Theorizing Infrastructures in Global Politics

International Studies Quarterly (2023) 67, sqad101 Theorizing Infrastructures in Global Politics THEORY NOTE CHRISTIAN BUEGER A growing wave of studies in international relations is interested in “infrastructure.” Pipelines, ports, financial transaction arrangements, and other large technical systems increasingly occupy the minds of international theorists. This theory note provides direction to the debate by offering an important clarification of the concept of infrastructure and how it is theorized. Scholars have very different understandings of what infrastructures are, why they matter, and how to theorize and study them empirically. By outlining three distinct “styles of theorizing infrastructure,” we provide new directions for future research and how it can contribute to broader debates in international theory. The three styles allow to capture the disagreement over whether infrastructure is a theoretical concept at all, or if it solely refers to empirical phenomena. For some scholars, infrastructures are an object of politics, while others see them as developing political force or even agency on their own. Others see broader potential and note that “infrastructuralism” could provide a major new theoretical vocabulary. Each style provides major new avenues for international theory. Existe una creciente ola de estudios en el campo de las relaciones internacionales que muestra interés por las ≪infraestructuras≫: los oleoductos, los puertos, los acuerdos de transacciones financieras, así como otros grandes sistemas de carácter técnico ocupan cada vez un mayor espacio dentro de las mentes de los teóricos internacionales. Esta nota teórica proporciona a este debate una dirección que poder seguir, ya que ofrece una aclaración importante del concepto de infraestructura y de cómo se teoriza este. Los académicos tienen una comprensión muy diferente de lo que son las infraestructuras, de por qué estas resultan importantes y sobre cómo teorizarlas y estudiarlas empíricamente. Existe un desacuerdo sobre si la infraestructura es un concepto teórico o si se refiere a fenómenos empíricos. Para algunos académicos, las infraestructuras son un objeto de la política, mientras que otros las ven como el desarrollo de la fuerza política o incluso como una agencia por sí mismas. Otros, incluso, llegan a reconocer un potencial más amplio y señalan que el ≪infraestructuralismo≫ podría proporcionar una nueva e importante forma paradigmática de teorizar la política internacional. Proporcionamos, mediante el esbozo de tres estilos distintos de teorización de la infraestructura, nuevas direcciones para la investigación futura de la infraestructura y cómo puede contribuir a debates más amplios dentro de la teoría internacional. De plus en plus d’études en relations internationales s’intéressent aux ≪ infrastructures ≫. Les pipelines, ports, arrangements de transactions financières et autres grands systèmes techniques sont de plus en plus présents à l’esprit des théoriciens internationaux. Cette note théorique oriente le débat en proposant une clarification importante du concept d’infrastructure et de sa théorisation. Chaque chercheur conçoit différemment les infrastructures, leur importance, leur théorisation et leur étude empirique. Il existe même un désaccord quant à l’existence du concept théorique d’infrastructure, ou s’il s’agit plutôt d’un phénomène empirique. Pour certains chercheurs, les infrastructures sont un objet politique, alors que d’autres les conçoivent comme des forces politiques émergentes ou même, des agents à elles seules. D’autres leur reconnaissent même un potentiel plus vaste et remarquent que ≪ l’infrastructuralisme ≫ pourrait constituer une nouvelle forme paradigmatique majeure de théorisation en politique internationale. En présentant trois styles de théorisation distincts de l’infrastructure, nous proposons de nouvelles pistes de recherche sur l’infrastructure et comment celle-ci peut contribuer aux débats plus larges en théorie internationale. Introduction: How Infrastructures Matter Author’s note: Research for this article has benefited from a grant by the Velux Foundation for the Ocean Infrastructure Research Group. For comments and suggestions that have improved the manuscript, we are grateful to Claudia Aradau, Jonathan Luke Austin, Austin Carson, Lars Gjesvik, Stacie Goddard, Anna Leander, Maximilian Mayer, Daniel Nexon, Kimberley Peters, Swati Srivastava, Anders Wivel, the participants in the Ocean Infrastructure workshop, University of Copenhagen, October 2022, the International Relations Research Group meeting, University of Copenhagen, November 2022, the International Studies Association workshop on “Infrastructures of Power Politics,” March 2023, as well as the editors and reviewers of International Studies Quarterly. Christian Bueger is Professor International Relations at the University of Copenhagen where he leads the Ocean Infrastructure Research Group. His research relies on practice theories to understand global ocean politics. He is the author of Understanding Maritime Security, forthcoming with Oxford University Press (with Timothy Edmunds). Tobias Liebetrau is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the University of Copenhagen’s Ocean Infrastructures Research Group and a researcher at the Global politics has gone digital and depends on data infrastructures, as do global markets and financial transactions. Global trade and supply chains rely on expanding road, rail, aviation, and shipping infrastructures. Climate change necessitates renewable energy infrastructures or even geoengineering. China expands its influence by building infrastructures around the globe, while the United States weaponizes payment and other tech infrastructures to protect its Center for Military Studies. He specializes in cybersecurity, the politics of big tech, and data infrastructures. Jan Stockbruegger is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the University of Copenhagen’s Ocean Infrastructures Research Group. In his research, he investigates the global political economy of marine transport, including private security, sanction evasion, and the environmental impact of shipping. Bueger, Christian et al. (2023) Theorizing Infrastructures in Global Politics. International Studies Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqad101  C The Author(s) (2023). