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Abstract
This article seeks to provoke a deeper engagement of Critical Security Studies with security's relations to technology and weapons. It explores existing assumptions about these relations in mainstream arms control and disarmament theory, and the way such assumptions are deployed and distributed in the current settlement of arms control and disarmament practice. It then draws on recent social and philosophical discussions of materiality, particularly on the thought of Bruno Latour, to propose a different set of concepts for exploring the aims and limits of arms control and disarmament. These concepts emphasise the mediating roles of material things in social relations and they may offer a richer view of the object of arms control (weapons and violence) and of the practices of arms limitation and reduction; one that may ultimately gesture towards a different understanding of arms politics, and that may be used to explore the transformatory potentials of arms control and disarmament.
Acknowledgements
I thank Stephen James and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article.
Notes
1 Hedley Bull, The Control of the Arms Race: Disarmament and Arms Control in the Missile Age (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson for the Institute for Strategic Studies, 1961), 3.
2 Ken Booth, Theory of World Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 31.
3 Ken Booth, ‘Critical Explorations’, in Critical Security Studies and World Politics, ed. Ken Booth (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005), 7.
4 Booth, Theory of World Security, 35–6.
5 Ibid., 253–256.
6 Ibid., 250.
7 Ken Booth, ‘Beyond Critical Security Studies’, in Critical Security Studies and World Politics, ed. Ken Booth (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005), 266–8.
8 Columba Peoples, ‘Technology and Politics in the Missile Defence Debate: Traditional, Radical and Critical Approaches’, Global Change, Peace and Security 19, no. 3 (2007): 265–80.
9 Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Richard Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 85.
10 Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, 85; Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology.
11 Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, 86.
12 Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology, 12.
13 Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy, 85; Colin Gray, House of Cards: Why Arms Control Must Fail (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); John Mueller, Atomic Obsession:Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
14 Booth, Theory of World Security, 120.
15 Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy, 86; Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology.
16 Jacques Ellul, ‘The Autonomy of Technology’, in Technology and Values: Essential Readings, ed. Craig Hanks (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 67–75.
17 Kenneth Waltz and Scott Sagan, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (New York: W.W. Norton).
18 Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy, 87.
19 Peoples, ‘Technology and Politics’.
20 Vincent Pouliot, ‘The Materials of Practice: Nuclear Warheads, Rhetorical Commonplaces and Committee Meetings in Russian–Atlantic Relations’, Cooperation and Conflict 45, no. 3 (2010): 294–311; Alexander Wendt, ‘Social Theory as Cartesian Science: An Auto-critique from a Quantum Perspective’, in Constructivism and International Relations: Alexander Wendt and His Critics, ed. Stefano Guzzini and Anna Leander (New York: Routledge, 2007), 181–219.
21 Daniel Deudney, ‘Geopolitics as Theory: Historical Security Materialism’, European Journal of International Relations 6, no. 1 (2000): 77–107.
22 Pouliot, ‘Materials of Practice’; Claudia Aradau, ‘Security that Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection’, Security Dialogue 41, no. 5 (2010): 491–514.
23 Booth, Theory of World Security, 267.
24 Nancy Gallagher, ‘Bridging the Gaps on Arms Control’, in Arms Control: New Approaches to Theory and Policy, ed. Nancy Gallagher (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 1–24.
25 Ibid.; David Baldwin, ‘Security Studies and the End of the Cold War’, World Politics 48, no. 1 (1995): 117–41.
26 Thomas Schelling and Morton Halerpin, Strategy and Arms Control (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1961); Hedley Bull, The Control of the Arms Race: Disarmament and Arms Control in the Missile Age (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961); Donald Brennan, ed., Arms Control, Disarmament and National Security (New York: George Braziller, 1961).
27 Schelling and Halerpin, Strategy and Arms Control, 2.
28 Bull, Control of the Arms Race.
29 Jeffrey Larsen and James Wirtz, Arms Control and Cooperative Security (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009), 4.
30 Ibid.; Paul Bracken, ‘Thinking (Again) About Arms Control’, Orbis 48, no. 1 (2004), 149–59; Barry Buzan, An Introduction to Strategic Studies: Military Technology and International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1987).
31 Stuart Croft, Strategies of Arms Control: A History and Typology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 4.
