Science, Technology, and Peaceful Change in World Politics
This chapter undertakes a three-dimensional survey of the role of science and technology in peaceful change in world politics. One dimension is a sociology of knowledge on S/T and change in IR and its influence on the subdisciplines of security studies, international organization, and international political economy. The second dimension is the manner in which S/T has shaped the emergence of actors, interests, material power, social purposes, and grammars of international order to produce our contemporary late-modern Anthropocene age. Woven through this survey is the third dimension, contestation over S/T and its effects—at the micro and meso levels of analysis—that create the dynamic, open-ended movements and countermovements that brought humankind from the preindustrial order to the Anthropocene. The chapter considers next how IR can improve its theories of change and the prospects for this volume’s maximalist definition of peaceful change, beginning with some criteria for distinguishing what actually constitutes “peaceful” change. One of the most profound changes the world faces is rethinking both our paradigms and governance structures in light of climate change and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, as these will profoundly alter the actual workings of economies and societies, remaking global politics in the process.