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/67/4/sqad101/7455679 by Faculty of Life Sciences Library user on 04 December 2023 , TOBIAS LIEBETRAU, AND JAN STOCKBRUEGGER University of Copenhagen, Denmark 2 Theorizing infrastructures in global politics 1 For instance, Keohane (2015, 343) uses the term to loosely refer to any “legal, institutional, and civil society” matters “that makes democracy work.” Cooley and Nexon (2020, 48) argue that infrastructures are any “relationships, practices, flows, and interactions” that underpin international order. 2 The idea of styles of theorizing, originally develops from Ian Hacking’s (1992) concept of styles of reasoning with which he refers to broader configurational forms of producing knowledge. Delbridge and Fiss (2013) refer to styles of theorizing to capture forms of theory development as well as writing about them. See also Bueger (2022) who expands on the idea to capture different practices of theorizing. theorizations of infrastructure. It is an important pathway to identify convergences and divergences of the meaning of infrastructure and its theorizations. We show that there are three understandings of infrastructure and discuss what they have in common, how they vary, and how they advance international theory. Theories of infrastructure agree—implicitly or explicitly—that infrastructures underpin, create, and maintain the structures of international politics. Indeed, this understanding is rooted in the history of the term itself. Introduced from French into English language, the term was originally used in railroad construction (Carse 2016). It referred to the planning and construction work that was required to allow structures (railways system) to be build. As signaled by the prefix “infra,” the concept introduces a hierarchy of structures, where infrastructures are beneath and prior to any structure to be build. Infrastructures, hence, provide the necessary foundations for all forms of behavior, interactions, and practices. Put differently, all international political phenomena can be seen as having one or more underlying infrastructures that enable and sustain them. Studying infrastructures, then, promises new insights into how international politics is structured, how these structures emerge and evolve, and the multiple ways in which they interact with other actors and processes. In general terms, infrastructure theorists are interested in structuring effects— that is, how infrastructures shape and condition behavior— and in infrastructure processes and relations—that is, how infrastructures are designed, contested, changed, used, and maintained in specific contexts. Yet scholars have vastly different understandings of what infrastructures are, how they structure international affairs, and how to theorize the global politics of infrastructure. We systematize these divergences by arguing that three distinct styles of theorizing infrastructure underlie the debate. a) The first style of theorizing views infrastructure as an empirical instance to assess and further develop theoretical insights of realist and liberal scholarship. Theorists conceive of infrastructures as physical networks that create structural interdependencies and relationships in trade, finance, communication, and other areas of IR. Politics here is agentic and takes place around infrastructures—that is in the ways in which actors build, use, and govern infrastructures as a specific object in world politics. We describe this style with the term “infrastructure” theorizing. b) The second style interprets infrastructures as fragile socio-material entanglements and relational processes that entail both physical and immaterial, ideational elements. It theorizes them by advancing frameworks and vocabularies often imported from other disciplines, including actor-network theory or assemblage thinking. Politics here is inherent in infrastructure’s design and evolves around questions of how infrastructures govern behavior and how they are used and renegotiated locally in everyday activities. Theorizing primarily concerns how infrastructures shape actors’ conduct. Given the focus on practices, we describe this style with the term “infrastructuring.” c) The third style of theorizing does not advance or develop prior theories, but aspires to develop an alternative theoretical vocabulary. The attempt is to advance infrastructure as a general analytical concept and methodology to shed light on the making and maintenance of fragile political structures and Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/67/4/sqad101/7455679 by Faculty of Life Sciences Library user on 04 December 2023 interests. Infrastructures are major objects of global politics because they underpin