32 Neil Cooper, ‘Putting Disarmament Back in the Frame’, Review of International Studies, 32, no. 2 (2006): 353–76.
33 Hedley Bull, ‘Disarmament and the International System’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 5, no. 1 (1959): 41–50, as cited in Lawrence Freedman, Nuclear Disarmament: The Need for a New Theory (Sydney: The Lowy Institute for International Policy, 2009), 4.
34 Bull, Control of the Arms Race, 69.
35 Schelling and Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control, 9.
36 Hedley Bull, ‘Arms Control and World Order’, International Security 1, no. 1 (1976): 3.
37 Robert O'Neill, ‘Hedley Bull and Arms Control’, in Remembering Hedley, ed. Coral Bell and Meredith Thatcher (Canberra: ANU Press, 2008).
38 Bull, ‘Arms Control and World Order’, 4–5 and 12.
39 On this capture see Jeffrey A. Larsen and James M. Smith, Historical Dictionary of Arms Control and Disarmament (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 246; Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, The Evolution of International Security Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Marc Trachtenberg, ‘The Past and Future of Arms Control’, Daedalus 120, no. 1 (1991): 203–16.
40 Emmanuel Adler, ‘The Emergence of Cooperation: National Epistemic Communities and the International Evolution of the Idea of Nuclear Arms Control’, International Organization 46, no. 1 (1992): 101–45.
41 Daniel Deudney, ‘The Philadelphian System: Sovereignty, Arms Control, and Balance of Power in the American States-Union, circa 1787–1861’, International Organization 49, no. 2 (1995): 191–228.
42 Neil Cooper and David Mutimer, ‘Introduction: Arms Control for the 21st Century: Controlling the Means of Violence’, Contemporary Security Policy 32, no. 1 (2011): 3–19.
43 For a recent example of this framing, see Barry Steiner, ‘To Arms Control or Not: Lessons of Focused Case Comparison’, Contemporary Security Policy 31, no. 3 (2010): 379–405.
44 Stefan Fritsch, ‘Technology and Global Affairs’, International Studies Perspectives 12, no. 1 (2011): 27–45.
45 Gray, House of Cards, 68.
46 Waltz and Sagan, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons.
47 Jan Ruzicka and Nicholas Wheeler, ‘The Puzzle of Trusting Relationships in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’, International Affairs 86, no. 1 (2010): 69–85.
48 Cooper and Mutimer, ‘Introduction’.
49 Herman Kahn, ‘The Arms Race and Some of its Hazards’, in Brennan, Arms Control, 89–121; Jim Whitman, ‘Global Governance and Twenty-first Century Technology’, in Technology and Security: Governing Threats in the New Millennium, ed. Brian Rappert (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), 89–110.
50 Mark Wheelis and Malcolm Dando, ‘New Technology and Future Developments in Biological Weapons’, Disarmament Forum no. 4 (2000): 43–50.
51 Jurgen Altmann, Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications and Preventive Arms Control (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006).
52 Theo Farrell, ‘The Limits of Security Governance: Technology, Law, and War’, in Rappert, Technology and Security, 121.
53 Bob Graham et al., The World at Risk: The Report of the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).
54 Amitav Mallik, Technology and Security in the 21st Century: A Demand-side Perspective: SIPRI Research Report No. 20 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 103.
55 James F. Keeley. ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction as Mature Technologies’, in Control but Verify: Verification and the New Non-Proliferation Agenda, ed. David Mutimer (York: York Centre for International and Strategic Studies, 1994), 171–80.
56 Peoples, ‘Technology and Politics’.
57 Fritsch, ‘Technology and Global Affairs’.
58 Adler, ‘Emergence of Cooperation’; Richard Price, The Chemical Weapons Taboo (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Denise Garcia, Small Arms and Security: New International Norms (London: Routledge, 2006); Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
59 Price, Chemical Weapons Taboo.
60 Garcia, Small Arms and Security.
61 Emmanuel Adler, ‘Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics’, European Journal of International Relations 3, no. 3 (1997): 319–63.
62 Price, Chemical Weapons Taboo, 6.
63 Anne Harrington de Santana, ‘Nuclear Weapons as the Currency of Power: Deconstructing the Fetishism of Force’, Nonproliferation Review 16, no. 3 (2009): 325–45.
64 Anthony Burke, ‘Nuclear Reason: At the Limits of Strategy’, International Relations 23, no. 4 (2009): 506–29; Ken Booth, ‘Nuclearism, Human Rights and Constructions of Security (Part 1)’, The International Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 2 (1999): 1–24.
