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‘What are the grounds for knowledge claims?’ asked Sandra Harding (1992) in her seminal work on standpoint theory and ‘strong objectivity’. Revisiting questions about the validity of knowledge claims appears urgent today when the Oxford English Dictionary has consecrated ‘post-truth’ as the new word of 2016.1 Declarations of an age of post-truth abound across the political spectrum. Echoes of post-truth debates have been felt in critical security studies and international relations, as well as the social sciences more widely, including science and technology studies (e.g. Berling and Bueger, 2017; Fuller, 2016a, 2017; Jasanoff and Simmet, 2017; Sismondo, 2017). Diagnoses of ‘how we got here’ rushed to pinpoint the role of social media, Facebook ‘echo chambers’, the decline of the print press that had long sustained our ‘imagined communities’, but also the role of post-structuralist approaches, the so-called postmodern intellectuals, and science and technology studies ideas of the ‘universalization of symmetry’ (Fuller, 2016a, 2017). Post-structuralist, feminist and postcolonial approaches have dismantled the universality of truth and have exposed the power relations that underpin different regimes of truth. Understanding knowledge as something that is socially and politically enacted – that is, acted into being as well as acted upon – rather than methodologically derived from or corroborated by empirical worlds has put such approaches back in the dock for having done the intellectual groundwork for the current rise of post-truth. Such accusations are not new and are not limited to political fluctuations. From its inception, anti-foundational work that did not primarily ground knowledge in epistemological standards was challenged on grounds of undermining the possibilities of scientific knowledge in international relations (Keohane, 1988).

Recent engagements with questions of method and methodology in critical security studies have also rearticulated the question of validity, in particular how to make valid empirical statements within critical security studies. These attempts to formulate standards of validity have returned largely to epistemological debates, focused on the similarities or differences between qualitative and quantitative methods. They have sought to define standards that are internal to knowledge, rather than social or historical. In particular, standards of rigour, systematicity, objectivity and consistency have been invoked, contested and rearticulated (e.g. Hansen, 2006; Jackson, 2011; Klotz and Lynch, 2007; Salter, 2012).

Epistemology The function of an ideal type in epistemology comes in direct relation to its ontological aspects. Conceiving securitization as an ideal type reinforces the sociological attempt to explain the construction of threats by revealing the social actions and structures that underline them. Here, however, explanation cannot be put only in terms of a ‘deductive– nomological’ procedure. Rather, it requires an abstraction of characteristic features of a social phenomenon in order to ascertain whether these elements are instances of typical traits of the ideal type. In his sophisticated study of Weber’s theoretical proposals, Dieter Henrich notes, ‘ideal types are explanations – accomplished in the form of concept – of … events by reference to the circumstances which made their existence possible’.38 A theory of securitization of this sort brings out relevant factors or conditions, which tell scholars what brought about a phenomenon or why is that a securitizing move succeeded. In ‘The Meaning of “Theory”’, Gabriel Abend calls this ‘theory2’.39

Indeed, as the events or phenomena are social, it is worth emphasizing that their existence depends, to a great extent (but not exclusively), on the meaningful cause through which they are designed. The task of a sociological theory of securitization is not just to grasp what it means to say that a phenomenon is a threat, however; it wants to decipher the sequences of cause-and-effect in securitization (in the sense that the definition of a threat leads to similar consequences: the creation of deontic powers). So far as it goes, this enterprise would establish the investigation of social mechanisms at the center of its explanatory architecture.40 I assume that Wæver’s endorsement of social mechanisms makes our positions a bit closer. But Wæver argues that he does ‘not apply causal mechanisms to what brought securitization into being. Only to the effects of securitization’.41 But then, what is left of the idea of causal mechanisms, if we only examine effects, not the causal processes that produce a given outcome?42 Not that causal processes are the only forces that matter in securitization; instead, the problem lies with some lack of consistency. To agree that causal mechanisms are important conveys its own set of epistemological commitments. It is not à la carte type of preferences

The argument presented here is not a personal indictment of any particular author. Contrary to commonsense notions that reduce racism to interpersonal prejudices of openly bigoted individuals, racism and white supremacy are systems of power (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). Epistemic racism is intrinsic to Western knowledge structures, and not merely a failure of individual scholarship (Bhambra, 2013; Grosfoguel, 2003). Just as the ongoing racialized distribution of life chances across liberal societies is not simply the effect of intentionally racist individuals, racialized knowledge production is not simply the result of bad or flawed individual theorists. Colonial and racist assumptions about racial and civilizational difference animate the core political categories and theoretical frameworks of Western social and political thought. As we demonstrate, this is also true of classic securitization theory.

We begin by acknowledging that discussions of racism or colonialism are not entirely absent in classic securitization theory. Security: A New Framework for Analysis briefly discusses the racial politics of US domestic societal security (Buzan et al., 1998: 130). In one of securitization theory’s original formulations, Wæver discusses neo-Nazi attacks on asylum-seekers and racist justifications for the securitization of migration (Wæver, 1995; 70; see also Buzan et al., 1998; 42, 44–45). Colonialism is sometimes referenced (see Buzan et al., 1998: 61, 63, 98, 129; Buzan and Wæver, 2003: 14–18, 221), and white supremacism is mentioned as a potential ‘macrosecuritization’ (Buzan and Wæver, 2009: 263). Our argument is not that race is absent in securitization theory, but that racist political thought is integral to it, even when classic securitization theory texts discuss race or colonialism.

The argument presented here is not a personal indictment of any particular author. Contrary to commonsense notions that reduce racism to interpersonal prejudices of openly bigoted individuals, racism and white supremacy are systems of power (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). Epistemic racism is intrinsic to Western knowledge structures, and not merely a failure of individual scholarship (Bhambra, 2013; Grosfoguel, 2003). Just as the ongoing racialized distribution of life chances across liberal societies is not simply the effect of intentionally racist individuals, racialized knowledge production is not simply the result of bad or flawed individual theorists. Colonial and racist assumptions about racial and civilizational difference animate the core political categories and theoretical frameworks of Western social and political thought. As we demonstrate, this is also true of classic securitization theory.

We begin by acknowledging that discussions of racism or colonialism are not entirely absent in classic securitization theory. Security: A New Framework for Analysis briefly discusses the racial politics of US domestic societal security (Buzan et al., 1998: 130). In one of securitization theory’s original formulations, Wæver discusses neo-Nazi attacks on asylum-seekers and racist justifications for the securitization of migration (Wæver, 1995; 70; see also Buzan et al., 1998; 42, 44–45). Colonialism is sometimes referenced (see Buzan et al., 1998: 61, 63, 98, 129; Buzan and Wæver, 2003: 14–18, 221), and white supremacism is mentioned as a potential ‘macrosecuritization’ (Buzan and Wæver, 2009: 263). Our argument is not that race is absent in securitization theory, but that racist political thought is integral to it, even when classic securitization theory texts discuss race or colonialism.

The central argument of this article is that the current hegemonic consensus in the ‘Global North’ about the ‘China threat’ is not just the result of a neutral analysis of reality, but rather a discursive construction remarkably informed by global privilege and practices that aim to maintain such privilege. I have analysed the relation between the prevailing anti-China narrative and the entitlements and supremacism that stem from the global privilege enjoyed by the ‘Global North’, with a particular focus on the United States, across a diversity of domains (political, military, economic, technologic, cultural, and academic, as well as the relevance of ‘white privilege’). Moreover, the feeling that those shared global privileges are jeopardised and, therefore, should be safeguarded, is a pivotal factor that enables the articulation of otherwise highly heterogeneous groups in the ‘Global North’ vis-à-vis the common ‘enemy’: China. Simultaneously, this contingently sedimented imaginary serves to legitimise the global privileges and consequent domination of the international order by the ‘Global North’ as a universal good that China is not entitled to challenge.

Much as it transpired during the ‘Cold War’ against the Soviet Union, Manichean paradigms tend to define and perpetuate a frivolous and distorted division between virtuous heroes and dreadful villains. This is an unsophisticated and dichotomous ‘Schmittian’ worldview defined by the ‘culture of enmity’, which can be described as a discursive framework fixated on purposively identifying and constructing insurmountable differences with a chosen ‘Other’ to ultimately legitimate its elimination (see Brossat & Ruiz Casado, 2023). Carl Schmitt argued that the essence of the political lies in the distinction between friend and enemy, which derives from the most extreme case of emergency, war, overriding all other distinctions (Marchart, 2007, p. 41). The consolidation of these radically antagonistic relations of exteriority establishes a framework of normative constraints that also limits dissenting voices and thus pluralism within the democracies of the ‘Global North’, hindering a balanced discussion and restricting the available policy alternatives—be it due to firm belief that anti-China policies are the only acceptable ones or that deviating from them would be met with opposition from the general public (e.g., for the reaction to the words of French President Macron after he visited China, see Rankin, 2023).

