International Political Sociology of Technology

The current global (dis)order defies conventional stories about the workings of international affairs. States, so often the protagonists in these stories, must give way to big technology corporations, their politically ‘visionary’ CEOs, their algorithms and supposedly smart, intelligent or even ‘superintelligent’ machines.

The tools we, as students of International Relations (IR), have at hand for making sense of global order seem overly caught up with interstate politics. Technological change is everywhere and it is not just limited to military technology and nuclear weaponry, the ‘traditional’ arena for IR and Security Studies. As more and more social, political, and even international spaces are saturated with technologies of different kinds, global and regional regulatory institutions struggle to keep up. Facing this complexity this course looks for better stories to understand international relations and technology.

In this course we aspire to make sense of international relations and technology through International Political Sociology (IPS). Through combining the ‘international’, the ‘political’ and the ‘social’, IPS has considerably broadened what it means to study international relations through the development of different theories, concepts, and more granular analyses of global phenomena. The course thus seeks to study technology as a complex sociopolitical phenomenon, which shapes and is shaped by international relations.

Through introducing students to IPS, this course engages with concepts from a diversity of disciplines as they have been theorised in IPS, such as Sociology, Political Theory, Science and Technology Studies, and Political Geography. We then use these concepts and theories to study a range of empirical and theoretical questions that relate to international relations and technology: the power of Big Tech; technology and empire; AI; geopolitics; nonhuman agency; and more.