Navigating technological change: Future imaginaries and everyday practices in world politics

ABSTRACTIt has been argued that responsible research and innovation (RRI) requires critique of the ‘worlds’ implicated in the future imaginaries associated with new technologies. Qualitative social science research can aid deliberation on imaginaries by exploring the meanings of technologies within everyday practices, as demonstrated by Yolande Strengers’ work on imaginaries of ‘smartness’. In this paper, we show how a novel combination of narrative interviews and multimodal methods can help explore future imaginaries of smartness through the lens of biographical experiences of socio-technical changes in domestic energy use. In particular, this approach can open up a critical space around socio-technical imaginaries by exploring the investments that individuals have in different forms of engagement with the world. The paper works with a psychosocial conceptual framework that draws on theoretical resources from science and technology studies to explain how valued forms of subjectivity may be conceptualised as emerging out of the ‘friction’ of engagement with the world. Using this framework, we show how biographical narratives of engagement with technologies from the Energy Biographies project can extend into critical deliberation on future imaginaries. The paper demonstrates the value of ‘thick’ data relating to the affective dimensions of subjective experience for RRI.

Rebecca Dimond and Neil Stephens’ book Legalising Mitochondrial Donation: Enacting Ethical Futures in UK Biomedical Politics documents how the UK became the first country to legalise mitochondrial donation. Mitochondrial donation is a technique developed to prevent the transmission of mitochondrial disease from mother to child using part of a donated egg to replace faulty mitochondria (Castro 2016). The book contributes to wider science and technology studies (STS) commentary on mitochondrial donation and is rich with data extracts, from both stakeholder interviews and documentary analysis. The text then employs a thematic analysis that is both ‘structural’ and ‘microsocial’ (p. 16) to demonstrate its thesis. The book argues, ‘The legalisation of mitochondrial donation is the latest iteration of a particular UK sociotechnical around human embryo research and use is rendered ethical through a permissive but highly scrutinised system’ (p. 1). The book realises this argument through rich historical examples as well as the mitochondrial donation case and, importantly, raises how this sociotechnical imaginary will impact future biotechnology debates in the UK context, for example, genome editing. Legalising Mitochondrial Donation: Enacting Ethical Futures in UK Biomedical Politics draws upon a theoretical base from within STS and sociology, particularly Jasanoff and Kim's recent work on sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015). Dimond and Stephens complete an effective unpacking of the sociotechnical imaginary and its relevance for the mitochondrial donation debate. Dimond and Stephens ground their claim of the UK's significant as a case study by citing its historical reputation as a permissive regulator of biomedical technologies. In providing this historical overview, the authors cite numerous examples from both interviews and documentary analyses that hone in on imaginaries and performances in debates in quangos, governmental bodies and parliamentary committees. After setting up these organisations as integral to the process of legalising biomedical technologies, the book examines how consensus-building activities and public gauging tools were used by these organisations to implement the legalisation of mitochondrial donation in the UK. The book's establishment of the lens of ‘for’ clusters and ‘against’ clusters represents a novel contribution to STS methodological approaches and assists in generating a new understanding of the mitochondrial donation debate. This approach allows the reader to visualise the networks and cements the authors’ claim that links forged by the ‘for’ group allowed them to establish a collective narrative surrounding mitochondrial donation techniques that was eventually integral to their success in legalising these technologies (p. 27). Dimond and Stephens also identify political strategies used by the ‘for’ cluster to achieve its goal. Examples of these strategies include the establishment of Doug Turnbull as a ‘promissory agent’ (p. 27) and collective action by the ‘for’ cluster to enact an ethical future which aligned with the established sociotechnical imaginary of embryo research in the UK (p. 27). Legalising Mitochondrial Donation: Enacting Ethical Futures in UK Biomedical Politics is of relevance to those interested in social constructivist approaches to new and emerging biomedical and, or, assisted reproductive technologies. As such, it is likely to appeal to STS scholars, medical anthropologists and sociologists. Scholars reading this book will benefit from the strong empirical and conceptual investigations of this text. Through examining the sociotechnical imaginaries, the book aims to explore the ‘operation of power’ (p. 131). However, the text could be more explicit about what this operation of power refers to, and the ways in which these operations of power were performed successfully by the ‘for’ cluster and unsuccessfully by the ‘against’ cluster. If this were achieved the reader could have a better understanding of the role of power dynamics within the particular sociotechnical imaginary set out by Dimond and Stephens. Dimond and Stephens’ book sits within a small but very well-established epoch of literature that employs critical approaches to the mitochondrial debate through interdisciplinary approaches. An example of such literature is the special issue of the journal Bioethics (Volume 31, Issue 1) that focused on issues raised by mitochondrial replacement techniques. Furthermore, Dimond and Stephens’ book builds upon critical perspectives on mitochondrial donation arising from bioethics, STS and social science disciplines, filling gaps in the academic discussion before building upon their own thesis using empirical data and conceptual approaches in this far longer text. The book highlights an emerging area of study where the authors look forward to the relationship between mitochondrial donation and the next ‘potential iteration of this imaginary’ (p. 137) which relates to the contestation of the genome-editing debate. Legalising Mitochondrial Donation gives a clear and concise historical account of the debate and Dimond and Stephens demonstrate their thesis, concerning the role that sociotechnical imaginaries play in the legalisation of new and emerging biomedical technologies in the UK.