At the beginning of this paper a question was posed: What is the logic of the Russian “threat”, and are there any “cures” suggested in mainstream media coverage? Before, this is answered in full, the bits of the complex puzzle need to be brought together in order to make sense of the bigger picture. Firstly, is the role of journalism and the mass media. This institution has managed to create a branded myth around itself as being a fourth estate, an institution that checks and balances the political power in the name of public interest. However, there are concerns and evidence that journalism’s role has become co-opted by economic and political interests. This is precisely because of the assumed power to influence perception and shape public opinion. The mainstream mass media are indelibly tied to the interests of the hegemonic system of liberal democracy acting in the capacity as their information gatekeeper and watchdog.

Currently, that system of liberal democracy is experiencing a multi-levelled crisis in terms of public trust and legitimacy owing to what has been labelled as being the populist challenge. This has been seen in the US elections when Trump beat his rival and the anticipated winner (by mainstream politics and mass media) Hillary Clinton, when the favoured liberal contender was beaten by someone that rhetorically stood against the liberal system. There were also similar challenges found in BREXIT, the French and German elections. Another problem of contemporary politics is found in the competition for increasingly scarcer governmental financial resources. As a result, a common communication strategy seems to have been developed using a “cookie cutter” approach in order to attain these political and economic objectives. After some years of not being the global folklore devil, Russia has been re-elevated to this status, which may be in part through the ability of the moral panic communicators to link the supervillain brand of the Soviet Union from the Cold War to the Russian Federation. Thereby, the brand has some pre-existing level of recognition and status to the target audiences.

This textbook study helped contextualize the notion that discourses of education, in this case the discourses found in textbooks, shape our thinking and constitute subjectivities, whether we are aware of it or not. Subjectivities that are partly constituted by the discourses of science education are specific and can be traced, but also reworked and reformulated. Reworking these discourses, and the subjectivities they help constitute, is possible when educators endeavour to make the invisible visible through analytical engagement with discourses, and shift these discourses toward the promotion of an ecologically and socially just future.

Disruption of subjectification is always possible at the site where discourses and ideological practices that constrain and afford choices for students are repeated. Ironically, it is this site of repetition where resistance is possible because subjectivities, identities, and ways of being are sustained through constant, iterative performances at multiple sites. Taking the example of (the performance of) white(ness), male(ness), heterosexuality, able-bodied(ness) in educational settings, we must rework the repetitive practices and discourses that divide males and females, silence all other sexualities, and mask the Eurocentric, patriarchal image of science that becomes the assumed ‘subject of science’ (like the one alluded to in the epigraph to this chapter). Although power is exercised through discourses and their accompanying apparatuses (schools etc.), freedom is always possible because power can be “exercised over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free” (Foucault 1982, p. 790). Education is co-extensive with the production of subjectivities, and remains a site of resistance precisely because it can effect change. Subjectivity is central to modern struggles for justice, and in new informational, ‘immaterial’ economies, essential for social and political change.

The article is divided into two parts. The first part establishes the theoretical framework, drawing on discourse theory and privilege studies, and defines key concepts for the subsequent analysis, especially ‘Global North’ and ‘global privilege’. The second part illustrates the dynamics by which the global privilege of ‘Global North’ countries, and particularly the United States, interacts with the hegemonic discursive articulation of China as a threatening enemy across various domains. In conclusion, the article contends that the current hegemonic consensus in the ‘Global North’ about the ‘China threat’ is not just the result of a neutral analysis of reality but rather a discursive construction remarkably informed by global privilege and practices that aim to maintain such privilege, particularly the United States. These findings, in conjunction with the interdisciplinary methodology employed, have profound implications for our comprehension of the complexities inherent in global affairs. They underscore the necessity for self-reflection on privilege, a critical examination of unequal international relations and the importance of empathising with those perceived as the ‘enemy’ in order to foster peaceful coexistence.

Theoretical Framework and Main Concepts

Yet, the notion of ‘act’ is central for understanding the political investment made in moving towards studying security as a speech act. The concept of ‘act’ conditions the political critique of security practice that is possible within this approach. Let’s start from two short quotes that express the political dimensions of the security speech act: ‘By uttering “security” a state representative

moves a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it.’ (Wæver, 1995: 55) ‘Thereby the actor has claimed a right to handle the issue through extraordinary means to break the normal political rules of the game...’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 24) The key political quality of the speech act of security is a break in the normal political rules of the game. When security becomes an act it is not a routine practice, an acting out of given procedures and institutionalised conditions of felicity, a habitual practice, but it creates a scene in which actors and things are brought into a relation that challenges a given way of doing things. It sets something in motion by enacting the unexpected, unknown, unpredictable (Isin, 2008: 27). A break in instituted normality is what makes securitisation – a state representative moving a particular development into a [security] area – political. Following Isin’s work on ‘acts,’ let’s use the term ‘rupture’ to express this central quality of an act. (Isin, 2008) An act creates ‘a scene’ that ruptures a given order. The idea of rupture does not refer to replacing one order with another or one conception of order challenging another, however. Rather it refers to practices that create boundary conditions, however infinitesimal and momentary, through enacting limits of a given order. Enacting refers to both expressing limits and bringing the limits into being as an issue of contestation. They ‘raise the bet’ and create ‘a test case.’ ‘The point of my argument, however, is not that to speak “security” means simply to talk in a higher-pitched voice. It is slightly more complex than that: “security” is a specific move that entails consequences which involve risking oneself and offering a specific issue as a test case. Doing this may have a price and, in that sense, it could be regarded as a way to “raise the bet”.’ (Wæver, 1995: 75) At issue is not if an audience accepts the speech act of security – if the intentionality of securitising by those speaking security is realised through an audience agreeing with them or not. Neither is it whether security practices and technologies become institutionalised in routines and technologies one encounters at airports or embassies. The ‘realisation’ of an act consists of the creation of a rupturing scene itself, irrespective of its acceptance and institutionalisation. ‘To act, then, is neither arriving at a scene nor fleeing from it, but actually engaging in its creation.’ (Isin, 2008: 27) What matters is that the scene brought into existence as ‘an assemblage of acts, actions and actors in a historically and geographically concrete situation’ (Isin, 2008: 24) by actors remaining at the rupturing scene rather than fleeing from it.

Propaganda has the positive function of creating unity and mobilizing people and resources towards a rational and strategic objective. However, propaganda can also have the negative consequence of diminishing rational decision-making. A world divided between good and evil makes confrontation moral and compromise immoral. As Walter Lipmann discovered, propaganda is an essential tool to mobilize the public towards the confrontation of an adversary, although it often thwarts a workable peace.

Propaganda undermines the ability to mitigate the security dilemma, the situation in which actions taken by one state to enhance its security cause insecurity and thus counter-actions by other states. It is imperative to understand the security challenges of an adversary to aptly analyze their security policies and formulate the ideal policy in response. The West’s policies towards Russia are primarily informed by the security challenges from Russia, and Russia’s policies towards the West are similarly shaped principally by the security threats from the West. Recognizing that the actions taken by one state to increase its security can decrease the security of the rival state is imperative to enhance mutual security. This should not be controversial as the security dilemma is one of the most central concepts in political science and international relations, which infers that power maximization does not equate to security maximization.

Propaganda is characterised by the appeal of virtuous ideas such as reason, civilisation and human freedom to define the in-groups and the diametrically opposite to define Russia as the main out-group. Relations between the West and Russia have throughout history been conceptualised as a relationship between political subjects that drives civilisation forward, and political objects that must be civilised. The teacher-student relationship justifies a hierarchy and sovereign inequality as inferior ethnicity, morality, culture and values cannot be given equal status to the superior.

Propaganda is instrumental to legitimise special privileges for the West as the teacher, while the uncivilised nature of the Russian student presents an ultimatum—accept the role as the apprentice or be confronted in the form of containment or defeat. Either way, the stereotype precludes Russia from restoring its political subjectivity and sovereign equality. Russia’s acceptance of its role as an apprentice of the West is imperative for the West own identity-building as a benign hegemon devoted to socialising and civilising for common good. Andrius Kubilius, a member of the European Parliament and the former Prime Minister of Lithuania, argued for a combination: “The new EU strategy towards Russia should entail three elements—deterrence, containment and transformation” (Kubilius, 2021).

