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Arms and Influence
U.S. Technology Innovation and the Evolution of International Security Norms
By Jeffrey S. Lantis STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9984-3
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
America's capabilities are unique. And the power of the new technologies means that there are fewer and fewer technical constraints on what we can do. That places a special obligation on us to ask tough questions about what we should do.
— Barack Obama
Politics will, to the end of history, be an area where conscience and power meet, where the ethical and coercive factors of human life will interpenetrate and work out their tentative and uneasy compromises.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
IN AUGUST 1945, PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN announced the United States had developed a revolutionary new weapon, the atomic bomb, through a secret research program known as the Manhattan Project. He said the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, effectively destroying "its usefulness to the enemy." Truman hailed the Manhattan Project as "the greatest scientific gamble in history" and expressed optimism that atomic energy could become "a forceful influence toward the maintenance of world peace." However, the heavy responsibilities associated with the ultimate weapon soon generated significant controversy in the halls of power. Some cabinet members and scientists proposed forsaking the bomb and transferring all nuclear technologies to an international regulatory authority, while others argued the United States should seize the advantages provided by the weapons before others acquired them. Two decades later, President Lyndon Johnson pressed for the establishment of a discriminatory international nonproliferation norm and instituted export controls to limit the spread of these technologies. The 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) clearly delineated nuclear haves and have-nots, a distinction that continues to resonate in international politics today.
In the early twenty-first century, technology innovations continued to generate significant leverage in policy-making, but they did not always guarantee success in achievement of preferred normative structures. For example, advances in satellite reconnaissance, communications, and computing technologies provided unprecedented levels of information to U.S. policy-makers about incidents of mass political violence and genocide occurring in other countries. In 2011, President Obama declared preventing ethnic cleansing and genocide "a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States." To optimists, this suggested an endorsement of the emerging "responsibility to protect" (or R2P) international norm over concerns regarding sovereignty and nonintervention. However, critics charged that even though policy-makers had abundant evidence of human rights abuses in Darfur, the Central African Republic, and Syria, they failed to act to stop mass killings. As a former National Security Council staff director lamented, "at best, we have a rhetorical commitment" to R2P. But, he cautioned, one should not yet assume that "because we know more, we're doing more."
This book explores the complex relationship between technology, policy-making, and international norms. While not designed to establish predictive theory, it sets out to identify stages and processes associated with norm change as well as open theoretical avenues for further exploration. Challenges to traditional norms catalyzed by technology innovations, such as the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) for missile strikes on suspected terrorists that undermines the long-standing norm against assassination of foreign adversaries, have, in turn, prompted a broader effort to redefine international standards on self-defense, sovereignty, and preemptive strikes. These changes fuel significant contestation of international norms. As other governments develop their own drone fleets, Western leaders have scrambled to establish boundaries for a modified norm for targeted killings. In these and other instances, innovations appear to have become potential game changers in global politics.
These developments also suggest contradictions in the dominant historical narrative of U.S. engagement in global politics as a norm leader. The United States has played a critical role in shaping many international security norms — from standards on human rights grounded in the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948) to UN Security Council Resolution 1540, designed to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. First-generation (or what Andrew Cortell and James Davis term "first wave") constructivist international relations theory describes these developments as products of predictable life cycles; ideas for standards of behavior cascade through political systems and take on constitutive and regulatory qualities. However, this book examines the potential fragility of international norms through circumstances of attempted norm change by great powers. It sets out to document how determined leaders may develop strategies intended to change or manipulate normative security architectures for their own utilitarian purposes, and in the process fuel contestation that may or may not lead to successful outcomes.
Specifically, this study explores the fascinating dialectical relationship that emerges between the international normative order and endogenous technology advances. It highlights the ways tensions caused by hegemons have altered the political landscape by catalyzing norm-change processes. This approach stands in contrast to models that make general reference to "external shocks" as catalysts for change, and instead acknowledges the balance of internal and external factors that shape approaches to norms. In fact, technology innovations precede major shocks in many cases, but their implementation and advancement raise complex questions in the policy process. Technology may highlight dissonant strands of norms (e.g., nuclear technology sharing versus preventing weapons proliferation) or dissonance between norms (e.g., absolute sovereignty versus prevention of ethnic cleansing and genocide). New technologies often heighten awareness of problems or a lack of political consensus, increasing the chances that norms will be subject to contestation. In essence, "techno-normative dilemmas" fostered by technology innovations may force a sense of cognitive dissonance on elites, motivating them to solve the problem at hand. Drawing on insights from social psychology perspectives on idea formation and development, this study attends to the power of persuasion in domestic and foreign policy development.
In an era of drone strikes in Yemen, advancements in uranium enrichment, and the potential weaponization of space, research on the interaction between technology, norms, and state behavior has never been more important. While popular accounts of challenges to the global order focus on the behaviors of rogue states or dramatic events, this book shows how some of the most profound norm changes may be a function of quiet yet persistent campaigns by great powers to adapt international standards to emerging realities. This study takes some of the most controversial new developments in military technologies and embeds them in international relations theory; theoretical arguments are analyzed in relation to evolving social practice.
Key research questions in this project include: If norms are truly regulative and constitutive, as most first-generation constructivists maintain, why would states ever consider violating traditional norm frames? Under what circumstances are these considerations most likely? How do great powers reconcile emerging opportunities and challenges related to national interests with international norm strictures? What are the processes by which great powers promote norm change? Have major technological innovations shifted prevailing normative understandings in all cases? Why, or why not? What institutional features make norm change more or less likely? And finally, what are the implications of a model of norm change for policy-makers and theories of international cooperation?