Under what conditions does science influence environmental policy? International Relations (IR) scholars, such as Peter M Haas, have argued that to gain political influence, science should not connect to policy before scientific consensus has been reached. We take this suggestion as a point of departure for investigating how science is and should be connected to policy in international environmental governance. Using insights from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), the contribution of IR is critically discussed, both to present its limitations and, primarily, to further develop the understanding of scientific consensus within IR and the need for separation and connections between science and policy. The organization and performance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including the various assessments made by scholars from IR and STS, is used as an illustrative case. From the discussion of IR and STS and the role of the IPCC in climate policy, we conclude that the focus within STS on contextual and informal factors could shed light on how science and technology are understood by IR scholars, who focus more on the formal organizational design of the interplay between science and policy.

Renewing the future: Excluded imaginaries in the global energy transition

This forum proposes a practice-oriented approach to (de)legitimation processes in world politics. Drawing on international practice theory and visual IR, among other fields, our approach offers an important extension of existing literature on (de)legitimation that mostly concentrates on discursive (de)legitimation. Instead, this forum focuses on a broader variety of practices of (de)legitimation, such as bodily gestures and visual (de)legitimation practices, including as communicated via (social) media. The forum’s six contributions demonstrate the significance and conceptual promise of our approach by showcasing various conceptual entry points and empirical illustrations. Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt analyzes the everyday legitimation practices of international organization officials acting as the “personal face” of institutional processes on social media. Anna Geis examines the Taliban’s symbolic and embodied practices of self-legitimation during the Doha negotiations with the United States in 2019–2020. Subsequently, Stanislav Budnitsky conceptualizes the reoccurring practice of verbally and physically assaulting foreign experts on Russian televised political talk shows as embodied legitimation practices of Russia’s anti-Western geopolitical agenda. David Shim and Laurenz Krumbacher draw attention to the everyday, visualized legitimation practices of climate activists on TikTok, emphasizing their performative dimension. Frank Gadinger turns to Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s social media-oriented public performances in parliaments around the world. Nora Stappert and Siddharth Tripathi conclude the forum with a discussion of limitations, remaining challenges, and future research avenues, including using decolonial and postcolonial approaches. Combined, our forum opens an avenue for future research that considers existing and new forms of (de)legitimation in global affairs through the lens of practice while emphasizing the crucial role of legitimacy and normativity in international practices.