AI has been increasingly associated with radicalization, extremism, and polarization. Each of these terms has various definitions and have been subject to analysis across a deep and broad literature in many academic dicisplines. There is no consensus view in the literature of what constitutes radicalism or polarization or indeed how they can be measured. There is nothing inherently wrong with taking a radical position on a political, social or economic issue, and some radical beliefs have led to social progress. The term radicalism has also been used to refer to a more progressive and liberal politics [29]. The concern of this article, however, is to look at the connection between radicalism, polarization and violence in the modern context, and the impact of AI on these dynamics. In the context of this paper, radicalism is referred to as a process in which an individual or group adopts beliefs that are outside of the acceptable norms of society including a desire to break with the continuity of social institutions, stemming from a disbelief in their reformability [30]. In the contemporary era, and in popular usage, radicalism stands for political extremism of any variety, of the left or right [31], including such beliefs as white supremacy (the idea that whites are inherently superior to other races), white replacement theory (the notion that white people are being replaced by ethnic minorities), extreme forms of conspiracy theory (those espoused by the QAnon group, for example), and, crucially, the belief that violence against other peoples is acceptable and/or necessary in the pursuance of political goals or motivations. Radical beliefs contribute to polarization and form the basis of it – in this context, political polarization is the process of divergence of political attitudes to ideological extremes [32]. This can entail societies and/or societal groups become divided and through which incompatible and extreme views about the way that society should be governed emerge. Polarization is more likely if large numbers of people adopt radical beliefs, and can be (positively or negatively) influenced by political leaders, including through demonizing opposition politicians or groups, political reforms, curtailing democratic freedoms, and/or pursuing radical social and economic policies [33]. Polarization can also be the context in which radicalization and political violence occurs and/or an enabler for extremist violence [34]. According to recent research, polarization can create a matrix of vulnerabilities that may lead to violent extremism, and there are securitized forms of polarization that have emerged during the period of the post-9/11 war on terror which have contributed to armed conflict and political violence (these will be returned to later in the article).

So what is the connection between AI and these phenomenon? Information and communications technologies are increasingly recognized as having an instrumental effect on radicalization (the process through which an individual adopts radical or extreme beliefs), as well as polarization and the resort to political violence [35]. Technology is rarely the sole factor in these processes, and a mix of socio-economic, cultural, cognitive and historical factors are normally at play. In the post-9/11 period, technology has been instrumentalized by individuals and groups to increase levels of polarization, radicalize and encourage extreme political viewpoints, and in some cases directly encourage and cause political violence. Al Qaeda and ISIS activities online, for example, are aimed at radicalizing people into a belief system in which violence is a core goal, and these groups have contributed to and exploited polarization within societies and within the international system. On the far-right, online groups, sites and networks have also engaged in polarization and radicalization processes, calling, among other things, for white people to be ‘defended’ from the threat of multiculturalism, and creating narratives that depict those with opposing political viewpoints as anarchist, terrorists, or radicals themselves [36]. According to recent research, extremist groups are harrnessing the power of emerging technologies, including the algorithms that exist on social media that divert people's attention to extremist content, through the use of gaming platforms that can be modified to promote or reflect extremist goals or viewpoints, and through the use of AI generative models “that may enable and accelerate the production of a greater quantity and quality of digital propaganda manufactured by non-state extremist actors” [37].

As a subset of the cultural domain, global privilege in the academic field deserves a separate mention. Bob Pease’s work criticises North American scholars in the field of privilege studies for not naming and interrogating their own privilege emanating ‘from living in one of the most powerful, developed and affluent countries in the world’ (2010, p. 40). For instance, English being the hegemonic language in academia is a form of privilege that bestows advantages upon the scholars from some countries (and, therefore, their viewpoints) simply by virtue of birth, while simultaneously limiting the visibility and opportunities of non-English speakers. Furthermore, individuals born into financially privileged environments have the opportunity to receive English training or attend schools considered more prestigious. This implies that the bulk of academic publications come from comparatively privileged groups, shaping knowledge production with a bias from its inception (see Nair, 2022, pp. 83–96; Pease, 2010, pp. 51, 58–59).

Research has shown that the impact of privilege in academic inquiry is apparent in both the researcher’s ‘assumptions and narratives’ used to interpret their field experiences, as well as in the relationship established between the researcher and their object of study (McCorkel & Myers, 2003). Pease (2010, p. 43) similarly argues that ‘western social sciences are so embedded within Eurocentric assumptions that most social scientists are unaware of their European bias’. Consequently, the deeply ingrained theses of the dominant groups within the academia lead many scholars to aprioristically neglect and dismiss the arguments of the ‘Other’. The tendency towards biased judgements can be particularly damaging when examining topics that touch upon the researcher’s own privileges, and where the researcher may have a vested interest in obtaining a particular outcome (McCorkel & Myers, 2003, p. 226). As a way of illustration, a study by Hermann Kurthen (2020, p. 1) demonstrated that no matter the ideological leaning of the 37 US foreign policy experts he interviewed, all of them coincided with the imperative of ‘safeguarding US global leadership, maintaining alliances, securing US prosperity, orienting at values, and believing in a mission’.