Theoretical Foundations
Constructivism
Constructivism, which reflects a broad sociological turn in international relations theory, offers valuable foundations for the study of international cooperation and conflict. Contrary to realists, constructivists define international norms as "shared understandings that constitute actors' identities and interests," effectively binding the latitude of state policy. They are customary rules that govern behavior in societies, and scholars believe they help shape state behavior. Constructivists Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink's norm life-cycle model is a seminal first-generation constructivist approach to the study of international cooperation. Finnemore and Sikkink describe three stages of norm life: emergence, broad acceptance (also referred to as a "norm cascade"), and internalization. Finnemore and Sikkink also recognize countries like the United States as critical players in norm development — countries "without which the achievement of the substantive norm goal is compromised." By the late twentieth century, many states appeared to have become embedded in complex normative networks that influenced their foreign policy paths.
First-generation constructivist scholarship adds an ideational dimension to the modern study of international relations, but it presents an incomplete accounting of a range of possible state behaviors. First-generation models focus primarily on norm development and "life." They rarely allow for state challenges to international standards, especially efforts by traditional norm stewards to change the meaning of a norm or rules within multilateral frameworks. These models also tend to disregard negative cases, or instances in which norms may be challenged, rejected, or modified. Works that do recognize the potential for change focus on broad causes, including external shocks, the actions of rogue states, or "world historical events such as wars or major depressions." Constructivism also has not resolved the agent-structure question sufficiently. How exactly are international norms maintained, and by whom? If international norms are manifest in cognitive, evaluative, and expressive dimensions, it is conceivable that actors who support those values might be identified and their impact on state compliance and multilateral negotiations explored.
This study expands the norm life-cycle model to account for episodes where hegemons or great-power leaders play roles as architects of norm change or evolution. It presents a thoughtful look at norm stewardship by modifying the traditional norm life-cycle model to incorporate stages in which leaders may seek to reinterpret the meaning of norms to accommodate exceptions to international standards related to security. This is consistent with calls from international relations scholars for more dynamic models. For example, Robert Axelrod recommends theoretical treatments of "how norms arise, how norms are maintained, and how one norm displaces another." Sikkink suggests the value of an "agentic constructivism" frame that "focuses on the role of human agency in the origins of new norms and practices, and is thus better positioned to explain change." Such models may help restore some balance to theoretical treatments of the agent-structure relationship and provide more comprehensive explanations of international politics.
Technology and Norm Change
Technology advancements are particularly salient among the factors that may foster leaders' perceptions of gaps between general rules and state interests. Innovations may encourage leaders of powerful states to revisit critical normative structures of the past and adapt them to new material and ideational boundaries. While there is ample evidence that countries support some norms some of the time, this book shows that technological competitiveness may foster a much greater role for agency in norm discourse than allowed for by traditional constructivism. These connections may be critical, but they have received surprisingly limited treatment in international relations theory. As noted above, default explanations of change in international relations tend to focus on system dynamics and balances of power, not endogenous pathways of development.
Studies of the sociology and history of technology and international law inform this model of norm change. Counter to the "technological imperative" hypothesis that technology is an exogenous factor that dictates state behavior — most closely associated with realist arguments from Barry Buzan, Michael Howard, Robert Heilbroner, and Daniel Deudney — contemporary works recognize a dialectical relationship between political decisions and technological opportunities. Beginning with pathbreaking scholarship by Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (1994), social construction of technology (SCOT) theorists frame innovations as the impetus for social trends and transformations. Advancements in this literature highlight how this relationship is mutually constitutive in that social forces shape the evolution of technologies. SCOT theory tends to focus on how different groups compete to control and interpret the implications of technology designs rather than the expectation of a preordained path from innovation to application. Instead, Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch focus on a process of mutually constitutive stabilization by which one social group or set of innovations prevails over the others. Innovation is thus a complex process of construction where technology and society negotiate the meaning of new technological artifacts through thoughts, frames, practices, and actions.
Though this literature devotes less attention to the impact of technology on political systems, SCOT theory is consistent with constructivist international relations theory in its emphasis on subjective interpretations of the meaning of scientific advancements and knowledge. For example, Wayne Sandholtz and Kendall Stiles contend that great-power development of steel-hulled ships had very different meanings for different groups. A social construction model of technology recognizes a synergistic relationship between technological advances and political processes. As another study explains, SCOT theory emphasizes "the 'interpretive flexibility' of an artifact. Different social groups associate different meanings with artifacts leading to interpretive flexibility appearing over the artifact. The same artifact can mean different things to different social groups of users."
Historical sociology explains the role of technology in a broader social context, exploring how interests are shaped and, critically, the key players involved in the policy process. Geoffrey Herrera's Technology and International Transformation (2006) begins to try to bridge technological change and international politics. The book summarizes key insights from the last two decades of work in the history of technology. It challenges traditional balance of power approaches and instead advances constructivist interpretations of international relations. Herrera's overall argument is that certain technologies — especially large technical systems — may have direct consequences for the international system. Counter to what realists assert, technological innovations may spur on system transformation, but "institutions, social practices and politics surrounding it" are critical to an endogenous process of change, "giving it political (and military) meaning." As Herrera argues, this exploration is valuable because technology is a critical element of global politics (he calls it a "medium of interaction for international actors") — yet there is little established theoretical understanding of mutually constitutive "complex sociotechnical systems that are political to their core." This relationship is clearly intersubjective. The most comprehensive models of these connections must eschew pure technological determinism (the idea that technology will have a certain, singular political effect) as well as the social constructionists' preoccupation with the political effects of brand new technologies. In sum, the SCOT literature suggests there are important possible connections between technological advances and changes in social and political structures.
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Excerpted from Arms and Influence by Jeffrey S. Lantis. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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