Security Logics in War and Conflict

Summary

Research on security, war, and conflict in science and technology studies (STS) has gained traction since the 2000s. This is most welcome. Indeed, international relations scholars, who traditionally put security and war at the center of their research program, have so far largely failed to problematize the relation between science, technology, and war. Mapping the work of STS and critical studies scholars, reframed—paraphrasing feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe—as a community of “technology-curious” scholars, highlights how this contributes to understanding war. It suggests that two fundamental assumptions challenge the traditional vision of technology in war. First, technology and knowledge are socially constituted and thus cannot be reduced to mere tools or autonomous forces. Second, by rejecting the Clausewitzian definition of war, it becomes a social process constitutive of communities.

The emerging field has highlighted the numerous changes to the security logics of war and conflict since the end of the Cold War and 9/11. While not comprehensive, three changes come up. First, as authorities turned to the risk logic to understand the new security environment and provide direction in the War on Terror, scholars insisted that risk constituted a performative practice of security knowledge production that ordered present societies through future-oriented technologies. Risk shaped societies for permanent insecurity. Second, authors observed the production of targets, conducted increasingly in the context of drone warfare and through datafication, raising concerns about how they both shape the vision and space of war. Third, noting the race toward development of new “disruptive” technologies, in particular military artificial intelligence, the field problematized the assumption of desirability and inevitability of the latest weaponry. Authors highlighted the sociotechnical imaginaries of the technologies and observed the shift toward war as laboratory, where war becomes the ground for experimentation. In the end, technology-curious scholars suggested that war is in a process of unbounded expansion fed, at least in part, by the fetishistic belief that war can be technically predicted and governed.