This book brings together internationally-distinguished scholars from History, Philosophy, Development Studies, Geography, and International Relations (IR) to examine recent developments in Marxist approaches to world politics. Offering original and stimulating analyses of subjects traditionally at the forefront of Marxist studies of world politics, the collection also considers issues which have yet to be fully explored within a number of disciplines. Examining a wide array of topics ranging from the imperialism-globalization debate, the connections between social structures and foreign relations, the role of identity and imperialist norms in world politics, to the relationship between Marxist and Realist IR Theory, the contributors seek to further theoretical discussions and their implications for emancipatory radical politics. These contributions are structured around two major themes: • The relationship between capitalist modernity and the states-system in explaining the changing patterns of inter-state conflict and cooperation; • The debates within Marxist and IR discourses on the theoretical significance of ‘the international’, covering topics including uneven and combined development and passive revolution. An impressive collection that seeks to advance dialogue and research, Marxism and World Politics will be of interest to students and scholars of IR, International Political Economy, Political Science, and Historical Sociology.

Guest Editorial: Ecological knowledge co‐production and the contested imaginaries of development in Southeast Asia

Scholars in International Relations Cite Books More Frequently than Journals: More Research is Needed to Better Understand Research Behaviour and Use

The Socio-Technical Imaginaries (STI) approach in Science and Technology Studies (STS) has illuminated the central role of social imaginaries in shaping the politics of technology. Its emphasis on the multilinear forms of socio-technical development is a useful corrective to universalist explanations of technological change. However, STI lacks a clear account of how inter-societal interaction shapes the imaginaries of any given political community. Synthesizing STI with the theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) can correct this shortcoming. UCD offers an ontology of universals and accompanying methodology of incorporated comparison, enabling STI to integrate inter-societal causality into its theoretical framework. A combined UCD and STI framework is examined in this paper through a focus on imaginaries of technological innovation in contemporary American foreign policy. Responding to the ‘whip of external necessity’, US foreign policy seeks to upend technological diffusion and impose global regulatory evenness on national forms of technological innovation.

What are the conditions under which international relations might become a meaningful political site for indigenous peoples' struggles against colonisation? This paper explores this question through an engagement with disciplinary struggles within international relations, on the one hand, and a reading of the politics of indigeneity, on the other. It traces the disciplinary mechanisms through which the gesture of inclusivity by scholars of international relations towards indigenous peoples functions to re-inscribe colonial relationships and, given this, considers whether and under what conditions indigenous peoples might find any relevance in the study and practice of `international relations' as inscribed through the discipline. This analysis in turn suggests two questions: one about the limits of and inscribed by the discipline read against claims to represent `world politics', the other about the strategic potentialities of `international relations' as a political site for `marginal' peoples.

What does it take to be an international relations (IR) scholar? IR discourses have tackled this question with focus on very different problems: the role and function of IR scholars for policy; the (ir)relevance and impact of IR knowledge and expertise in world politics; disciplinary history; or in studying IR's institutions. We argue that all these “disciplinary sociology” debates struggle with the relation between an internal scientific IR world and an external social context (policy, society). We reject this distinction and argue that science studies can help us to address these problems more adequately by treating IR as a scientific practice that is closely tied to its social environment. The article sets out to explore science studies' possible contributions. Based on science studies key assumptions, we develop a heuristic by which the relations between IR and its environment can be grasped systematically. From this perspective, IR is pivotally a culture constituted by different domains of practice. Hence, understanding IR scholars in “doing IR” requires taking into account their daily and sometimes trivial practices. For instance, writing an article in IR means much more than only thinking theoretically at a desk. We systematize the different domains of practices as the articulation of knowledge claims, mobilizing the world, autonomy seeking, alliance building, and public representation. “Being an IR scholar” and “producing IR knowledge” depends inevitably on these sets of practices and IR is intrinsically interwoven with its environment through these.

