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Introduction : technology and world politics / Daniel R. McCarthy -- The social construction of technology : how objects acquire meaning in international society / Mary Manjikian -- Actor network theory : objects and actants, networks and narratives / Christian Bueger and Jan Stockbruegger -- Critical theory of technology : design, domination and democracy / Daniel R. McCarthy -- New materialisms and international relations : bodies, brains and complex causality / Nick Srnicek -- Nuclear technoaesthetics : sensory politics from trinity to the virtual bomb in los alamos / Joseph P. Masco -- The global politics of Internet governance : a case study in closure and technological design / Monroe Price -- The infrastructure of the global economy : the shipping container as a political artefact / Alejandro Colas -- A revolution in military affairs? : changing technologies and changing practices of warfare / Antoine Bousquet -- Extra-terrestrial politics : the politics of technology in space / Columba Peoples -- The geopolitics of extinction : from the anthropocene to the eurocene / Jairus Victor Grove -- Conclusion : technology and international relations theory : the end of the beginning / Daniel R. McCarthy.

This book examines the internet as a form of power in global politics. Focusing on the United States' internet foreign policy, McCarthy combines analyses of global material culture and international relation theory, to reconsider how technology is understood as a form of social power.

American policy towards the internet has been the subject of popular debate, from the Iranian Green Revolution to Edward Snowden's revelations about Internet surveillance. This book examines the internet as a form of power in global politics, taking into account the significance of global material culture upon theories of international relations to reconsider how technology is understood as a form of social power. Examining American Internet policy as the product of the Open Door tradition in US foreign relations, McCarthy suggests that American policy officials actively promote the construction and maintenance of a network that maintains a 'free flow of information' in order to spread liberal democratic capitalism internationally. The book argues that technology is a form of institutional power that reflects the cultural values of its creators in the case of the Internet, it reflects the cultural values of American liberal capitalism. Considered in this way, our theoretical conceptualization of technology and power is altered, pushing our analyses to consider the sociotechnical production of global order as the product of an uneven and combined global political economy. A unique and topical contribution to internet governance studies, this book will be a valuable resource to scholars of International Relations Theory, Global Politics and Technology Studies.

AbstractInfrastructures are central to processes of state formation. The revival of materialism in International Relations has made an important contribution to our understanding of states through careful analysis of the politics of infrastructure and state building. Yet, to date, engagement with the state-theoretical tradition associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas, and Bob Jessop has been absent. Through comparison with the external-relational ontology of Bruno Latour and actor-network theory (ANT), this article argues that state theory and its internal-relational ontology avoids reifying the state while providing an analysis of infrastructure and state formation sensitive to the historical reproduction of social orders over time. Developing Gramsci's concept of the 'integral state', it emphasises the necessary interpenetration between civil society, the state apparatus, and the creation of infrastructure. These conceptual arguments are illustrated through an analysis of the United States' development of nuclear infrastructures during the early Cold War period, in the internal relations between infrastructure and the integral state are explored through Civil Defense Education programmes. Clarifying the internal relations of past, present, and potential future forms of socio-technical order is an important task for rethinking the politics of technological design in International Relations.

Cybersecurity sits at the intersection of public security concerns about critical infrastructure protection and private security concerns around the protection of property rights and civil liberties. Public-private partnerships have been embraced as the best way to meet the challenge of cybersecurity, enabling cooperation between private and public sectors to meet shared challenges. While the cybersecurity literature has focused on the practical dilemmas of providing a public good, it has been less effective in reflecting on the role of cybersecurity in the broader constitution of political order. Unpacking three accepted conceptual divisions between public and private, state and market, and the political and economic, it is possible to locate how this set of theoretical assumptions shortcut reflection on these larger issues. While public-private partnerships overstep boundaries between public authority and private right, in doing so they reconstitute these divisions at another level in the organization of political economy of liberal democratic societies.

Cybersecurity sits at the intersection of public security concerns about critical infrastructure protection and private security concerns around the protection of property rights and civil liberties. Public-private partnerships have been embraced as the best way to meet the challenge of cybersecurity, enabling cooperation between private and public sectors to meet shared challenges. While the cybersecurity literature has focused on the practical dilemmas of providing a public good, it has been less effective in reflecting on the role of cybersecurity in the broader constitution of political order. Unpacking three accepted conceptual divisions between public and private, state and market, and the political and economic, it is possible to locate how this set of theoretical assumptions shortcut reflection on these larger issues. While public-private partnerships overstep boundaries between public authority and private right, in doing so they reconstitute these divisions at another level in the organization of political economy of liberal democratic societies.