The title to this engaging attempt to grapple with contemporary matters of technology and security offers an apt double meaning. While the notion of security is in many ways in crisis itself, the book simultaneously ponders how various crises in the field of international relations might also shed light on contemporary difficulties. How technologies are used for political effect is a longstanding theme in social thought, but now, as the discussion of the Anthropocene has made obvious, this is an increasingly salient concern in what is an increasingly artificial world. But, and this is key to this book, these new circumstances require thinking about politics in ways that draw on many academic fields beyond traditional international relations, not least anthropology, earth systems, and technology studies, as well as the more critical strands of security studies.
Focusing on technopolitics and Sheila Jasanoff’s notions of sociotechnical imaginaries to grapple with how security is being rethought, or not, this volume tackles some of the most pressing current issues in the politics of security. This is a rich intellectual agenda, and a timely one, as climate and ecological disruptions increasingly impinge on politics, either shaping policy responses, or in the case of many populist political campaigns, leading to flat denials that changing geophysical circumstances or novel technologies are a matter of concern for politics.
To get to grips with this series of interrelated conceptual puzzles, Peoples offers nine chapters to structure the argument. An introductory scene is followed by a thoughtful reiteration of the notions of critique and crisis and how they have influenced discussions in international relations. Edward Carr’s volume The Twenty Years Crisis is exemplary here. Juxtaposing this with Richard Ashley and Rob Walker’s ruminations about the crisis in the field at the end of the Cold War offers a way to start to think through the multiple meanings of security. A third chapter digs into notions of global uncertainties and insecurities before engaging explicitly with the formulation of the “planetary” in the fourth. The fifth chapter turns to a discussion of crisis management at the planetary scale, which leads to the issue of geoengineering as a technical fix to problems of environmental, or should that be, ecological security. How sociotechnical imaginations shape this discussion of planetary crisis is the seventh chapter’s theme, before a rethinking of what a planetary technosphere might now mean in terms of crisis, management, and security. A brave effort to sum all this up is offered in the conclusion.
In delving into these concerns, a starting point helps, and here, Peoples starts with Barry Commoner’s volume from the early 1970s, The Closing Circle, highlighting the crisis as emerging from the wealth generation of contemporary social organization and confronting the geophysical realities of planet Earth. This theme was prominent in that period, which produced the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, The Limits to Growth, and other arguments about the contradictions that arise when considering infinite economic growth on a finite planet. But the warnings from Stockholm were largely ignored, and now the planetary condition is one where human activity is shaping the future quite directly. Yet, how futures are imagined, and what is deemed essential to be secured into that future, is highly contested, and as this volume emphasizes, shaped by the sociotechnical imaginaries brought to bear in political discussion.
Peoples draws on numerous thinkers in grappling with these themes; the lengthy bibliography at the end of the volume attests to the breadth of the scholarship involved. Noteworthy is how carefully the author teases out the arguments and judiciously engages everyone from Daniel Deudney to Langdon Winner in his attempts to focus attention on the significance of the theme of the planetary as a necessary contextualization for security thinking in a dynamic earth system, one that is changing rapidly because of novel technologies and their consequences in causing ecological disruption at the planetary scale.
In some ways, these are old arguments. Technology, at least in the form of the industrial production of massive amounts of weapons, and then, since 1945, nuclear and thermonuclear devices, challenged historical interpretations of the rivalries among states. Much of security thinking during the Cold War, and perhaps to a lesser extent since, was about how to manage the dangers that resulted, and in the process, both deter the use of nuclear weapons and deal with the political rivalries that could potentially spill over into warfare. But now both digital technologies and the profound disruptions already in motion in the earth system require a much more comprehensive engagement with technopolitics than traditional international relations studies encompass.
These themes all come together in Peoples’ lengthy discussion of geoengineering and how the deliberate manipulation of the planet’s climate might be deliberated upon, decided, undertaken, and then managed in some way. Solar radiation management is anathema to most traditional notions of environmentalism, but in the face of the apparent “need” to tackle the climate crisis, such unpalatable considerations are now emerging. Here, Peoples’ text weaves its way carefully through the conceptual issues with a sobering reminder of both the difficulties and urgencies of tackling these matters in a world of heightened geopolitical rivalries where climate change and other ecological disruptions now get short shrift in the immediate focus on old-fashioned hard power and new-fangled hybrid warfare in the novel context of cyberspace.
Crisis indeed in both the categories used to analyze the present conjuncture and the urgency of tackling looming dangers to people and places in what Richard Falk, back in the 1970s, so aptly called an endangered planet. Peoples has done the international relations discipline a huge favor by so carefully laying out this agenda and highlighting the key issues that now need to be addressed by scholars and policymakers alike.
