What If We Were There? A Counter-Factual Call for IR to Engage with Material-Technological Making

Abstract

International relations (IR) shows growing interest in expanding its practical engagements into different domains: the visual, the artistic, the aesthetic, the diagrammatic, and so forth. But a gap remains. Despite widespread acknowledgment of the political transformations caused by material and technological change across world politics, IR rarely fully integrates forms of material-technological praxis into its work. We rarely make digital, architectural, computational, or other seemingly technical things within IR. This article suggests we should start doing so, in direct collaboration with practitioners, applied scientists, and technical experts. Specifically, it suggests that engaging in material-technological making has the potential to (1) increase our basic scientific knowledge of politics, (2) augment our capacity to theorize politics, and (3) radically expand how we normatively and political intervene in politics. To make that argument, the paper conducts a speculative form of counter-factual analysis of the kind of “difference” that might have been made if scholars of IR had been involved in the development of three technologies designed by the International Committee of the Red Cross for humanitarian purposes. In doing so, we show that the exclusion of the material-technological from IR’s praxis is not only damaging to its vitality as an intellectual field, but also an abdication of what Haraway terms its ethico-political response-ability within politics.