international affairs. They connect actors, facilitate flows, and enable transactions across the globe. The background infrastructures that enable, sustain, and stabilize global interactions from underneath are the precondition for international politics. How infrastructures emerge and evolve, who plans, funds, builds, and controls them, and how they function and operate are therefore vital questions for international theory. Studies addressing these questions have proliferated in recent years to a degree that infrastructure is becoming a fundamental concept in the discipline of international relations (IR). Yet, these studies approach and study infrastructures in different and disparate ways. A range of scholars is interested in systemic, distributional, and strategic effects. They investigate, for example, how the United States uses digital and financial transaction platforms to ensure its global dominance, or how China and other revisionist states build infrastructure to redesign the international system (Farrell and Newman 2019b; Kardon and Leutert 2022). Others investigate how infrastructures such as telegraph cables and shipping increase international “interaction capacity” (Buzan et al 1993, 66–80) and lead to the emergence of regimes that facilitate cooperation (Zacher and Sutton 1996). Another set of scholars are inspired by the substantial wave of studies on infrastructure in geography, anthropology, science and technology studies, and organization studies. They argue that infrastructures are both constitutive of, and constituted by politics, and shape the conditions of possibility of global affairs. Researchers aim at demonstrating that infrastructures may have political agency of their own, shape behavior, and constrain powerful actors (Aradau 2010; Bernards and Campbell-Verduyn 2019; de Goede and Westermeier 2022). While expanding, IR’s infrastructure debate is still far from a coherent research program. Studies are dispersed and lack common direction and purpose. Yet, the term infrastructure and how one can theorize with it, increasingly is controversial. While some use it as a rather loose figure of speech and metaphor,1 others disagree over what infrastructures are, and whether infrastructure is a theoretical concept or merely refers to a cluster of empirical phenomena. Some scholars treat infrastructures as objects of global politics while others attribute political force to them. Clarifying the conceptual terrain, giving direction to the controversy, and enhancing the analytical purchase of infrastructure is the key objective of this theory note. The strategy we employ is based on the identification of styles of theorizing infrastructures. By “styles of theorizing,” we refer to organized and collective ways of formulating claims about the relevance, character, and meaning of infrastructure and generalizing them in coherent ways.2 The notion of “styles” respects that theorizing with the concept of infrastructures takes different, yet closely related directions with varied theoretical ambitions. This approach enables us to systematize explicit and implicit assumptions that underpin and sometimes obscure CHRISTIAN BUEGER ET AL. 3 Table 1. Three styles of theorizing infrastructure B: Infrastructuring C: Infrastructuralism Key understanding Material systems that create structural interdependencies An analytical concept to investigate infra-structural processes Politics Actors use and govern infrastructures How do actors use, govern, and compete over infrastructures? Fragile socio-material arrangements and relational processes Infrastructures have political force and agency of their own How do infrastructures enable and constrain behavior? Core question relations. Politics here is about how socio-material structures are built, maintained, and repaired to stabilize and order complex social systems and organizations. In this style, theorizing, hence, aims at capturing both the building and using of infrastructures, as well as their inherent powers. Given the ambitions linked to the style, we describe it with the term “infrastructuralism.” In the next step, we elaborate on the key ideas of each style, including definitions, what phenomena come to the fore, and which analytical questions organize theorizing. Our discussion brings order to the extensive and varied approaches to infrastructures in IR. Our intention is, however, not to provide a comprehensive overview of the literature in IR, or appraise in detail how individual studies have investigated infrastructures.3 Our core objective is to distill the essence of each style. Table 1 provides an initial summary of the three styles. Our first and second style of theorizing are part of, and embedded in, rather well-established approaches in international theory. Style-A theorizing draws upon theories that foreground strategic interests, interdependence, and international regimes, while style-B theorizing advances frameworks developed in practice theory and new materialism debates often imported from neighboring disciplines. We invest more space in elaborating style-C— infrastructuralism—since it represents a more recent and emergent form of theorizing. Infrastructuralism is not necessarily a rival theoretical paradigm that competes with other IR “isms.” It aims at developing a new theoretical vocabulary and methodology to advance IR theorizing more broadly by shedding light on the socio-material arrangements that underpin world politics. To do so, infrastructuralism draws on empirical research and extends key insights carried out under the two other