I’m now nearly completed with the third edition of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (2008), a massive collection of interesting STS articles dealing with various heterogeneous fields from genomics to sociology to biotechnology and more, with an aim to conceptualize science and technology and their roles and relations in society. I won’t mention in this post any actual analyses from that insightful volume (since this blog receives few visitors- if anyone is interested in the content of some of these articles from the Handbook, drop me a comment and I’ll make a blog post on that), but instead want to briefly point indirectly to some broad themes coming from those articles, and suggest their relevance when it comes to the current U.S. war in Afghanistan.
What much work in STS as well as Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory demonstrate is that the connections between various actors- such as science, technology, social groups, and the law- cannot be simply assumed and taken for granted in a descriptive or explanatory account trying to account for their interrelations. Instead, the boundaries between them are often problematic and contested, and it takes real work for science as an institution to function, just as it does for technologically-mediated plans of action to be implemented. Likewise, for any given technological artefact to present itself to us as inconscipuous and invisibly useful, a lot of work has to go into ‘blackboxing’ that artefact, and this blackboxing takes place at the intersection of the worlds of designers, users, and sociomaterial things and networks. Latour points out that our analyses of science and technology should reflect this contingency and these difficult intersections, which means following the actors and tracing the work that they do.
Likewise, just as it takes much work on the part of different actors for a particular technology to be stabilized, technologically mediated plans of action on a large-scale level aren’t simply set in place in an unproblematic, linear fashion, but instead require a lot of work to set in place- and often are subject to contestation or failure. For instance, an architect doesn’t simply sketch a blueprint and apply his sketches to reality through contractors and builders- instead, he has to negotiate all the contingencies of zoning regulations, building funds, unreliable personalities, unforeseen problems in the design process, etc.
Another interesting case of technologically mediated plans of action is war. We can consider the current American war in Afghanistan. What is that war? In an important sense, it’s an attempt to solidify allies and destroy or subdue enemies, and this attempt is technoscientifically mediated. How? Through the science that goes into advanced weapons being used in Afghanistan, the academic policy research on counterinsurgency, the disposal of funds for particular reconstruction projects, the transfer of troops with all their weaponry, including controversials pilotless drones that have been claimed to contribute to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Pashtun tribesmen along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
What’s the link I see between STS and the Afghanistan war? Just as science and technology can’t be taken for granted ans assumed as static terms of analysis, but instead need to be constructed, so does this war. The war in Afghanistan ties together diverse actors, ranging from the American military establishment, military-funded scientific knowledge, high-tech weaponry, Afghan tribesmen and insurgents, and the nations of Afghanistan, India, Iran, and Pakistan (among others). It is in the details of how this war is being implemented- for instance, at the economic and aid reconstruction level- that we can determine whether the plan is at present successful or not. Until recently, many analysts speculated that the money the Taliban procured came from growing poppies and participating in the opium trade. Now we have anecdotal evidence (on a Reuters news blog) that much of the funding for the Taliban comes through deals that they make with local reconstruction companies outsourced with American money. In one case, an anonymous project manager reports that of the million dollars in aid that his company receives each month, $200,000 go monthly to the Taliban, to prevent attacks on the reconstruction company’s workers.
What this shows is that the war in Afghanistan could well go on indefinitely, since American money is supporting the Taliban! Imagine that- an economically troubled nation bankrolling the very people they’re fighting against, with the Afghan people stuck in the middle.
It seems to me STS can be useful here because it can ‘unblackbox’ something like the war in Afghanistan, to show how the various actors- economies, insurgents, countries, weaponry, etc.- are (problematically) linked together and pushed apart, and thus to suggest how we might more effectively understand and deal with the situation in question.
Link: http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2009/08/13/who-is-funding-the-afghan-taliban-you-dont-want-to-know/
Quote:
A shadowy office in Kabul houses the Taliban contracts officer, who examines proposals and negotiates with organizational hierarchies for a percentage. He will not speak to, or even meet with, a journalist, but sources who have spoken with him and who have seen documents say that the process is quite professional.
The manager of an Afghan firm with lucrative construction contracts with the U.S. government builds in a minimum of 20 percent for the Taliban in his cost estimates. The manager, who will not speak openly, has told friends privately that he makes in the neighborhood of $1 million per month. Out of this, $200,000 is siphoned off for the insurgents.
If negotiations fall through, the project will come to harm — road workers may be attacked or killed, bridges may be blown up, engineers may be assassinated.
The degree of cooperation and coordination between the Taliban and aid workers is surprising, and would most likely make funders extremely uncomfortable.
One Afghan contractor, speaking privately, told friends of one project he was overseeing in the volatile south. The province cannot be mentioned, nor the particular project.
“I was building a bridge,” he said, one evening over drinks. “The local Taliban commander called and said ‘don’t build a bridge there, we’ll have to blow it up.’ I asked him to let me finish the bridge, collect the money — then they could blow it up whenever they wanted. We agreed, and I completed my project.”
