Calculations of Risk: Towards An Understanding of Insurance As A Moral and Political Technology*

2021 ◽  
pp. 403-438
Author(s):  
D. Knights ◽  
T. Vurdbakis
Keyword(s):  
Political Technology

The time that money requires: Use of the future and critique of the present in financial valuation

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-113
Author(s):  
Fabian Muniesa ◽  
Liliana Doganova
Keyword(s):  
Investment Decisions ◽  
Financial Valuation ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Future Value ◽  
Philosophical Implication ◽  
Sociology Of Finance ◽  
Uncertain Future ◽  
Political Technology

The future is persistently considered in the sociology of finance from two divergent, problematic angles. The first approach consists in supplementing financial reasoning with an acknowledgement of the expectations that are needed in order to cope with an uncertain future and justify the viability of investment decisions. The second approach, often labelled critical, sees on the contrary in the logic of finance a negation of the future and an exacerbation of the valuation of the present. This is an impasse the response to which resides, we suggest, in considering the language of future value, which is indeed inherent to a financial view on things, as a political technology. We develop this argument through an examination of significant episodes in the history of financial reasoning on future value. We explore a main philosophical implication which consists in suggesting that the medium of temporality, understood in the dominant sense of a temporal progression inside which projects and expectations unfold, is not a condition for but rather a consequence of the idea of financial valuation.

Borders as penal transplants: Control of territory, mobility and illegality in West Africa

2021 ◽  
pp. 136248062199545
Author(s):  
Eva Magdalena Stambøl
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
Border Security ◽  
Mobility Control ◽  
Spatial Awareness ◽  
Control Order ◽  
Political Technology ◽  
Geographical Scope

This article explores an increasingly significant trend in crime and mobility control that has received scant criminological attention: border externalization, specifically scrutinizing land border security-building by international actors in West Africa. Going beyond the usual focus on migration in border studies, it develops a criminologically grounded theorization of the border as a political technology of crime control and its relationship to the state. This is done by arguing that borders, theorized as ‘penal transplants’ embodying specific (western) visions of state, political power, social control/order and territoriality, are transformed and often distorted when performed in ‘heterarchical’ contexts in the global South. Further, empirically based concepts from ‘the periphery’ are suggested to enrich border criminology, broadening its geographical scope and spatial awareness.

Nation Branding

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-73
Author(s):  
Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Nation Branding ◽  
Business Managers ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
The Social ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Political Technology

This chapter proposes the practice of nation branding as a political technology, as an example of neoliberalism in which the definition of national identity, previously assessed primarily by the social sciences and humanities, becomes the domain of business managers and advertising executives, thanks to technologies associated with social media. It explains how the redefinition of social goods, the role of the state, and the role of experts entail the replacement of a more socially driven understanding of identity with an act of commercial prestidigitation by way of nation branding; the pertinent state entities are replaced by advertising and image consultancy firms; and, lastly, scholars of various disciplines are replaced by advertising and PR executives. In short, following neoliberalism, identity is reinterpreted as brand. Identity no longer results from the never-ending and instantaneous negotiation between a multiplicity of parties, representative of myriad aspects relevant to the configuration of individuals and communities, but is rendered instead as the quantifiable, concrete result of a variety of transactions. Through this reformulation, a new relationship is suggested between the idea of nation as imagined community and the reality of the state as a material expression of the concept of nation.

Grey Zone Conflicts in Cyber Domain

2020 ◽  
pp. 271-286
Author(s):  
Muhammed Can
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Cyber Attacks ◽  
Grey Zone ◽  
Information Warfare ◽  
Major Powers ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Political Technology ◽  
Political Realities

In recent years, controversial concepts like post-truth, truth decay, political technology, and blurred nature of reality have become more complex around the world. Perhaps, a most important manifestation of these concepts could be discerned in grey zone conflicts. Confrontations in the grey zone are regarded neither peace nor war by the major powers. Russia, China, and Iran constantly use grey zone tools, notably disinformation campaigns, influence operations in social media through troll farms, information warfare, and cyber-attacks to sustain the balance of power/threat with Western countries. What makes these conflicts very significant is that they are cheaper and less risky for aggressor states given the disastrous consequences of the total wars. Furthermore, these malicious activities have unique impacts on political realities thanks to the common usage of social media and cyberspace. Thereby, this article argues the cyber frontier of grey zone conflicts and its possible effects to reality through the concept/analogy of hyperobjectivity and nonlocality.

Nightmare Knowledges: Epistemologies of Disappearance

2019 ◽  
pp. 253-272
Author(s):  
Ege Selin Islekel
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
Epistemic Agency ◽  
Political Technology

This chapter develops a conception of necropolitics as a power/knowledge assemblage by focusing on the games of truth and regimes of knowledge produced around death in the cases of mass graves and disappearance in Turkey. In particular, I am interested in the relations drawn between death, memory, and knowledge in necropolitical spaces, in spaces where life and the living are subsumed under the active production, regulation, and optimisation of death. The chapter consists of three parts: the first part analyses the relation between necropolitics and knowledge production, in order to establish necropolitics not only as a political technology, but also an epistemic one. The second section investigates the specific techniques of knowledge deployed in necropolitics, i.e., necro-epistemic methods, which target the temporal and logical coherence of memory in necropolitical spaces. The last section focuses on the practices of epistemic resistance, which work through mobilising perplexing realities in order to instigate counter-discourses. Overall, I argue that these counter-discourses, which I call ‘nightmare-knowledges,’ constitute necropolitical spaces as spaces of epistemic agency.

Orienting the Martial

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-128
Author(s):  
Andrea F. Bohlman
Keyword(s):  
Military Power ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
Military Involvement ◽  
Nationalist Sentiment ◽  
Political Technology ◽  
At Home

Bohlman’s chapter explores the fragmented archive pertaining to Polish military involvement in the Crimean War, focusing on evocations of military power and travel in legion songs. The chapter suggests that legion songs were a political technology for preserving and promoting Polish nationhood during a time of partition. Not only did such songs stimulate nationalist sentiment (both at home and abroad) and portray the legion as the fulcrum of Poland’s aspirational sovereignty, they also posited a relationship to land rooted in mobility. The chapter argues that poems and songs served to sing a nation into being, redrawing constantly shifting imaginary borders between Poland and the imperial forces that kept it splintered.

Design as aesthetic education: On the politics and aesthetics of learning environments

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-187
Author(s):  
Christina Vagt
Keyword(s):  
Learning Environments ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media History ◽  
Political Aesthetics ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Political Technology ◽  
Design Of Learning Environments ◽  
The Impact

The article, speaking from the double perspective of media history and political aesthetics, discusses the impact of behaviourism and early computer technology on the design of learning environments in the United States after the Second World War. By revisiting B. F. Skinner’s approaches to behavioural techniques and cultural engineering, and by showing how these principles were applied first at US design departments, and later to prison education, it argues that cybernetic and behavioural techniques merged in the common field of design and education. Behavioural design of the 1960s and 1970s furthered the cybernetic dream of total control over the world by addressing the learning environment rather than the individual, and operated within a space of possibility that was governed equally by technology and aesthetics. Behavioural design can therefore be understood as a political technology.

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