The technopolitics of security: Agency, temporality, sovereignty

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue on ‘the technopolitics of security’ outlines key concepts and engages debates pertaining to the relationship between techno-materiality, security governance and struggles over sovereignty. ‘Technopolitics’ refers to the strategic practice of designing and using technologies to enact political goals, producing hybrid forms of power that combine cultural, institutional and technological dimensions. These technopolitical practices give rise to new forms of agency, producing effects unintended by their designers that may alter logics of political contestation and allow technologies to be reappropriated for different political purposes. To illustrate the distributed forms of agency and contingent encounters that the technopolitics approach evokes, the article develops three key aspects of technopolitics in its relationship to security governance: (1) an understanding of agency as distributed between human and non-human actors, but also asymmetric in that human intentionality plays an assembling role that is frequently overrun by the unintended effects; (2) the temporal horizons of imagination and action over which technopolitical interventions unfold, identifying the importance of logics of anticipation and eventization; and (3) the relationship between technopolitics and sovereignty, arguing that it encourages a decentred and materialized understanding of how claims to sovereignty are made and contested.

The Digital Euro: A Materialization of (In)Security.

“…Scholarship that engages with the nexus of technology and security at the intersection of International Relations and Science and Technology Studies has foregrounded how the European Union's security agendas have worked to bring new policy areas such as technology and innovation into high politics (Hoijtink & Leese, 2019;Bellanova & Glouftsios, 2022;Müller & Richmond, 2023). The terminology of strategic autonomy originated in the security realm but has since been extended to other policy areas.…”

The Datafication of Migrant Bodies and the Enactment of Migrant Subjectivities: Biometric Data, Power and Resistance at the Borders of Europe

“…Scholarship within critical security studies has also explored data-gathering systems as material objects, which are utilised for specific political purposes and generate, sustain, or challenge relations of power. Pilo and Jaffe (2020) argue for understanding biometric gathering systems as material objects, mobilized by human actors for political goals and suggest the concept of ‘technopolitics’ as a better way to understand the interaction between human and non-human actors in the pursuit of political goals (see also: Amicelle et al, 2015; Mayer, 2014; Mueller and Richmond, 2023; Mutlu, 2013; Tsekeris and Katerelos, 2008). As a term, ‘technopolitics’, draws attention to the fact that data systems are neither abstract nor neutral.…”