Abstract
This article offers an alternative to civilizational thinking in geopolitics and international relations predicated on assemblage theory. Building on literature in political geography and elsewhere about everyday practices that produce state effects, this article theorizes the existence of transnational geopolitical assemblages that incorporate foreign policy apparatuses of multiple states. Everyday material and discursive circulations make up these assemblages, serving as conduits of affect that produce an emergent agency. To demonstrate this claim, I outline a genealogy of the UKUSA alliance, an assemblage of intelligence communities in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. I then trace the circulation of materialities and affects—at the scales of individual subjects, technological systems of mediation, and transnational processes of foreign policy formation. In doing so, I offer a bottom-up process of assemblage that produces the emergent phenomena that proponents of civilizational thinking mistakenly attribute to macroscaled factors, such as culture.
Highlights
Literature ReviewCivilizational thinking has a long pedigree, both in international relations and in wider academic thought. Jackson (1999), reviewing the resurgence of civilizational thinking in international relations (e.g., Gress 1998), noted the heterogeneity of these approaches: “Some authors prefer to talk about the impact of civilizational loyalties on the foreign policies of states, while others concentrate on how the values and practices of a given civilization impact economic growth and personal liberty” (142)
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This article offers an alternative to civilizational thinking in geopolitics and international relations predicated on assemblage theory
Summary
Civilizational thinking has a long pedigree, both in international relations and in wider academic thought. Jackson (1999), reviewing the resurgence of civilizational thinking in international relations (e.g., Gress 1998), noted the heterogeneity of these approaches: “Some authors prefer to talk about the impact of civilizational loyalties on the foreign policies of states, while others concentrate on how the values and practices of a given civilization impact economic growth and personal liberty” (142). The creation of bodies politic, and their subsequent affects and effects, are not determined by structuring forces such as political economy or geography (either physical or cultural) They are highly contingent, with general patterns emerging that are subject to nonlinear change. A few works move past rational choice theory to consider how intelligence cooperation fits with the various theories dominant in international relations or liberal political philosophy (Aldrich 2004; Svendsen 2008; Munton 2009). By highlighting the power of (dis)connection to generate and circulate embodied affects, Barry highlighted the role of Protevi’s affective sense-making in the Cold War context, demonstrating the synchronic emergence of first- and second-order bodies politic. NATO and the Warsaw Pact can each be understood as a higher order body politic, linked together through the materialization of many relations (including intelligence cooperation), they were hitched together through other relations (including spying on one another)
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