Technological innovation and security studies: from instrumentalism to imaginaries Dynamics of technological innovation inform central narratives of international systemic change in IR (e.g. Organski 1968; Brooks and Wohlforth 2015/16). Core disciplinary accounts of the rise and fall of great powers, and thus the transition from one international order to another, are underpinned by accounts of how technological innovations diffuse across the International. More broadly, technological innovation and the wealth it is assumed to produce is often equated with national power as such (Mearsheimer 2001: 62; Taylor, M.Z., 2004: 602). While most of this scholarship black boxes the political economy of technological innovation, an important subset of work on the political economy of weapons procurement has detailed the impact of bureaucratic politics, pork-barrel politics and electoral incentives, and defence contractor lobbying on levels of defence expenditure and government support for private sector research and development (e.g. Gholz and Sapolsky 2000). However, the primary focus of this research has been on technological innovation in the defence sector, rather than processes of technological innovation in the wider economy. With some significant recent exceptions (Taylor, M.Z., 2004, Taylor 2012, 2016; Kennedy and Lim 2018), detailed study of the broader politics and processes of technological innovation within states – as opposed to the dynamics of technological diffusion between states – has not been a central point of focus for security studies. 198 D. R. MCCARTHY Where processes of technological innovation have been analysed in greater detail in IR, the dominant conceptualisation of innovation is structured by an ideal-typical understanding of what innovation should look like. Drawing on the work of economic historians and rational choice theory, explanations for the support for or resistance to innovation are located in the balance between winners and losers in the process of change (Taylor 2012, 129–133). These are determined by the institutional configuration of a given state – the property regimes, electoral systems, research and development bodies, and so forth – which make innovation practices more or less successful. Even in the most sophisticated accounts of how technological innovation occurs (e.g. Taylor 2016), innovation functions in the background as an ideal type whose course is shaped, diverted, or blocked by the absence of specific policies, and often by the presence of national cultural impediments (Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff 2017, 786). Actors incentive structures, whether shaped by domestic political interests or external security concerns (Taylor 2016), are the determinant of whether or not a state will embrace innovation. This is a ‘deficit’ model of innovation, in which a norm of efficiency is deployed to determine the comparative efficacy of different bundles of innovation policies (Pfotenhauer, Juhl, and Aarden 2019; Feenberg 2002, 6, 63, passim). The innovation model underpinning these ideal-types prescribe what innovation should look like as an end-point (Godin 2006); this condition has never historically existed. Technological innovation is subsequently glossed as the instrumental pursuit of a given outcome, and the motivations for pursuing innovation are similarly understood in instrumentalist terms.1 Given both the lack of evidence on the efficacy of any given bundle of innovation policies – their impact on economic growth, and thus national security, remains uncertain (Berman 2013, 400–401, 421; Leitner 2017) – answering why states pursue specific forms of innovation requires broadening our horizons beyond an instrumentalist view. Contributions from Science and Technology Studies (STS), historians of technology, and increasingly from IR, have stressed that social, political, and historical contexts are central to both the generic embrace of innovation and to the specific form that innovation assumes (Nowotny 2006; Nye 2003; Schmid and Huang 2017; Pfotenhauer and Juhl 2017). Technological innovation is not merely valued due to its ability to deliver material prosperity (although we should not underplay this), but also as an expression of a specific set of cultural values. The pull of technonationalism – understood as the national prestige political communities attach to technological innovation rather than as a synonym for autarky (Edgerton 2007; cf. Bitzinger 2015; Kennedy 2013) – is a prominent example. States pursue specific defence industrial policies, and innovation policies more broadly, because they reinforce valued identities and international esteem registered by technological achievements (Adas 1989; Ritchie 2019). Examining the pursuit of technological innovation requires moving beyond a sole focus on security competition and economic growth to consider the larger frames of meaning actors attach to innovation, particularly given that political actors clearly do not conceive of technological innovation in strictly instrumentalist terms. Undertaking this analysis requires that we understand the world-views that make sense of and support distinct institutional orders of technological innovation – the political processes through which specific social actors are empowered to make design decisions, wielding political authority in the materialisation of dominant socio-economic norms. As noted, recent work in security studies and International Relations has made important moves in this direction, unpacking how, for example, border technologies are creating in the laboratory prior to their employment in the material creation of sovereignty (Bourne, Johnson and Lisle 2015; Lisle 2018). Tracing out networks of association in this manner undercuts ideas of technological determinism and sociological determinism. Furthermore, for critical security studies this insight is of crucial importance in pushing beyond the reduction of technoscientific practices into the category of instrumental rationality. Analysing security practices in the laboratory thereby highlights both the misrepresentation of technoscientific practices and provides direct empirical evidence of the political struggles intrinsic to innovation . CRITICAL STUDIES ON SECURITY 199 At the same time laboratory politics are one part of the ordering of innovation. Laboratories exist are part of larger historically enduring social, economic, and political institutions which define how technological innovation occurs. The danger of focusing too narrowly on the laboratory, of embracing a thoroughgoing ‘flat ontology’ focused on localised and contingent hierarchies, is that it sidelines the careful mapping of enduring structures of social power (cf. Latour 1993, 36–37; Noys 2014). Remaining cognisant of the dangers of reifying social scientific concepts is important; struggling against easy explanatory recourse to an abstracted ‘capitalism’ or regime of ‘power/ knowledge’ for social outcomes is always required. Nevertheless, for a social science with emancipatory intent the game of historical and structural analysis is worth the candle. In other words, it is important to connect micro-practices of technoscience to the larger patterned forms of social relations as they occur over time if we wish to understand and change those practices. The Socio-Technical Imaginaries (STI) approach developed by Jasanoff and collaborators has sought to deepen and widen the STS view of politics for precisely this reason (Jasanoff 2015a, 18–19, 21). Jasanoff’s concept of co-production has extended the focus of STS beyond the laboratory to consider how technoscience operates in wider practices of world making. STI carefully traces out the connection between micro-political practices and the political orders they instantiate and reproduce. Alongside related work in STS, co-production analyzes the material and discursive practices that produce technoscience as an autonomous sphere of human activity over time (Ezrahi 1990). This attentiveness to the longue durée allows us to locate STI both in the broader family of historical materialisms, including but not limited to Marxist historical materialism (Jasanoff 2015, 20–24; Choat 2018). Imaginaries do not thereby exist in an unstructured vacuum, created out of whole cloth. Material and discursive institutional path dependencies operate as structuring pressures, shaping the plausible range of meaning-making activities that exist at any given historical moment. When allied to the analysis of political economy derived from Marxist Critical Theory – a focus largely neglected in the STI literature to date – the resulting synthesis captures the complex totality of modern capitalist international relations. This approach develops a monistic philosophy of internal relations to analyse socio-technical imaginaries of innovation, drawing on the heritage of Critical Theory and the gentle nods to dialectical ontologies in STI and the imaginaries approach more broadly (Jasanoff 2015, 4; Taylor. C., 2004, 31–38).2 In less grand terms, it recognises that ways of life are necessarily comprised of internally-related interests, meanings, and material practices. Imaginaries of technological innovation define the legitimate social location of its practice. For instance, designating technological innovation as appropriately located in the private sphere, and driven forward by market-led incentives, is one process through which imaginaries operate to reproduce the institutional division between the political and the economic in modern capitalist states (Wood 1995, 19–48; Feenberg 2002). To foreshadow the analysis below, the discretionary power to direct processes of technological innovation across the economy is defined by the historically path-dependent institution of private property rights. If we want to analyse, for instance, the connections between capitalist technological innovation and the creation of an insecure cyber-proletariat or ‘class-biased technological change’, it is necessary to have an account of social structure through which we can understand different social roles and their concomitant capacities for action (KrisTal 2019; Dyer-Witherford 2015; Roberts and Joseph 2015, 10–11, passim; Feenberg 2002). Moreover, the differentiation of technological innovation as political or nonpolitical, varying between political communities, produces innovation as democratic or nondemocratic. Subsequently, the right to design is denied to large swathes of national and global political communities, introducing a form of domination through which our collective futures are being decided.3 Imagining technological innovation is one part of the constitution of political order and the construction of political authority. Knowing how a given institutional order empowers specific social actors such as scientists, engineers, or corporate CEOs to undertake practices of innovation remains the necessary first step in tracing out networks of socio-technical action (cf. Balzaq and 200 D. R. MCCARTHY Dunn Cavelty 2015, 4–5, passim). Sedimented world-views support these orders. This includes the imagined relationship between innovation, science, industry, development, basic and applied research, state and society, in a constellation of meanings crafted over time (Godin 2006, 2015). In short, locally particular practices of technological innovation are necessarily embedded within larger historically enduring ecosystems of innovation and their attendant forms of political order, at local, national, and global scales. Analysing these ecosystems using the lens of STI focuses attention on how the ‘collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfilment of nationspecific scientific and/or technological projects’ (Jasanoff and S-H. Kim 2009, 120). Seeking to develop Benedict Anderson (2006[1983]) and Charles Taylor, C., (2004) social imaginaries framework, Jasanoff and Kim have extended their account of social imaginaries to include the technological. Socio-technical imaginaries have the character of background understandings that shape and are, in turn, expressed by social practice. In so far as this ‘common sense’ is constituted by narratives, myths, and cultural tropes, these are not theoretical frameworks (Taylor, C., 2004, 24–30). Rather, they are interrelated sets of ideas about how the world works, how it should work, and how humans and non-humans stand in relation to each other.4 Socio-technical imaginaries thereby disclose a actors’ presuppositions about socio-technical ontologies, sociologies of causation, and a normative evaluation of these. Setting the broad horizon of meaning in which socio-technical problems are understood, imaginaries frame specific political events or processes as problems and, in turn, set out a defined range of potential solutions to these problems. Sociotechnical imaginaries allow us to analyse how ways of life are imagined, and thus produced, over time. Employing this approach in security studies involves extending our view of national security imaginaries to include political cultures of technological innovation, complementing existing scholarship on the material and discursive construction of socio-technical infrastructures and their attendant security politics (Stevens 2015, 36, 100–109, passim; Ritchie 2019; Dunn Cavelty 2019; Peoples 2010). In its focus on imaginaries, STI shares similarities with securitisation theory, as to be expected given their often-shared theoretical roots (cf. Jasanoff 2015a; Balzacq, Leonard and Ruzicka 2016). Both approaches emphasise how political and security issues are framed and concretely materialised in socio-technical institutions, including the framing of political problems as ‘technical’, a form of rhetorical closure that differentiates ‘political’ from ‘non-political’ spheres of society, setting boundaries around, for example, democratic participation (Jasanoff and Kim 2009; McCarthy 2015, 52–53, 99–100; Hansen and Nissenbaum 2009, 1166–1168). As with successful acts of securitisation, ‘technification’ changes the status of a political issue (Hansen and Nissenbaum 2009, 1166–1168). At the same time, STI is distinct in focusing on how an already-accepted differentiation of spheres of technology and politics are either contested or maintained through security politics. Violation of this differentiation through the politicisation or securitisation of technological innovation, rather than the technification of an existing security issue, may be considered a security threat unrelated to questions of technical expertise at all, as in the myth of the lone inventor discussed below. The navigation of this boundary between the technical and the non-technical is informed by the wider world views of a given political culture whose forms of life security policies are designed to protect. Methodology The analysis presented below was informed by Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough 2010; van Dijk 2015; Leeuwen 2008). CDA focuses on how forms of meaning making reproduce structures of power and inequality. The internal-relational ontology that underpins the CDA approach to discourse analysis makes it an ideal methodology to analyse socio-technical imaginaries, which are both constituted through symbolic relations and focus on the relationship between meaning making and material practices (Fairclough 2010, 3, passim; Jasanoff and Kim 2009, 123). CRITICAL STUDIES ON SECURITY 201 This approach is also explicitly normative, with its concern for analysing shifting forms of democratic governance underpinned by an ethics of human flourishing and self-realisation. It is on this latter point that CDA departs from poststructuralist forms of discourse analysis, such as those prominently developed in security studies, even though the practical distance between them is often small (cf. Hansen 2006, 45–46). Thus, while the following analysis has drawn on this literature for its insights on methods of textual analysis (Hansen 2006; Milliken 1999) its methodology is nevertheless distinct. The discourse analysis proceeded as follows. Starting with the 2017 National Security Strategy and 2018 National Cybersecurity Strategy, a general survey of the primary source material was undertaken to understand the main themes of American socio-technical imaginaries (Hansen 2006, 52–53, 58–50). This clarified the centrality of intellectual property rights to technological innovation in American national security and cybersecurity imaginaries. As a result, research was guided towards a specific focus on this aspect of the overarching imaginary. Administration statements on IP security at events like World Intellectual Property Day, and the state institutions responsible for them, such as the Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC), became an important element of the research. Second, documents were contextualised to locate speaker and audience in a specific time and place in order to determine whether, and how, the discourse changed according to audience and location. The primary differences between US administrations are of tone and slight emphasis; no substantive difference was found depending on the audience being addressed. That is, a speech to a business organisation and a speech to a University audience delivered the same narrative. Close textual analysis was subsequently used to draw out the elements of the discourse and determine how it was constructed – how predicates, nouns, adjectives, metaphor, attributions of agency, and so forth, linked together to construct representations of social relations within the text (Milliken 1999, 231–237; van Dijk 2015, 474ff). For example, intellectual property rights are almost universally linked via predicates of ‘incentives’ for innovation in US policy documents and statements, in contrast to views of intellectual property as primarily a rent-seeking and unproductive part of the economy (e.g. Birch 2020). After the initial broad survey documents were selected by ‘following the actors’ – in this instance, following the intertextual references between relevant documents emerging from successive American presidential administrations, chiefly focusing on the G.W. Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations. For instance, the excerpt from Barack Obama’s speech in 2016 at Carnegie Mellon University presented below is a near word for word the repetition of remarks made at the 2014 White House ‘Maker Faire’, which was also quoted in the 2015 White House Strategy for Innovation. The core narrative presented below emerged inductively by tracking these textual connections. While the analysis has found the discourse is largely consistent between presidential administrations three differences should be noted. First, the Obama administration emphasises the important role of government support for innovation to a greater extent than either the Bush or Trump administrations, and it also connected the fertility of the American innovation ecosystem to equality of opportunity for all Americans to access this system (White House 2015b, passim). However, the differences between administrations are a matter of degree, not of kind. Second, the bombastic and aggressive rhetorical tone of the Trump administration is a significant departure from both preceeding administrations. Finally, the intertextual linkages of the Trump administration were more intense, as administration proclamations, speeches, and policy documents crossreferenced each other more extensively than previous administrations. For instance, the 2021 Report of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, in addition to quoting the 2017 NSS, quotes Trump’s 2020 Proclamation on World Intellectual Property Day, the 2019 Proclamation on National Manufacturing Day, his 2018 State of the Union Address, and so on, building a document largely out of the President’s own previous statements. In the following analysis, we will first unpack American national security fears around the erosion of their technological leadership writ large. This aspect of US imaginaries discloses a longstanding fear, in which American geopolitical power relies on its technological leadership; this view 202 D. R. MCCARTHY is dependent, in turn, on a causal narrative of innovation underpinned by the myth of the ‘lone inventor’ and the theory of human action it entails. In the second section, we will turn to the normative facet of American national security imaginaries of innovation. Here the normative justification of the American approach to innovation is detailed, focusing particularly on the relationship between market-led innovation and the self-realisation of the American national character. Combined, these facets of American socio-technical imaginaries of innovation portray threats to technological innovation as threats to the American way of life in its material practices and symbolic registers. Technological innovation, property rights, and American national security Cyber-enabled threats to the security of technological innovation are treated on equal terms with threats to critical infrastructure in American national security policy (White House 2018a, 14–17, passim; Department of Defence 2015, 33; Lynn 2010). The Trump Administration concisely captured this equivalence in its National Cyber Strategy (White House 2018a, 14), arguing Economic security is inherently tied to our national security. As the foundations of our economy are becoming increasingly rooted in digital technologies, the United States government will model and promote standards that protect our economic security and reinforce the vitality of the American marketplace and innovation. The threat to economic security, and thus national security, is not limited to the defence industrial base. Cybersecurity is here a facet of American economic security, with technological innovation considered in its functional role across the US economy. American policy describes threats to technological innovation in classic national security terms as a threat to the foundation of American economic strength and, subsequently, its national power. A series of National Security Strategy (NSS) statements have stressed that economic wealth is central to national power, American leadership, and the future of American global primacy. The 2010 NSS stated that, ‘Simply put, American innovation is the foundation of American Power’ (White House 2010, np, 2, 28, 51), while the 2015 NSS noted that the United States sought to ‘advance a model of American leadership rooted in the foundation of America’s economic and technological strengths and the values of the American people’ (White House 2015a, 1, 21). A shift in tone occurs under the Trump Administration towards more combative and pessimistic language, although the underlying message is the same, as is the underlying policy (Wolfe 2018, 202). The 2017 NSS stated that ‘Losing our innovation and technological edge would have far-reaching negative implications for American prosperity and power’ (White House 2017, 21; OSTP 2019). Contemporary socio-technical imaginaries of innovation in American policy are not reflective of the short-term drifting desires of policy experts (cf. Jepperson 2020, 52–53), but rather articulate the long-standing idea that technological innovation is central to the competitiveness of the American economy (Berman 2013, 417). Fears about the erosion of US economic power through the decline of its technological leadership centre primarily on the vulnerability of intellectual property rights due to the insecurity of digital networks (White House 2018a, 2, 16, passim; US Department of Justice 2018, 65; White House 2013). China is identified as the single most important source of threat to intellectual property rights – and thus technological innovation – in American policy, as it has been for nearly three decades. US security concerns around innovation are intertwined with the broadest possible geopolitical anxieties surrounding China’s rise and America’s decline. American officials stress the substantive economic shock of IP theft, in lost revenue and lost jobs. For instance, the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) asserts that some 45 million jobs, or 30% of the American labour market, are in IP intensive industries (IPEC 2016). Estimates of lost revenue are hard to accurately determine, but are substantial by any account; the US government estimates losses between 1–3% of GDP per year, or roughly 600 USD billion dollars a year, while President Trump suggested a figure of 300 USD billion dollars a year (United States Department of Justice 2018, 28; White House 2017). While clearly conscious of CRITICAL STUDIES ON SECURITY 203 the present impact of cybertheft on the US economy – reversal of harmful trade practices and IP theft was a central plank in the permanent campaign of the Trump Administration – American policy discourse conspicuously focused on the future impact of present threats. Former director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Command General Keith Alexander called cyber-enabled IP theft ‘The greatest transfer of wealth in history,’ asserting ‘that our future disappearing right there’, a view endorsed by the Commission on the Theft of Intellectual Property (Rogin 2012; IP Commission 2013; Blair and Alexander 2017). Cyber-enabled intellectual property rights theft is not merely a threat to present corporate profitability. While present threats to lost corporate revenue and lost jobs are certainly significant in US discourse (White House 2019a; IPEC 2019, 2, 6, passim), IP theft is imagined as targeting and undermining the very incentives that, in the causal narrative of US socio-technical imaginaries, are required to drive innovation forward into the future. The 2018 National Cyber Strategy (White House 2018a, 16) succinctly states this long-held policy view Strong intellectual property rights ensure continued economic growth and innovation in the digital age. The United States government has fostered and will continue to help foster a global intellectual property rights system that provides incentives for innovation through the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights such as patents, trademarks and copyrights. The theory of technological innovation disclosed in American policy has as its core institutional feature the protection of private property rights. These rights generate the incentives, and pressures, required to motivate actors to undertake technological innovation, as absent these innovations will not occur. A pithy turn of phrase by Abraham Lincoln – that intellectual property rights add ‘the fuel of interest to the fire of genius’ (White House 2011, 7; IPEC 2016, 2) – is the bedrock assumption on which the institutional apparatus of the United States government innovation ecosystem is built. In US imaginaries IP theft is an existential threat to American innovation because it damages the incentive structure required for technological innovation by making it unprofitable, removing the fuel that generates the combustion necessary for technological progress. Prominent strands of American culture inform these imaginaries. The prototype of the ‘lone genius,’ with Thomas Edison as its exemplar, remains prevalent in wider US socio-technical imaginaries around innovation (Lemley 2012; Pfotenhauer and Juhl 2017; Bix 2000, 11). The lone genius trope hold that the genius ‘can solve problems that stump the experts’, beetling away in home laboratories to build their inventions and reap their material reward (Lemley 2012, 710). Donald Trump’s high-profile comparison of Elon Musk to Edison (and the inventor of the wheel) captures, in a slightly mangled and exaggerated form, this wider notion: ‘[. . .] he’s one of our great geniuses, and we have to protect our genius. You know, we have to protect Thomas Edison and we have to protect all of these people that – came up with originally the light bulb and – the wheel and all of these things’ (CNBC 2020; White House 2018b; White House 2011, 9). Lone genius prototypes focus policy attention on threats to individual incentives in the marketplace rather than threats to innovation capacities that exist, for example, due to restrictive immigration policies. The theory of social action presented in US policy derived from the lone inventor myth thereby focuses on markets as the source of innovation in American society, with the private sector identified as the location of invention. Explicitly acknowledging the central role of state support to the process of technological innovation, Trump Administration Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross asserted that ‘Many of these innovations [the Internet, smart phones, and medical science] got their start with the help of Federal R&D funding. But it was the private sector that spun these technologies out of the laboratory and into the economy’ (Ross 2018). In other words,‘The private sector is America’s innovation engine’ (White House 2011, 9). American cybersecurity policy is designed to enabled the state to take steps to address market failures, particularly through the establishment of public-private partnerships designed to meet cybersecurity threats. Yet the point of this practice, enabled through these specific imaginaries, is to enable market-led innovation in the economy as a whole; the state’s role is always conceptualised as supportive of, and external to, the 204 D. R. MCCARTHY innovation process (White House 2011; cf. Pfotenhauer and Juhl 2017). The impact of these imaginaries is to reproduce the institutional separation between the public sector and the private sector, or that between politics and economics, within American society as a whole. In pursuing the security of technological innovation American policy makers are attempting to maintain a series of existing boundaries between what is, and what is not, political. In the causal account of technological innovation outlined above, American pursuit of the security of innovation is merely a means to the end of American national security, defined in conventional terms as economic and military power. This is an account of how technological innovation occurs, demonstrated through American exemplars, and, in turn, how it is threatened by cyber-enabled IP theft. It links a micro-level theory of human action linked to the broadest questions of world order and American global leadership. Yet, while these aspects of the US imaginary disclose something resembling instrumental rationality, the security of technological innovation is not valued solely for impact on national power and cannot be encapsulated in these terms. Intertwined with apparently generic means-ends calculations is a normative account of how and why the continued security of technological innovation is of signal importance to the American way of life. It is to this facet of US socio-technical imaginaries that we now turn. Protecting ‘our way of life’: market-led innovation and American national identity In contemporary US national security policy actualising the creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit of the American people is understood as central to the American way of life. Threats to technological innovation threaten the very practices that comprise American’s ways of ‘being in the world’. US imaginaries articulate the processes and products of material culture as central to the identity of the national community. Securing market-led technological is thereby understood as a normative project, rather than merely the instrumental pursuit of other values. American politicians’ sense of the United States as uniquely creative and entrepreneurial is well captured in a 2016 speech by Barack Obama (Obama 2016; White House 2015b, 65). Speaking about the role of technological innovation in revitalising the city of Pittsburgh, he stated And that’s consistent with this nation, who we are – a nation born from an idea that became the world’s laboratory. There aren’t a lot of countries where one of your Founding Fathers has an idea to fly a kite in a thunderstorm and helps to fundamentally change how we think about electricity. A place where the women who solved the equations to take us into space, even though they weren’t always acknowledged. A nation whose engineers brought us the Internet. Innovation is in our DNA.

