McCoy raises an interesting parallel with our own period in that a similar process of technological innovation and diffusion has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. As McCoy argues, “innovative colonial policing in the Philippines influenced the formation of the American state, contributing to the development of a sophisticated internal security apparatus.” These innovations would increasingly accrue back to the United States and become part of the nascent national security state. The historian Alfred McCoy shows how during the Philippine-American War the United States innovated a variety of technologies aimed at suppressing the Filipino insurgency. Barbed wire, for example, which emerged in the American mid-West in the 19 th century proved to be an enormously important space-dividing technology that would have lasting consequences for the architecture of the concentration camp during the Boer War. Colonial spaces have historically acted as technological crucibles, places to test military technologies, forms of surveillance and social control, public health and educational initiatives that would be repatriated back into metropolitan spaces. In my own work Empire Within, I show how this understanding of the material transformation of colonial spaces had significant effect upon imperial metropoles. As he writes, “on condition that you respect a limited set of laboratory practices – disinfection, cleanliness, conservation, inoculation gesture, timing and recording – you can extend to every French farm a laboratory product made at Pasteur’s lab.” In The Pasteurization of France, Latour shows how Louis Pasteur’s ideas on microbiology were carefully modulated for applicability in specific rural settings. As Jonathan Luke Austin explains, ANT had as its goal the problematization of “scientific binaries (objective-subjective, modern-non-modern etc.)” in order to focus on the “practices, contradictions, mistakes, chaos and complexities of its practices in the local contexts (like the scientific laboratory) of its enaction.” Bruno Latour, one of the founders of ANT, examines the diffusion of the laboratory setting into the social world as a material process and not primarily one rooted in scientific validity. ANT does not privilege the human over other material objects and the effects that such material objects may have. Such material objects, known more generally as actants, have a capacity to act in the world alongside human beings. For ANT, social relations should be understood as being part of a larger assemblage of relations including material objects. The emergence of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in the social sciences is an important step in situating technological change more generally. Given the acceleration of intelligent technological innovations such as automated weaponry, artificial intelligence and automated production, understanding the place of technology will necessarily become a significant aspect of international relations theory.Īctor-Network Theory and Technological Diffusion However, this limited perspective on technological change neglects a much more important constitutive component that technology may have for international politics. Yet Deudney raises the good point that in much of “international political theory” such material-contextual factors “ remarkably truncated and unsystematic.” In particular, Deudney writes, “We think and act as if technologies are just our handy tools and as if nature has somehow been left behind.” It is recognized insofar through its effects during periods of armed conflict or as key weapon systems such nuclear arms. This may first appear odd given how much ink is spilled on questions concerning material factors in determining international outcomes in many international relations theories. In his Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village Daniel Deudney rightly draws our attention to what he sees as neglected “material-contextual factors” such as “nature, geography, ecology and technology”.
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