65 Ken Berry et al., Delegitimizing Nuclear Weapons: Examining the Validity of Nuclear Deterrence (Monterey, CA: Monterey Institute of International Studies, 2010).
66 Keith Krause and Andrew Latham, ‘Constructing Non-Proliferation and Arms Control: The Norms of Western Practice’, Contemporary Security Policy 19, no. 1 (1998): 28.
67 Ibid.; John Borrie, ‘Rethinking Multilateral Negotiations: Disarmament as Humanitarian Action’, in Alternative Approaches in Multilateral Decision Making: Disarmament as Humanitarian Action, ed. John Borrie and Vanessa Martin Randin (Geneva, UNIDIR, 2005), 16.
68 Krause and Latham, ‘Constructing Non-Proliferation’, 39–45; Neil Cooper, ‘Putting Disarmament Back in the Frame’, Review of International Studies 32, no. 2 (2006): 353–76.
69 Krause and Latham, ‘Constructing Non-Proliferation’, 43; Tannenwald, Nuclear Taboo, 46; Price, Chemical Weapons Taboo, 12.
70 Williams Walker, ‘Nuclear Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment’, International Affairs 83, no. 3 (2007): 431.
71 Brian Rappert, Controlling the Weapons of War: Politics, Persuasion and the Prohibition of Inhumanity (London: Routledge, 2006).
72 Ibid., 127.
73 Ibid.
74 The Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), formed in 1974, is a group of forty-six states that supply nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes which seek to support non-proliferation through guidelines to prevent supplying nuclear and related technologies where they may be used in weapons proliferation. The Zangger Committee, formed in 1971, is a similar, but more informal, arrangement among thirty-eight states seeking to harmonise nuclear export controls. There is considerable overlap in membership (especially since China joined the NSG in 2004), although all Zangger Committee members are members of the NPT, this is not a requirement of the NSG. The NSG covers dual-use goods and a wider range of technologies than the Zangger Committee whose mandate is tied to Article III.2 of the NPT.
75 Rebecca Johnson, ‘Rethinking the NPT's Role in Security: 2010 and Beyond’, International Affairs 86, no. 2 (2010): 442.
76 William Walker, ‘The UK, Threshold Status, and Responsible Nuclear Sovereignty’, International Affairs 86, no. 2 (2010): 447–64.
77 Rappert, Controlling the Weapons, 223–6.
78 Cyriaque Pawoumotom Agnekethom, ‘Political and Institutional Dynamics of the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons in West Africa’, Disarmament Forum no. 4 (2008): 13–20.
79 Dick Pels, Kevin Hetherington, and Frederic Vandenberghe, ‘The Status of the Object: Performances, Mediations, and Techniques’, Theory, Culture and Society 19, no. 5–6 (2002): 1–21.
80 Tim Dant, Materiality and Society (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005); Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (London: Duke University Press, 2005); Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, eds., The Object Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).
81 Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology; Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).
82 Wyn Jones, Security Strategy; Peoples, ‘Technology and Politics’.
83 John Law, ‘Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics’ (unpublished paper, April 25, 2007 version, www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2007ANTandMaterialSemiotics.pdf ).
84 Bruno Latour, ‘Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social’, in The Social in Question. New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, ed. Patrick Joyce (London: Routledge, 2002), 117–32.
85 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
86 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 10–11.
87 Pouliot, ‘Materials of Practice’, 307.
88 Latour, Bruno, ‘Irreductions’, in The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 151–236; Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: Re.Press, 2009).
89 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 76.
90 Ibid., 76.
91 Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 174.
92 Latour, Reassembling the Social; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (London: Duke University Press, 2010); Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800 (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973); Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006); Alex Preda, ‘The Turn to Things: Arguments for a Sociological Theory of Things’, The Sociological Quarterly 40, no. 2 (1999): 347–66.
93 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 73.
94 Ibid., 71.
95 Ibid., 72.
98 Latour, Pandora's Hope, 178–9.
96 Latour, Pandora's Hope, 307.
97 Ibid., 178; Latour, Reassembling the Social, 108.
99 For a recent review see Tom Jackson and Nic Marsh, ‘Guns and Deaths: A Critical Review’, in Small Arms Crime and Conflict, ed. Owen Greene and Nic Marsh (London: Routledge, 2011).