Here, popular culture tropes and a mythic presentation of America’s political development intermingle to produce a powerful encapsulation of the dominant national identity constructed in US socio-technical imaginaries. The reference to Benjamin Franklin’s kite ties together innovation with the foundation of the American state. In an image that, while possibly false – the veracity of Franklin’s kite experiment to research electricity remains uncertain – nevertheless suggests that innovation is an essential aspect of the national character. ‘Who we are’, in this context, is a political community that finds its expression through a specific form of scientific and technological innovation, an understanding present throughout US policy in which market-led innovation allows the United States to realise its character. Narratives of American political development support this common-sense sociology of innovation, as contemporary US policy is linked to the historical founding of the republic. Section 1, Article 8§8 of the United States Constitution granted Congress the power ‘To Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries’ (Constitution of the United States 1788). American officials highlight this clause as responsible for the subsequent success of American capitalism and its track record of technological innovation (IPEC 2020, 2018; White House 2017, CRITICAL STUDIES ON SECURITY 205 2015b). Collapsing two different historical contexts separated by 230 years into a narrative of the historical development of a national community, this idea of simultaneity – the identity of past and present – is of signal importance in producing a techno-nationalist identity (Anderson 2006 [1983], 22–36). Inter-societal comparison is, of course, of central importance in these imaginaries. In the same Obama went on to stress that ‘And it is the thing that sets us apart; that ability to imagine and hypothesise, and then test and figure stuff out, and tinker and make things and make them better, and then break them down and rework them (Obama 2016; White House 2017, 2, 21). American cultural identity has always been constructed, in part, via the relational-comparative register of technological culture, with societies framed as modern, traditional, civilised or barbaric through American’s contrast of technological artefacts (Adas 1989; 2006). From the initial colonial settlement through the closing of the frontier at the end of the 19th century white European settlement was justified through technological comparison with indigenous political communities. Taking up the imperial mantel in the 20th century, American global dominance was conceived and conducted in technological registers, particularly in foreign development policy as the United States attempted to physically remake the world in its own image (Ekbladh 2010; Adas 1989, 402–418). Obama’s indicative statement highlights the weight these comparisons retain in the composition of American nationalism. Indeed, American ingenuity in creating the Internet is an oft-noted point of comparison (White House 2018a, passim) used to justify contemporary cybersecurity strategies, its national character materialised in information technology. These comparative exercises are couched in distinctively normative terms. Built around popular historical narratives and myths, the socio-technical imaginaries of innovation disclosed by the American state ascribe specific normative values to the US system of market-led innovation. At one level, these values are closely linked to the broader relationship between private property and political liberty that is foundational to American political thought (Foley 2008, 213–237). Private property ownership incentivises innovation but, just as significantly, it provides a sphere of liberty in which individuals are free to decide for themselves how to dispose of their possessions. Thus the causal story in US socio-technical imaginaries, expressed above in the notion that innovation requires fuel in the form of IP protection is buttressed by the normative argument that this reward is also an expression of justice (Delrahim 2018; IPEC 2016, 32), a view derived from a Lockean justification of private property rights as filtered through the Founding Fathers. The hard work of American entrepreneurs morally justifies property in the product of their labour and its associated material benefits (White House 2017, 21). More surprisingly, however, is the framing of technological innovation, and intellectual property rights, in the language of individual and national self-realisation. The most striking example comes from Dana Gioia, Poet Laureate of California, in her ‘Preamble’ to IPEC’s 2016 Report Supporting Innovation, Creativity, & Enterprise: Charting a Path Ahead. In a passage worth quoting at length, Gioia (IPEC 2016, np, italics in original) writes When Walt Whitman wrote, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” he was not discussing literature. What Whitman praised so prophetically was the vast and transformative creative energy that characterized his young nation and, indeed, democracy itself. The Greek root of poet means one who makes, creates, fashions, composes. The United States created itself – politically, socially, culturally – from the pieces of a colonial empire, and that early appetite for growth and experimentation has never been sated. American history is an achievement woven from innumerable threads of individuals acts of imagination and innovation. For Gioia, the American national character is expressed through its self-making innovations. American individualism and the ‘innumerable threads’ of everyday lives create something greater than their parts. Disclosed is a notion of the self-realisation and self-fashioning of America characteristic of Hegelian normative justifications of property rights. This passage – and the wider US discourse – suggests that the United States cannot realise its own national essence unless it can embark on market-led forms of technological innovation. Threats to intellectual property 206 D. R. MCCARTHY rights emanating from weaknesses in cybersecurity threaten the practices allowing Americans to express their ‘pioneering spirit’ (White House 2019b, 2018b; 2017, 21). This ethical concern for collective self-realisation captures the security of innovation as a project of national becoming. The teleological conception of American society, understood in terms of fulfilment of a pre-existing national character, belies the otherwise open-ended and contingent future-oriented temporalities that characterise technological innovation as a social practice.

