in technology, a similarly bewildering and perplexing process. We struggle to keep track of how technology affects our societies and our laws and regulations often lag behind technological advances. The effects and indeed unintended consequences of the adoption and diffusion of technology are often slow to be appreciated and can create a sense of exasperation and frustration. The answer to the question, what is history, continues to produce a variety of colorful and contradictory answers. History is at once a deeply personal phenomenon which relates to our own familial, social, and cognitive experiences, and a process that determines the shape of the world around us including our relationships with the states that we live in, the cohesiveness of our societies, and the level of peace or conflict in the international system.

To put it more academically, there is no single epistemological or ontological understanding of what history is. It cannot be simply defined. Historians themselves are wrought from myriad different cloths. Social historians, international historians, and critical historians see history in different ways and focus on different aspects of the past and how it feeds into the present. Within the field of international relations (IR), the role of history is equally fractured and contentious. Some historians suggest that IR as a field of study has become disconnected from history to its detriment. Geoffrey Roberts (2006, p. 708), for example, has argued that “IR theoretical concepts and postulates need to be buttressed and validated not just by example-mongering or selective empirical sampling, but by specific stories about the evolution and development of international society”. Ian Clark (2002, p. 277) paints a similar critique, suggesting that “drawing on both the insights of history and political science” is necessary for a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the present. By these definitions, history constitutes a narrative that is constantly constructed and reconstructed by the actors that populate the world.

The history of technology is similarly diverse, and there is little agreement within different subfields of scholarly inquiry about the role of technology in shaping the modern world. According to the realist approaches to IR, military technology is a value-free tool to accomplish specific tasks and is developed by states to enhance their survival in an international system characterized by anarchy (the lack of an international sovereign or government to decisively regulate state behavior under conditions of self-help). Technology by this conception provides a path toward survival, and the most powerful states are the ones that possess the most powerful and advanced military and civilian technology. The technological might of a nation, counted in the number of tanks, guns, drones, and aircraft carriers, the ability to maintain these technologies and deploy them, contributes to the global balance of power and will determine the outcome of military conflict and, therefore, the historical trajectory of the world. Liberal scholars, conversely, place more emphasis on the role of technology in positive, normative political change over time, including democratization, the dissemination of norms and values, and the advancement of human rights, transparency, and accountability. Technology by this conception is a force for progress, not just a tool of power relations, and can be harnessed to enhance a state’s power but also to progressively and incrementally make the world a more peaceful, just, and democratic place. New technologies can help us communicate and increase economic interdependencies that have a positive effect on the levels of peace and conflict in the international system. In this understanding, democracy itself is a natural historical trajectory, which is aided and abetted by technological change.

There are some other deeper philosophical divides when we examine the theories of history and their relationship with technology. Marxist historians, for example, see technology as a tool in class struggle and the ownership and access to technology as deeply inequitable. According to this conception, technology underpins the exploitative practices of modern capitalism, has driven historical colonial expansion, and has been a vehicle for exporting inequality. The oft-cited concern that millions of people will lose their jobs to machines makes sense in the context of the Marxist critique of capitalist economics. The contribution of post-structuralist and postmodern scholarship has also had a marked impact on the debate about technology and history. In the critical security studies sphere, for example, a host of analyses have emerged about new technological arms races and imperialism (Shaw, 2017), the militarization and securitization of technology (Cavelty, 2012), and the adverse effects of its adoption by states for war fighting (Burton & Soare, 2019). Technologies are mechanisms of societal control – facial recognition software and fingerprint technologies are used to construct and enforce borders, dehumanize, and undermine freedom and open societies. In these conceptions, security technologies are used to embed authoritarian practices in both democratic and authoritarian states.

Perhaps one of the deepest fault lines within the academy when it comes to the role of history and its relationship with technology has been the divide between technological determinism and the science and technology studies (STS) approach. The former places emphasis on technology having an independent role in shaping politics and societies, and that history is determined by technological change. The STS approach contends that technologies themselves are socially constructed and embedded and emerge out of very specific societal, political, and social contexts, which determine how they are used (Jasanoff et al., 1995). By this logic, after 9/11, the convergence of the US-led War on Terror with the growth of the global internet resulted in mass surveillance. That is to say, the political situation in the US determined how the technology was used, and not vice versa. This view is related to constructivist conceptions of technology, which assume that the way we use and develop technology is deeply cultural and stems from our historical practices, ideas, beliefs, and behaviors. One can hardly discount the relevance of these assumptions when considering the continued disposition in the academic and policy worlds to approach security in a clearly globalizing environment through the lens of the nation state, borders, walls, and boundaries.

