Technopolitics: The Nature, Origins, and Significance of a Maturing Concept

Technopolitics: The Nature, Origins, and Significance of a Maturing Concept

Authors

1. Arian Khanqahi Rezaei
2. Mohammadali Modarresi Yazdi

1. Definition and Conceptual Foundations

Few concepts within the interdisciplinary literature of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and International Relations have experienced as much semantic inflation as technopolitics. Today, the term is used to describe everything from the U.S.–China competition over semiconductors, to the European Union’s regulatory policies on artificial intelligence, to national identity-building projects such as India’s space program. Yet this breadth of application is often less a sign of conceptual strength than of diminishing analytical precision. When a concept is used to explain everything, it risks explaining nothing in particular.

For this reason, before discussing the significance or impact of technopolitics, it is necessary to return to a deceptively simple but fundamental question: What exactly does technopolitics mean, and what distinguishes it from adjacent concepts such as science policy, technology governance, or simply the politics of technology?

Two Conceptual Traditions Often Conflated

A careful review of the literature reveals at least two distinct conceptual traditions that are frequently grouped under the same label despite resting upon fundamentally different ontological assumptions.

The first tradition, which can be understood through an instrumentalist lens—particularly one centered on the state—originates in the work of Gabrielle Hecht. Hecht first employed the concept in her study of the French nuclear program, defining technopolitics as the strategic practice of designing or using technology to enact political goals (Hecht, 1998). Central to this definition is the conscious agency of political actors, especially the state. Technology is portrayed as an instrument deliberately deployed to construct national identity, generate political legitimacy, or secure strategic advantage.

In Hecht’s later work, particularly her edited volume on the intertwined geographies of empire and technology during the Cold War, this framework expanded to encompass networks of colonial and postcolonial actors who simultaneously employed nuclear technology as both an instrument of domination and a means of resistance (Hecht, 2011).

The second tradition, while less frequently labeled technopolitics, occupies a closely related space within the philosophy of technology. Here, technology is understood as possessing political consequences independent of the intentions of any particular actor. Beginning in the 1960s, Lewis Mumford distinguished between what he termed authoritarian technics and democratic technics. In his view, certain technical systems—such as the pyramids of ancient Egypt or modern nuclear weapons programs—are organized in ways that require concentrated authority and hierarchical control. Other technologies, including small-scale agricultural tools or decentralized communication networks, are more compatible with participatory social arrangements (Mumford, 1964).

Langdon Winner extended this argument by shifting attention away from the intentions of political actors and toward the intrinsic characteristics of technological artifacts themselves (Winner, 1980).

It is important to state explicitly that these two traditions are often treated as though they describe the same phenomenon. In reality, however, the distinction between them is profound. If technopolitics is understood through Hecht’s framework, the central research question concerns the intentions, strategies, and agency of political actors. If it is understood through Mumford and Winner, the focus shifts toward the internal structure of technologies themselves, regardless of who employs them or for what purpose.

A significant portion of the conceptual confusion surrounding technopolitics stems precisely from the inadvertent conflation of these two distinct traditions.

Melvin Kranzberg and a Law That Is Frequently Quoted but Rarely Understood

Perhaps no statement about technology has been quoted more often—and understood less accurately—than Melvin Kranzberg’s first law of technology: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral” (Kranzberg, 1986).

This phrase is frequently invoked merely as evidence that technology is not neutral. Yet Kranzberg’s argument was more nuanced. He emphasized that the social consequences of a particular technology vary dramatically according to the social, political, and historical context in which it is deployed. The same nuclear technology that serves as an instrument of deterrence and stability in one political setting may become a catalyst for regional instability in another.

Properly understood, Kranzberg’s insight serves as a bridge between the two traditions discussed above. It demonstrates that both the internal characteristics of technology and the intentions and contexts of those who employ it matter in shaping political outcomes.

Paul Edwards and Technology as a “Closed World”

Another important intellectual lineage that receives comparatively little attention in Persian-language discussions of technopolitics is Paul Edwards’s work on computing and the Cold War.

Edwards demonstrated that the military-computational technologies developed in Cold War America were not merely defensive instruments. They were also integral components of what he termed the “closed world discourse.” This discourse constituted a techno-epistemic system through which the world came to be imagined as a controllable, simulatable, and ultimately predictable system governed through computation (Edwards, 1996).

The relevance of Edwards’s work lies in its demonstration that technopolitics extends beyond the mere application of technology. At its core, technopolitics also concerns the construction of particular political languages, imaginaries, and modes of understanding that technology makes possible. This dimension of Edwards’s analysis is often lost in more recent and simplified definitions of technopolitics.2. Historical Development, Contemporary Relevance, and Impact

Why Did This Concept Emerge Specifically in the Late Twentieth Century?

A question that is rarely addressed is why the concept of technopolitics emerged specifically between the 1970s and the 1990s rather than earlier. The answer is that this timing was far from accidental.

Prior to this period, most political analyses of technology were framed within the paradigm of modernization. Within modernization theory and development frameworks, technology was generally viewed as a linear instrument of progress, while its relationship to power received comparatively little attention. However, the oil crises of the 1970s, the unintended consequences of nuclear programs, and the emergence of the first generation of environmental critiques of industrial technology created the intellectual conditions for a fundamental reassessment of the relationship between technology and power.