This article used a consistent set of primary sources, an explicit methodology, and both qualitative and quantitative data to account for the evolution of the current securitization process which portrays great power competition, in the form of Russia’s and China’s open challenge to America’s position in the international system, as an existential threat to America’s place in the international system. While at some level the specific elements of this new narrative – revisionism, the democracy-autocracy binary, and spheres of influence – are revivals of Cold War tropes, this analysis allowed for a better understanding of the broader issues involved in how this narrative shift reflects U.S. geopolitical culture, how it believes this challenge has occurred, and how it perceives America’s role in the changing international system. From these, the likely future of American grand strategy and geopolitical culture is coming into clearer focus. It is the open recognition that the geopolitical status quo is actually slipping, a situation which some IRT scholars have been saying for some time (Schweller and Pu 2011; Layne 2012; Mearsheimer 2019), which has precipitated this narrative shift. This demonstrates exactly how closely tied U.S. self-identity and geopolitical culture are to the preservation of primacy, unipolarity, and the liberaldemocratic world order. Should one or more of these conditions fully collapse, then we are likely to see a dramatic rupture in American geopolitical culture – with a difficult redefinition of its place in the world, a popular backlash, and unpredictable results. Moreover, the quantitative data reveal that this narrative shift has had less to do with the growing capabilities of Russia/China than their ultimate goal to promote a new global architecture based upon multipolarity. The ability of Russia’s and China’s nuclear programs to end the physical existence of the U.S. has remained virtually the same since the end of the Cold War, and while these states have begun closing the military and technical gap between themselves and the U.S., this new geopolitical narrative more closely corresponds to a notable rise in references to their intentions, rather than capabilities. This is seen most clearly by the fact that Russia’s more overt challenge has resulted in it being singled out as the more significant threat over China, which, based upon raw current and future capabilities, is objectively a far larger danger. This raises important theoretical questions about threat perceptions and securitization processes which seemingly have more to do with perceptions about current and future aggressiveness than capabilities. This invites further study. Finally, LeGreco and Tracy (2009) noted that an equally important aspect of discourse/narrative tracing is to track what is not said. There was little acknowledgment from the American side that it had a substantive hand in precipitating these changes by either promoting a security dilemma between itself, on the one hand, and China/Russia, on the other, or that it has engaged in a grand strategy which has led to overextension and imperial decline. Therefore, according to this (self-)limited understanding on Washington’s part, there appears little that it can do to ameliorate the situation, and no course correction is seen as necessary except for confronting these states when their actions run contrary to U.S. interests. If the pattern leading up to the 2019 threat assessment is any indication, we are likely to see a closer alignment between this intensified threat narrative and a reinvigorated mission to preserve the status quo, without any self-awareness that this policy may be self-defeating. America appears to be firmly in the “’Try Harder!’” phase of strategic thinking, to use Legro’s (2005, 37) formulation. This is reflected in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), which appears to double down on the strategy of pursuing American primacy, even to the point of direct confrontation (Clarke and Ricketts 2017). By doing so, these officials are neither preparing American foreign policy nor its citizens for a revised geopolitical culture better suited to ensure a soft-landing of unipolarity. Consequently, it is likely that the United States “won’t see [the end] coming until it’s too late,” as Schweller (2011) speculated. Thus, a full accounting of why this broader structural change is occurring will likely elude American policymakers for the foreseeable future, leading to an even weaker United States and more fraught great power relations as the defining features of the international system and America’s place within it.