100 Susan Sample, ‘Military Buildups, War, and Realpolitik: A Multivariate Model’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 42, no. 2 (1998): 156–75.
101 Latour, Pandora's Hope, 182.
102 Ibid., 182.
103 Philip Verwimp, ‘Machetes and Firearms: The Organization of Massacres in Rwanda’, Journal of Peace Research 43, no. 1 (2006): 5–22.
104 Rappert, Controlling the Weapons, 89.
105 Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place (London: Routledge, 1992), 397, as cited in Rappert, Controlling the Weapons, 92.
106 Nick Srnicek, ‘Conflict Networks: Collapsing the Global into the Local’, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies no. 2 (2010): 30–64.
107 Mike Bourne, ‘Controlling the Shadow Trade’, Contemporary Security Policy 32, no. 1 (2011): 215–40.
108 Jane Bennett, ‘The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout’, Public Culture 17, no. 3 (2005): 455.
109 Martin Coward, ‘Network-centric Violence, Critical Infrastructure and the Urbanisation of Security’, Security Dialogue 40, no. 4–5 (2009): 399–418.
110 Tim Luke, ‘The Co-existence of Cyborgs, Humachines and Environments in Postmodernity: Getting Over the End of Nature’, in The Cybercities Reader, ed. Stephen Graham, (London: Routledge, 2003); Stephen Graham, ‘Switching Cities Off: Urban Infrastructure and US Air Power’, City 9, no. 2 (2005): 169–193.
111 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
112 Christopher Coker, The Future of War: The Re-Enchantment of War in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Chris Hables Gray, ‘Posthuman Soldiers in Postmodern War’, Body and Society 9, no. 4 (2003): 215–26.
115 Bruno Latour, ‘Morality and Technology: The End of the Means’ (trans. Couze Venn), Theory, Culture and Society 27, no. 6 (2002): 252–3.
113 Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (London: Routledge, 2002), 114.
114 Bruno Latour, ‘Technology is Society Made Durable’, in A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1991), 103–31.
116 Benjamin Sovacool, ‘Reactors, Weapons, X-Rays, and Solar Panels: Using SCOT, Technological Frame, Epistemic Culture, and Actor Network Theory to Investigate Technology’, The Journal of Technology Studies 32, no. 1 (2006), http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JOTS/v32/v32n1/sovacool.html.
117 Latour, Pandora's Hope, 183.
118 Ibid., 184.
119 Steven Flank, ‘Exploding the Black Box: The Historical Sociology of Nuclear Proliferation’, Security Studies 3, no. 2 (1993): 259–94.
120 Donald Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Missile Guidance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
121 Donald Mackenzie, ‘Theories of Technology and the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons’, in The Social Shaping of Technology: Second Edition, ed. Donald Mackenzie and Judy Wajcman (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999), 419–42.
122 Alexander Montgomery, ‘Ringing in Proliferation: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb Network’, International Security 30, no. 2 (2005): 153–87; Greg Thielmann and Peter Crail, ‘Chief Obstacle to Iran's Nuclear Effort: its own Bad Technology’, Christian Science Monitor, December 8, 2010, http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/1208/Chief-obstacle-to-Iran-s-nuclear-effort-its-own-bad-technology.
123 Nick Ritchie, ‘Relinquishing Nuclear Weapons: Identities, Networks and the British Bomb’, International Affairs 86, no. 2 (2010): 465–87.
125 Ibid., 251–2.
124 Latour, ‘Morality and Technology’, 251.
126 Latour, Pandora's Hope, 185.
127 Ibid., 186.
128 Ibid., 190.
129 Schelling and Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control, 3.
130 Ryan Bishop and John Phillips, ‘Unmanning the Homeland’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26, no. 3 (2002): 620–25.
131 Latour, ‘Morality and Technology’.
132 William Walters, ‘The Power of Inscription: Beyond Social Construction and Deconstruction in European Integration Studies’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31, no. 1 (2002): 92.
133 Aradau, ‘Security that Matters’; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
134 Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public’, in Making Things Public, ed. Bruno Latour and Michael Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 15.
135 Jane Bennett, ‘In Parliament with Things’, in Radical Democracy: Politics between Abundance and Lack, ed. Lars Toender and Lasse Thomassen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 133–48.
136 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, ix.
137 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 89.