If the field of history and technology that exists in the academy leads us to such different conclusions and illuminates different aspects of reality, then how can we possibly learn lessons from history when confronting the apparently transformative technological change we are now witnessing in societies? Is it possible to learn lessons from the history of technology and apply them in any meaningful way to help mitigate the apparent risks that the current environment engenders? One way forward here is to explore the major historical transformations that have occurred in the past, and to examine the role that technologies played in them. This form of historical excavation could tell us where, when, and how technology has had an influence. An examination of the Arab Spring, for example, a transformative event in the Middle East, might establish how social media technologies allowed dissent to emerge and how images of protests, violence, and state brutality diffused so quickly. It might help explain the organizational effectiveness of activists seeking to mobilize support and overthrow their governments. However, that reading belies the other major causes, including the broader social and economic inequalities, the nature of the authoritarian regimes themselves, and how technologies were a double-edged sword used to crush dissent. A similar analysis of the end of the Cold War might reveal certain technological influence in the demise of the Soviet Union. President Reagan’s pursuit of the SDI (“Star Wars”) initiative as a means to place increased pressure on the Soviet Union to compete in what had become an intensely technological competition might be highlighted. The broader role of communications technologies and television media in highlighting the divides that exist between east and west might also be brought into view. But clearly there were also deep structural weaknesses in the Soviet system and ideological holes in the fabric of communism itself, including the continued identification of people in the eastern bloc with their national identities rather than any sense of communist or class-based identity. To use these two big historical turning points, we can see technology played a role, but was certainly not the formative factor. By this form of analysis, technology is only ever likely to be one variable among many others in shaping major historical transformations, and one that will be difficult to weigh or quantify.

(R)evolutions in military affairs?

Perhaps a better way forward is to examine the emergence of particular technologies and their impact in reshaping the character of war and politics throughout the ages. Instead of focusing on the role of technology in major historical transitions, this form of technological excavation would look at the nature of the technological change itself and the extent to which it reshaped how nations compete and come into conflict and even the ways in which they cooperate. Examining history in this way requires considering the question of whether the technology is revolutionary itself, rather than the role technology played in revolutions. Military historians and strategists have certainly been occupied with mapping the impact of profound and sudden technological changes that have altered the strategic interactions of nation states. Nevertheless, these efforts have been complicated by determining exactly what counts as a technological revolution. There have certainly been large technological advances which have influenced modern political history; the most commonly cited examples are the crossbow, gunpowder, iron/steel clad ships, the combustion engine, the tank, the fighter aircraft and bomber, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, precision-guided munitions, and, in the more modern era, ICT and cyber weapons. But a close examination of these military-technological advances raises questions about how revolutionary they actually are.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that technologies do not develop in a linear fashion. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a good example. Since the 1950s, we have had intense periods of interest in AI technologies which have ended up in so-called AI winters for reasons related to computing power and available data. Whatever progress is made in the next decade with AI will be the culmination of nearly a century of leaps forward and incremental efforts. This is not the only example – high-capacity laser technology has been a US military program since the 1970s and has been abandoned (mainly for budgetary constraints and lack of progress) and resurrected dozens of times because progress in related areas promised to facilitate breakthroughs. We also need to consider what it is about the technology that is revolutionary. In this context, the nuclear attacks against Japan followed the conventional (incendiary) bombing of Tokyo, which caused 100,000 deaths. Is the technology revolutionary, therefore, because of its destructive power or because of the changes in behavior it engenders in societies, states, and in the international system?

Nuclear revolution?

Perhaps the most cited case of a revolutionary technology that fundamentally changed the world we live in is the nuclear revolution. Oppenheimer’s famous words “I have become death, the destroyer of worlds” certainly indicated a profound change, but they also proved inaccurate. Oppenheimer himself did not create the technology. It was the result of an intensified scientific effort that was again driven by the context of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Machines, the state, and war
• 1 Histories of technologies: Society, the state, and the emergence of postmodern warfare
• PART I The machine and the international system
• PART II Emerging technologies, the state, and the changing character of conflict
• PART III The state, society, and non-state actors
• Conclusion: Society, security, and technology: Mapping a fluid relationship
• Index