I think that we have now an understanding of what the situation is: The sovereign everywhere, be it the political or financial elite, fakes the legitimacy on which its power and authority supposedly rest. In truth, they rest on violence and terror, or the threat thereof. This is an obvious and essential aspect of the singularity of the present crisis. In this sense, the singularity of the crisis lies in the fact that the struggle for dominance is at one and the same time impaired and made more brutal by the lack of hegemony. This is true in general, but it is perhaps particularly true with respect to the greatest power on earth, the United States, whose hegemony has diminished or vanished. It is a fortiori true of whatever is called ‘the West,’ of which the US has for about a century represented the vanguard. Lacking hegemony, the sheer drive for domination has to show its true face, its raw violence. The usual, traditional ideological justifications for dominance (such as bringing democracy and freedom here and there) have now become very weak because of the contempt that the dominant nations (the US and its most powerful allies) regularly show toward legality, morality, and humanity. Of course, the so-called rogue states, thriving on corruption, do not fare any better in this sense, but for them, when they act autonomously and against the dictates of ‘the West,’ the specter of punishment, in the form of retaliatory war or even indictment from the International Criminal Court, remains a clear limit, a possibility. Not so for the dominant nations: who will stop the United States from striking anywhere at will, or Israel from regularly massacring people in the Gaza Strip, or envious France from once again trying its luck in Africa? Yet, though still dominant, these nations are painfully aware of their structural, ontological and historical, weakness. All attempts at concealing that weakness (and the uncomfortable awareness of it) only heighten the brutality in the exertion of what remains of their dominance. Although they rely on a highly sophisticated military machine (the technology of drones is a clear instance of this) and on an equally sophisticated diplomacy, which has traditionally been and increasingly is an outpost for military operations and global policing (now excellently incarnated by Africom), they know that they have lost their hegemony.

‘Domination without hegemony’ is a phrase that Giovanni Arrighi uses in his study of the long twentieth century and his lineages of the twenty-first century (1994/2010 and 2007). Originating with Ranajit Guha (1992), the phrase captures the singularity of the global crisis, the terminal stage of sovereignty, in Arrighi’s “historical investigation of the present and of the future” (1994/2010: 221). It acquires particular meaning in the light of Arrighi’s notion of the bifurcation of financial and military power. Without getting into the question, treated by Arrighi, of the rise of China and East Asia, what I want to note is that for Arrighi, early in the twenty-first century, and certainly with the ill-advised and catastrophic war against Iraq, “the US belle époque came to an end and US world hegemony entered what in all likelihood is its terminal crisis.” He continues:

When I began writing this column, Black Hawk helicopters were still circling over Washington, DC, flying low to intimidate and disperse protestors demanding justice for yet another murder of an unarmed Black person, this time George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

While the spread of popular uprisings against police brutality across the United States feels like an unprecedented tipping point, the impunity with which police and military forces operate is not new. Nor is it isolated to domestic policing. The willingness to weaponize state power against those expressing their discontent and calls for change has long been a part of both US domestic and foreign policy.

Liberal internationalists like Ignatieff, John Ikenberry, and AnneMarie Slaughter – self-identified adherents to a school of thought that claims historical origins in the international vision of Woodrow Wilson and who came to prominence following Obama’s election in 2008 – believe that the strength of their approach lies in its unique combination of abstract, liberal principles and practical, foreign policy sensibilities, what Ignatieff describes as a fusion of the “view from nowhere” with the “view from somewhere.”28 The confidence expressed by liberal internationalists that they speak more directly and realistically to global politics than do liberal theorists and global justice scholars no doubt emerges, in part, from the fact that these thinkers are often public intellectuals who straddle the worlds of academia, popular media, and the “foreign policy establishment.” Whatever their origins, the “realist” impulses of the liberal internationalists lead them to explicitly embrace – in a way that most global justice scholars do not – the permanent necessity of American military, political, and economic domination; an ideal of international order that Ikenberry describes as “liberal hegemony.”29 At base, these thinkers understand themselves as balancing between the soft realm of “professional ethicists” and the hard zone of “realist” policy-making.

