Technology, Conflict and International Relations
Technological evolution has impacted foreign policy decision-making processes at the micro level by facilitating data gathering and speeding up decision-making processes, thus adding another window on government behavior and international conflict. A tech
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Technology, Conflict and International Relations Stefan Fritsch Technology is linked to key phenomena in international relations (IR), including conflict, but has not been effectively incorporated into the study of IR and remains under-appreciated, especially given the rise of technology in the past 150 years and more particularly in the past several decades. For millennia, technological evolution has deeply impacted global politics, security, economics, culture and the environment and vice versa, and such inter-linkages have only accelerated in the modern era. Technology’s multifaceted character has motivated different social and humanities disciplines such as history, sociology, philosophy, economics, geography and anthropology to investigate its origins, evolution and consequences for humanity. IR also has addressed technology-related issues in one way or another since its inception in the 1920s. Unfortunately, a number of early—and mostly policy-oriented—studies of technological issues in world politics remained at the discipline’s periphery (KohlerKoch 1986; Ogburn 1949; Sanders 1983; Skolnikoff 1993). Recent macro-trends such as economic and military globalization, transformations in the relationship between time and space, and the emergence of
S. Fritsch () Department of Political Science, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 P. James, S.A. Yetiv (eds.), Advancing Interdisciplinary Approaches to International Relations, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40823-1_5
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new actor types (non-state actors) or policy challenges, have highlighted the discipline’s difficulties in conceptualizing technology’s proper role. Several primary reasons explain this substantial gap in IR scholarship, which hinders our understanding of IR and critical subjects such as conflict. The first conceptual problem relates to IR’s mainstream understanding of technology as a primarily material artifact and its passive role as tool or instrument. The second problem is rooted in technology’s definition as a component exogenous to the international system. Hence, technology in its role as a highly politicized core feature of the global system and a main driver of system-level change has taken center stage in recent efforts to address these conceptual shortcomings of IR. Third, this underconceptualization of technology weakens IR’s ability to comprehend the origins and driving forces of systemic change and of conflict, and to understand a range of newly emerging issues and processes and their intended and unintended consequences. What this strand of research promotes is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of technology in the context of global affairs. The central argument of this chapter is that IR scholarship must do far more to incorporate technology into theoretical, empirical and policy analyses. In particular, this chapter focuses on the role of technology in conflict. Technology can serve as both a cause of conflict and a deterrent to it—an outcome that
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