It was within this context that Thomas Hughes, a contemporary of Winner, demonstrated through his studies of large-scale electrical systems that infrastructural technologies possess their own histories, ideologies, and logics of power, no less than formal political institutions do (Hughes, 1983).

From a historical perspective, Science and Technology Studies (STS) emerged during this period as an independent interdisciplinary field, drawing upon both British sociology of scientific knowledge—particularly the Edinburgh School—and American history of technology. Technopolitics can be regarded as one of the most significant intellectual products of this convergence.

From Science and Technology Studies to International Relations

A point that has received relatively little attention is that although technopolitics had become established within STS literature by the 1980s, its serious incorporation into International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE) largely occurred only after the 2010s.

This nearly three-decade delay is itself an intriguing subject for research. Why did a discipline whose central concern is power—International Relations—take so long to embrace a framework explicitly concerned with the power embedded within technology?

Part of the explanation lies in the long-standing dominance of neorealist and liberal institutionalist theories within IR. These approaches treated states and international institutions as the primary units of analysis and regarded technology primarily as a material capability serving those actors—an instrumental resource rather than an entity possessing its own independent logic.

This perspective began to shift with the rise of the digital economy, the data revolution, and especially the work of Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman on weaponized interdependence. Their research demonstrated that global technological networks can function directly as instruments of state coercion, surveillance, and geopolitical leverage (Farrell & Newman, 2019).

Similarly, Manuel Castells—although primarily a sociologist—provided an important bridge between sociological analyses of technology and analyses of global power through his theory of the network society (Castells, 1996).

Contemporary Relevance: Why Is Technopolitics No Longer a Peripheral Debate?

The contemporary significance of technopolitics can be understood from at least three distinct perspectives, each worthy of independent examination.

First: The Transformation of Great-Power Competition

The technological rivalry between the United States and China—particularly in areas such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence—can no longer be adequately explained through traditional International Relations concepts centered on balances of power and military alliances.

Since the 1990s, the critical philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg has argued that technology is never merely a neutral instrument of technical efficiency. Rather, technologies embody technical codes that incorporate specific social values and interests (Feenberg, 1999).

Today, this insight is directly relevant to the analysis of AI standards, internet protocols, and semiconductor design and manufacturing. In many cases, the question of who sets the standards is more consequential than the question of who possesses the superior technology.

Second: The Transformation of Sovereignty

The free flow of data across national borders has confronted states with a fundamental dilemma: how can sovereignty be exercised within a space that is inherently transnational?

The different responses offered by China through the Great Firewall, the European Union through data protection regulations, and the United States through technology export controls represent distinct manifestations of contemporary technopolitics. Each reflects an effort to redefine political authority in a world where digital infrastructures no longer align neatly with traditional territorial boundaries.

Third: The Transformation of Political Agency

Perhaps the least discussed dimension concerns changing understandings of political agency itself.

When social media recommendation algorithms shape public opinion, or when artificial intelligence systems make decisions regarding employment, creditworthiness, or access to services, the question of who bears political responsibility for these decisions becomes increasingly difficult to answer.

This is precisely the issue that Daniel Drezner has addressed through a broader conception of technopolitics—one concerned not merely with large national projects, but with the ways political power is generated and exercised through the technological infrastructures of everyday life (Drezner, 2019).

Conclusion

Unlike more established concepts such as the balance of power or interdependence, technopolitics remains a concept in the process of maturation. Indeed, part of its scholarly value may lie precisely in its incompleteness.

The purpose of this essay has been to demonstrate that beneath this seemingly singular term lie at least two distinct intellectual traditions—one associated with Gabrielle Hecht and another rooted in the work of Lewis Mumford and Langdon Winner—as well as several historically distinct layers of analysis. These traditions should be analytically distinguished rather than collapsed into a single simplified definition that obscures their differences.

The question that remains open is whether one of these traditions must ultimately prevail for technopolitics to evolve into a coherent theoretical framework, or whether the true value of the concept lies precisely in preserving this duality and employing both levels of analysis simultaneously: the structural properties of technology itself and the strategic, intentional agency of political actors who design, deploy, and govern it.

References

Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.

Drezner, Daniel W. 2019. "Technological Change and International Relations." International Relations 33 (2): 286–303.

Edwards, Paul N. 1996. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Farrell, Henry, and Abraham L. Newman. 2019. "Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion." International Security 44 (1): 42–79.

Feenberg, Andrew. 1999. Questioning Technology. London: Routledge.

Hecht, Gabrielle. 1998. The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hecht, Gabrielle, ed. 2011. Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hughes, Thomas P. 1983. Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kranzberg, Melvin. 1986. "Technology and History: Kranzberg's Laws." Technology and Culture 27 (3): 544–560.

Mumford, Lewis. 1964. "Authoritarian and Democratic Technics." Technology and Culture 5 (1): 1–8.

Winner, Langdon. 1980. "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" Daedalus 109 (1): 121–136.

[1] Modernization.