Thus, while both liberal internationalists and most global justice scholars dismiss the impact of imperialism on contemporary politics, they frame that dismissal differently. In contrast to many global justice scholars, liberal internationalists usually admit that most of the existing international norms, traditions, and institutions associated with the current global order are the product of former imperial relations and the triumph of Western powers after World Wars I and II. At the same time, they insist that these norms were never, in Ignatieff’s words, “imposed from the top down by an international elite.”30 Rather, as Ikenberry puts it, after 1945, “other countries, particularly in Western Europe and later in East Asia, handed the reins of power to Washington just as Hobbes’ individuals in the state of nature first construct and then hand over power to the Leviathan.”31 In an odd torqueing of the global justice argument that history has no bearing on the constructions of ideal moral solutions to the problems of the contemporary world, liberal internationalists acknowledge the imperial and coercive origins of today’s American-led order but insist that this order is liberal nonetheless and, even when it isn’t, it is the best we can get. Moreover, their intense belief in “the idea” of America as the indispensable nation without whom “nothing gets done” compels liberal internationalists to obsessively fixate on maintaining the status quo of American power because they are convinced that this power is always the only thing standing between stability and utter chaos.32

As the Cold War came to an end that the US “increasingly emphasized support for democracy as a foreign policy goal” as it sought to “a new organizing concept that [could] fill the void left by containment’s demise”.41 According to Peceny, the US “use[d] the promotion of democracy to build domestic political consensus and ‘policy legitimacy’ for US interventions”.42 Washington’s track record in subsequent decades of invoking “democracy promotion” to launch wars of aggression, particularly in the case of Iraq, and regime change efforts has left the concept with little credibility. By 2008, Thomas Carothers, the leading academic proponent of US “democracy promotion” lamented that, “on the world stage, the US provokes many doubts and suspicions about its efforts to promote democracy”.43 Carothers list of prescriptions “to decontaminate American democracy promotion” reflect the degree to which the concept had been abused: “[the US] has to first say that democracy promotion will not be pursued via unauthorized military force against another country. Secondly, it means that the US must stop associating democracy promotion with regime change … Third, it means not intervening in elections for the sake of favoring certain groups”.44 In fact, as Carothers more-or-less conceded, democracy promotion was merely an ideological justification to buttress the designs of US imperialism in the post-Cold War era.45

Moreover, Washington has consistently demonstrated it is willing to abandon its purported democratic concerns when it serves US interests. To expand its global military base network, Vine demonstrates that “[US] officials have repeatedly collaborated with murderous, antidemocratic regimes and ignored widespread evidence of human rights abuses”.46 Many of the countries that host US military bases qualify as “authoritarian regimes” under leading democracy indices; in these cases, Vine argues that “American installations and the troops stationed on them are effectively helping block the spread of democracy”.47

The notion of democracy is not only a category of analysis (a Weberian ideal type). It works today largely as an identity marker for the West, the signifier of its very quintessence. As such, it establishes and perpetuates the superiority complex of the West vis-à-vis “the Rest”, democracy being held as the universal model of the “end of history”.7 Western democracies have thus unsurprisingly long been annoyed at the fact that China blatantly refuses to “transit” toward democracy in accordance with the prophecy of democracy as the end of history and the West as the destiny of the world. In the face of the emergence of COVID-19 in Wuhan, Western democracies have repeatedly asserted the superiority of their political regime—with, in the background, the belief in a form of superior democratic rationality. However, from March-April onwards, as Western democracies in turn came to be seriously affected by the disease, this stance started to reveal its illusory as well as deadly character. Does Democracy Protect Against Disease? When the epidemic was announced, in France as in many Western countries, the media discourse immediately engaged in a denunciation of the Chinese political system: editorials, op-eds, and broadcast or televised debates condemned the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, considered a “martyr of the coronavirus”,8 analysing how it revealed of the “failure” of the Chinese system,9 particularly of its “totalitarianism”.10 French media have not hesitated to attribute Dr. Li’s death to his treatment by Chinese authorities, writing at length about his “imprisonment”,11 or even, for some, going as far as to suggest his murder by the Chinese authorities.12 In other words, the coronavirus was framed less as an issue of public health than as a matter of foreign policy/politics. By the end of January, the announcement of the lockdown in China reinforced this reading even further: the lockdown was presented as a totalitarian measure dictated by the profound nature of the Chinese regime, rather than by the severity of the problem in epidemiological terms. The decision to put tens of millions of people under house arrest reinforced the feeling of radical alterity between Europe and China: more than ever, it was out of the question to compare the two entities. Meanwhile, the superiority of democracy was energetically reaffirmed.13 Then, from March onwards, while the prospect of confinement no longer appeared so “exotic/archaic” in Europe and as Wuhan started to lift its lockdown, editorials and op-eds began to question the ability of democracy to handle the crisis any better than China had.14 The question was raised as to whether authoritarianism might not ultimately be better able to respond to health crises, although the answer remained invariably negative: no, of course not.15 Finally, from early April onwards, when China reported its “success” in eradicating the virus, Western democracies imposed quarantine measures—although European mortality rates quickly escalated to higher numbers than in China. Since then, editorials and op-eds have returned to the discourse of non-comparability, arguing that Chinese numbers were fake, which was typical of Chinese “propaganda”,16 itself a product of China being a “structurally deceitful country”.17 Thus, it was argued, given the lack of comparable data (statistics in democracies being assumed to be honest and reliable), the comparison between democracy and dictatorship would be impossible—as well as being morally unacceptable. Are Public Policies Comparable Only Among Democracies? Not very many situations lend themselves to international comparison better than the one arising out of the COVID-19 pandemic. John Stuart Mill, one of the founders of qualitative comparison, established in his System of Logic, published in 1843, a typology of the comparative methodologies to isolate and test the variables of a given phenomenon: the method of most similar cases producing differing outcomes and the method of most different cases producing similar outcomes.18 The China-France comparison seems a priori to be in the matrix of the most different cases: for the same outcome, namely the suppression of the virus, two different methods, one democratic, the other authoritarian. Yet, the most similar cases comparison appears to be a better fit: the two countries have used the same methods, namely lockdown (confinement), but with dissimilar results. China aimed to eradicate the virus, France to slow down its pace (the so-called “flattening” of the curve). Of course, the lockdown was stricter in China than in France, but progressively, with the use of drones and methods of surveillance, this gap has reduced.19 In certain respects, the French lockdown was both more stringent and more massive than the one imposed in China: China confined only one province and a handful of cities, a tiny part of its population, without declaring a state of emergency, while Paris imposed a national lockdown on its 67 million inhabitants and declared a state of emergency. In France, the media pushed a narrative of blaming and shaming China, which in turn delayed rather than prompted the reaction of the French government to take public health measures against the coronavirus. The expected positive effects of freedom of the press and transparency in terms of inducing prompt government reaction to the crisis did not materialise. The initial absence of reaction toward the virus contrasts with the “overreaction” deployed against the H1N1 flu in 2009, which had a much lower death rate than COVID-19 but was first declared in the United States, another country considered to be part of the “club of liberal Western democracies”. So, why did Amartya Sen’s theory, once extrapolated to epidemics, not prove to be true in the case of COVID-19? The Democracy-Dictatorship Binary: An Orientalist Reading of Comparative Politics In 1978, Edward Saïd, following Syed Hussein Alatas,20 defined Orientalism as an epistemic process at the heart of the domination of the West, a process built on a series of essentialising stereotypes.21 From an Orientalist perspective, the COVID-19 epidemic was interpreted in the West as the dysfunctional, even well-deserved, offspring of Chinese totalitarianism, rather than as a public health event. Biases and stereotypes against China, reactivated by the start of the epidemic, are not only racist against Chinese people per se but also reveal deeper stereotypes of authoritarian regimes, of which Beijing is currently the paradigmatic case.22 The origins of the massive media reaction of blaming China can be traced back to the Orientalism of our categories of thought and the categories we use in the social sciences. Such Orientalism lies at the heart of the genesis of the discipline of political science. It suffices to quote Montesquieu, who was the first, in his Spirit of the Laws, to establish despotism as the “natural” condition of the East, based on his readings on Japan, China, Siam, and the Ottoman Empire.23 Next, in Montesquieu’s wake, John Stuart Mill and Max Weber associated freedom, legality, and modernity distinctively and exclusively with the West.24 After the Second World War, transitology, which borrows heavily from the theory of modernisation derived from the Weberian thesis, became one of the pillars of the discipline of comparative politics.25 Non-Western countries were intended to “transit” toward democracy. The dictatorship-democracy dichotomy became the new semiotic avatar of the differential degrees of civilization between West and East. The central question, formulated from the West, focused on how to “assist” non-democratic countries to democratise, reactivating the myth of the civilising mission of the West. From the 1980s onwards, the social sciences were diversely affected by the Saïd revolution. If Orientalism had a major impact on the discipline of anthropology, it had a lesser impact on other social sciences. In political science and public law in particular, Eurocentrism was vigorously denounced, but the comparison between dictatorships and democracies remained limited to the emphasis of their profound, ontological alterity. Orientalism diffused with more ease within the interdisciplinary field of “area studies”, a somewhat marginalised field. If most of the “areas” forming the units of area studies were to some degree homogeneous in religious or political terms—real or fantasied26—this was not the case of Oriental Asia, characterised by its extreme religious as well as political diversity.