The literature on global international relations (IR) has argued that the discipline develops in the footsteps of world politics, but no sustained attention has been given to more immediate causes such as the funders that pay for IR teaching and scholarship. These donor–recipient relations have only attracted the attention of authors interested in cultural hegemony and those contributing to the recent historiography of IR. Among the latter, some have studied how during the Cold War the Rockefeller Foundation attempted to buttress classical realism in the United States and Western Europe. This article connects and moves forward IR historiography and the global IR literature by shedding light on philanthropic foundations’ attempts to further a specific IR theory—classical realism—and area studies in the global south. The article argues that world politics influenced global IR, but this influence was mediated by highly contingent events. Even a proximate cause like science patronage, let alone “world politics,” is not a sufficient cause capable of determining IR theories and disciplinary boundaries. Donors may achieve some impact but only under specific circumstances such as the ones explored here, that is, the donor is a unitary actor determined to advance its agenda by resorting to conditionality, alternative donors and funding are scarce, the discipline is either poorly or not institutionalized, and the recipient perceives the donor's preferences as legitimate. The article uses previously untapped, fine-grained, primary sources to unravel philanthropy's impact on Latin America's first IR center. Because science patronage is exposed to many sources of indeterminacy and to contingency, donors cannot determine scholarship, which makes cultural hegemony all but impossible. Still, IR scholars need to study their patrons to understand their discipline, in and outside Europe and the United States.

How do we know ‘the international’? In the age of the internet and social media, which promise to further democratize access to information, this question has become more pertinent than ever. It is thus no wonder that, whether focusing on climate change, war on terror, or global health, scholars of International Relations (IR) have increasingly explored how knowledge about ‘the international’ is produced, disseminated, and contested, who gets to speak on these matters, and on what ground. This type of research inquiry has, however, a much longer and richer tradition in science and technology studies (STS), an interdisciplinary field focusing on the interconnections between the production of science and technology, on the one hand, and the production of socio-political orderings, on the other hand. This chapter takes stock of some of the main approaches in STS to analyse the politics of knowledge production and connects this scholarship with the research on knowledge and expertise in IR. The chapter also discusses the implications of democratizing and socially embedding the production of knowledge on global politics.

In this book Rob Walker offers an original analysis of the relationship between twentieth-century theories of international relations, and the political theory of civil society since the early modern period. He views theories of international relations both as an ideological expression of the modern state, and as a clear indication of the difficulties of thinking about a world politics characterized by profound spatiotemporal accelerations. International relations theories should be seen, the author argues, more as aspects of contemporary world politics than as explanations of contemporary world politics. These theories are examined in the light of recent debates about modernity and post-modernity, sovereignty and political identity, and the limits of modern social and political theory. This book is a major contribution to the field of critical international relations, and will be of interest to social and political theorists and political scientists, as well as students and scholars of international relations.

This book provides a critical understanding of contemporary world politics by arguing that the neoliberal approach to international relations seduces many of us into investing our lives in projects of power and alienation. These projects offer few options for emancipation; consequently, many feel they have little choice but to retaliate against violence with more violence.   The authors of this pioneering work articulate worldism as an alternative approach to world politics. It intertwines non-Western and Western traditions by drawing on Marxist, postcolonial, feminist and critical security approaches with Greek and Chinese theories of politics, broadly defined. The authors contend that contemporary world politics cannot be understood outside the legacies of these multiple worlds, including axes of power configured by gender, race, class, and nationality, which are themselves linked to earlier histories of colonizations and their contemporary formations. With fiction and poetry as exploratory methods, the authors build on their ‘multiple worlds’ approach to consider different sites of world politics, arguing that a truly emancipatory understanding of world politics requires more than just a shift in ways of thinking; above all, it requires a shift in ways of being.   Transforming World Politics will be of vital interest to students and scholars of International Relations, Political Science, Postcolonial Studies, Social Theory, Women's Studies, Asian Studies, European Union and Mediterranean Studies, and Security Studies.