We have never been civilized: Torture and the materiality of world political binaries

Abstract

This article demonstrates how world political binaries (democratic–autocratic, civilized–barbarian, etc.) are materially, as well as ideationally, constructed. By drawing on the analytical sensibilities of Actor-Network Theory, it is shown that differences in the actions, practices and/or behaviours of states usually situated at one or another extreme of socio-political dichotomies are sometimes dependent only on the availability of, and/or global inequalities in, mundane material ‘allies’, such as airplanes, sedatives and military bases. Empirically, the article evidences this claim by constructing a comparative case study of the Argentine torture regime and ‘Death Flights’ programme (c. 1975–1983) and the post-9/11 US-led ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme. By describing the contours of each case in microsociological detail, I suggest that differences in the forms of violence enacted in these two cases (both involving torture but one resulting in death and the other indefinite detention) were not related to the democratic or ‘civilized’ status of the US and the authoritarian or fascist-cum-barbarian status of Argentina (and the subjective motivations that we attribute such binary signifiers), but, rather, to differences in the agencies of the non-human object of the aircraft available in each case. These empirical findings allow the article to affirm the value-added of Actor-Network Theory’s ‘reconstructive’ method in International Relations for: 1) ‘mangling’ power-saturated world political binaries without relying on critical ‘deconstruction’; 2) revealing the ever-present material-semiotic fragility of those dualisms; and 3) unveiling the ideational ‘purifications’ that sustain dichotomies in spite of their often lacking an empirical basis through a refusal to engage with materiality.

Right-wing populism with Chinese characteristics? Identity, otherness and global imaginaries in debating world politics online

“…For critics, however, the liberal international order not only has its origin in European imperial and colonial histories characterised by violence and domination, but also continues to legitimate hierarchical relations through a series of ‘world political binaries’ (Austin, 2017): the West and the non-West; the liberal and the illiberal; the civilised and the barbarian; and so forth. It is argued that the Eurocentric ordering of the international has an uneasy relationship with difference in conceiving of ‘others as not properly different, but either threatening or just behind a historical queue’ (Nordin, 2016: 156).…”

Assembling cybersecurity: The politics and materiality of technical malware reports and the case of Stuxnet

“…Like other imperceptible hazards, apprehending the object and any risks that it poses requires its articulation and translation as such (Kuchinskaya, 2014). Such an analysis can therefore show where materiality is making a difference (Austin, 2017). Symantec's efforts are demonstrative of these kinds of productive efforts.…”

Towards an International Political Ergonomics

“…However, while Sikkink has aided in the growth of a post hoc ‘justice cascade’ in which the strengthening of human rights norms has seen a rise in criminal prosecution, the practical effects of norm diffusion are less encouraging. For example, the strengthening of anti-torture norms has occurred without continued drops in the state-led use of torture (Austin, 2016b, 2017; Austin and Bocco, 2017; Noack, 2014), and this fact should be unsurprising. It has long been known that the prosecution and punishment of crimes does not produce significant declines in rates of drug dealing, gang violence or the like.…”

“…Following these principles, practice theorists have shown how bureaucratic pathologies (Neumann, 2007), political violence (Austin, 2016a, 2016b, 2017, forthcoming), terrorist recruitment (Crone, 2014), legal adaptations to technology (Leander, 2013), inefficiencies in humanitarian policy (Autesserre, 2014) and beyond are less the product of particular (more or less rational) choices or decisions framed by intersubjective horizons of meaning (which might be altered via logics of argumentation (Risse, 2000)) or cost–benefit calculations founded on a logic of consequences meditated over by (more or less) rational agents, so much as the product of a somewhat ‘unconscious’ or ‘non-reflexive’ re-articulation of repertoires of actions that force repetition even where these practices are either consensually recognized as pathological or, at a more minimal level, subject to a great deal of social controversy. Put simply, these are practices that occur repeatedly despite their not existing a consensus for their desirability.…”