Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War

by Gabrielle Hecht (Editor)

Investigations into how technologies became peculiar forms of politics in an expanded geography of the Cold War. The Cold War was not simply a duel of superpowers. It took place not just in Washington and Moscow but also in the social and political arenas of geographically far-flung countries emerging from colonial rule. Moreover, Cold War tensions were manifest not only in global political disputes but also in struggles over technology. Technological systems and expertise offered a powerful way to shape countries politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Entangled Geographies explores how Cold War politics, imperialism, and postcolonial nation building became entangled in technologies and considers the legacies of those entanglements for today's globalized world. The essays address such topics as the islands and atolls taken over for military and technological purposes by the supposedly non-imperial United States, apartheid-era South Africa's efforts to achieve international legitimacy as a nuclear nation, international technical assistance and Cold War politics, the Saudi irrigation system that spurred a Shi'i rebellion, and the momentary technopolitics of emergency as practiced by Medecins sans Frontières. The contributors to Entangled Geographies offer insights from the anthropology and history of development, from diplomatic history, and from science and technology studies. The book represents a unique synthesis of these three disciplines, providing new perspectives on the global Cold War.

337 pages, Paperback

First published April 4, 2011

About the author

Gabrielle Hecht is Stanton Foundation Professor of Nuclear Security and Professor of History at Stanford University. She earned her bachelor's degree in Physics from MIT in 1986, and her Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992.

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent collection that draws together disparate work on the history of developmental projects in the South during the third quarter of the twentieth century, using the concept of the technopolitical as a lead line. Particularly useful is the chapter on the circulation of experts as former colonial experts transformed themselves into development experts and consultants. Whereas colonial empires, with their capital intensive investments in particular locales had especially valued "local knowledge" (whether of the technical or humanist-orientalist sort), in the post colonial period these experts "deterritorialized" their knowledge to become generalists, so that they could sell their "knowledge" to potential buyers everywhere. The UN actually facilitated this de-localization of development knowledge, celebrating multicultural teams as a way to transcend the hierarchical relations of the colonial period. In doing this, it abandoned the value of local knowledge however.

In general, many of the papers together show the way that the language of technology was used to erase politics, to create a sense that there was some of "imperative" that had to be obeyed, and thus to avoid political negotiation over implementation of various developmental schemes: "the allure of technopolitical strategies is the displacement of power onto technical things, a displacement that designers and politicians sometimes hope to make permanent" (3). Of course the underlying social and political issues did not go away away just because the discourse of technological imperatives attempted to sweep them under the rug, and the result in many cases was a return of the repressed politics. This phenomenon has a classic case in Toby Jones's excellent discussion of the reconfiguration of the irrigation system in Eastern Arabia, under the guise of modernity, which ignored the sectarian and class splits in traditional water usage rights, thinking the modern system would produce such surplus that traditional tensions would be obviated.

As a general historiographical exercise, the paper very much continues Westad's effort to "deprovincialize" the representation of the Cold War as a contest between superpowers, instead focusing on the complex, negotiated, and locally refracted way that the Cold War struggle played out, with local elites and subalterns using the Cold War framing and idioms to achieve their own ends in the context of local struggles that often had nothing intrinsic to do with the ideological or geopolitical struggle of the Gaddisian Cold War.