styles, namely the idea that actors strategically and purposefully build and use infrastructures (style-A), and the idea that these structures have socio-material agency and power, are fluid, contested, and subject to change (style-B). We show that style-C contains substantial theoretical promises as an alternative to examining and reconceptualizing issues such as agency and order and to examine the material, social, and ideational foundations of global structures. To achieve this, infrastructuralism will need to draw upon empirical and theoretical insights from style-A and -B. Our argument is, hence, that the debate will benefit from advancing all three 3 We include studies in our reconstruction that do not explicitly use the term “infrastructures,” but refer to phenomena that are conventionally taken as infrastructures. Like with any other attempt to develop analytical categories of theorizing, we cannot do full justice to individual scholars and studies, and we acknowledge the risk of providing caricatures. Infrastructure underly, organize, and structure social systems How do infrastructures organize structures and how do actors create, transform, use, and maintain them? styles of theorizing and conversations between them. As we highlight in our conclusion, each of the three styles carries benefits, promises important insights and new avenues for theory building. The debate will benefit from proceeding with multiple styles. This approach enables infrastructure to serve as a promising focal point, opening up new avenues for conversations across disciplinary divides, and facilitating connections with other disciplines, while addressing specific empirical problems. Infrastructures: Objects and Actors A substantial number of studies in IR investigates the rise of large-scale technical systems that facilitate cross-border flows, communication, and economic transactions. Early researchers explored telecommunication, post, aviation, and shipping networks and their role in creating an interconnected world economy in the nineteenth and twentieth century.4 Contemporary scholars focus on data technologies and digital and financial flows (Farrell and Newman 2019a, b; Drezner et al. 2021), how geopolitical ambitions shape global supply chains (Solingen 2021), and the building of infrastructures such as ports and roads (Kardon and Leutert 2022; Petry 2023). Many of these studies do not explicitly theorize infrastructures. However, they rely on and advance an implicit theory—one that we call style-A theorizing. Infrastructures here are understood narrowly as physical structures and material networks such as telecommunication, post, aviation, or shipping. These infrastructures are not inherently regarded as political. Instead, they are interpreted as “objects” of politics, utilized by actors to pursue their political objectives. The primary function of infrastructures is to minimize transaction costs and facilitate efficient global communication and interaction. Yet, in doing so, infrastructures alter the fabric of world politics and generate political effects (Buzan et al 1993). They form and maintain structural interdependencies that shape the preferences and strategies of actors (Farrell and Newman 2019a). Style-A scholars, thus, theorize infrastructures through the lens of the politics of interdependence and examine how actors utilize infrastructures to establish and uphold structural relationships that conditions behavior. Collective Infrastructure Governance A range of classical studies theorize infrastructures as objects of collective regulatory regimes in sectors such as transport and telecommunication. The main insight derived from this literature is that governing infrastructures is vi4 See Strange 1976; Jönsson 1981; Cowhey 1990; Zacher and Sutton 1996. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/67/4/sqad101/7455679 by Faculty of Life Sciences Library user on 04 December 2023 A: Infrastructures 4 Theorizing infrastructures in global politics Infrastructures as Foreign Policy Tools Related style-A research investigates how actors strategically use and even “weaponize” infrastructures as foreign policy tools, often to pursue narrow political objectives. Such research draws on notions of “infrastructural power,” first introduced in sociology. In an influential study, Mann (1984), for instance, pointed out that states build and use technical infrastructures not only to provide public goods, but to control their societies. Recent scholarship takes this argument to the international domain. An influential example is Farrell and Newman’s (2019b) study of weaponized interdependence, which asserts that the expansion of global infrastructure has amplified the coercive power of the United States. For example, control over access to the payment system used by all major banks to process international transactions—the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT)—allows the United States to cut off adversary states, such as Iran, from the global financial system. For Farrell and Newman (2019b), such cases imply that control over global infrastructure enhances the coercive power over actors who rely on these infrastructures. Another important case to theorize the relationship between infrastructure and power—especially the political objectives and effects of oversea infrastructure investment—is China’s Belt and Road initiative. For instance, Petry (2023, 321) argues that building foreign market infrastructures gives China influence over “how these markets work” (see also Chen 2021). Kardon and Leutert (2022, 11), moreover, argue that China’s commercial port investments facilitate military power projection because ports can be used as “military logistics and intelligence capabilities” for China’s navy. Infrastructures, in other words, are increasingly theorized through the lens of geostrategic rivalries. Yet, the degree to which states can use infrastructures instrumentally remains contested. Some infrastructures are part of broader networks that cannot be controlled by a single actor. Semiconductor supply chains, for example, are highly decentralized across many countries. Consequently, they can “be adapted and reorganized” (Danzman and Kilcrease 2022) to mitigate weaponization risks. Jones and Zeng (2019), moreover, argue that large-scale investment programs such as the Belt and Road Initiative are too complex and fragmented to be interpreted as a grand power strategy. The initiative is, hence, better understood as a “far looser policy platform” that is “shaped by domestic Chinese struggles for power and resources” (Jones and Zeng 2019, 1438). In short, the very nature of an infrastructure often limits the ways in which it can be used strategically—a key argument made in the infrastructuring style discussed below. Future Research Emerging empirical cases for style-A theorizing are the infrastructures of the green energy transition and new technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence. How states build and finance renewable energy infrastructures (Lister 2015; Colgan et al. 2021) or high-end computing and microchip technology (Miller 2022), who owns and controls them, and how they are governed and regulated, will be vital questions for style-A scholars. Other important questions will focus on how to theorize the response of states and international organizations to the strategic use of infrastructures through “counter-infrastructure” financing and discourses such as “strategic autonomy” or “digital sovereignty” (Csernatoni Anghel et al. 2020, 2022; Tusikov 2021). To sum up, style-A scholarship primarily theorizes infrastructures as state tools in the politics of interdependence. It does so by drawing on and expanding theorizing in the realist, liberal, and institutionalist traditions. Infrastructures here are understood as material networks that help reduce transaction costs and facilitate global flows. Yet, infrastructures also have political effects because actors use them to increase their influence and advance individual or collective interests. Style-A theories work out the strategic and distributional implications of infrastructures and their role in shaping global interdependencies. Infrastructuring: Processes and Practices The second style of theorizing broadens the empirical and theoretical agenda considerably. Scholars conceptualize infrastructures as social-material entanglements and relational processes. Instead of reducing infrastructures to physical properties, this style argues that infrastructures consist of cognitive and cultural elements as well. This expands the scope of studies to encompass a wider range of empirical phenomena as infrastructures, including international law, international organizations, and diplomacy. Contrary to style-A theorizing, infrastructures are considered political in and of themselves. They are embedded in relations of power and domination, but their agential capacities also condition behavior and shape practices. Infrastructures are, hence, more than passive objects of foreign policies and global governance. Given that scholars highlight relations, practices, and processes, this style can be grasped with the connotation of “infrastructuring” (Leander 2021a). Key Assumptions and Arguments Style-B theorizing is inspired by “infrastructural turns” in neighboring disciplines such as sciences and technology studies (Star 1999; Edwards et al. 2009; Blok et al. 2016), history of technology (Misa and Schot 2005; van der Vleuten Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/67/4/sqad101/7455679 by Faculty of Life Sciences Library user on 04 December 2023 tal for an interdependent and functioning global economy. Building infrastructures is not only costly, but also gives rise to economic, social, and environmental problems that impact all states. Consequently, states need to cooperate in the collective provision and governance of essential infrastructures as part of broader efforts to address structural interdependencies. A classic work is Bechhoefer’s (1959) study of the International Atomic Energy Agency that unravels how the United States and the Soviet Union cooperated to prevent nuclear proliferation and to regulate civilian nuclear infrastructures (see also Colgan and Miller 2019). The most comprehensive study of collective infrastructure governance continues to be Zacher and Sutton’s investigation of international regimes and networks in “shipping, air transport, telecommunications, and postal services” (1996, 3). Zacher and Sutton (1996, 3) argue that these four industries “constitute the major infrastructure or service industries that link national economies,” and that “the efficient operation of the entire global economy depends on them” (ibid.: 212). Maintaining these infrastructures, then, is a common interest of all states, which leads them to develop joint “norms and rules [ … ] that assure the orderly and efficient flow of goods and communications throughout the arteries of the economic body” (ibid.: 213). As regime theorists and institutionalists argue, economic interdependence requires collective infrastructure governance. CHRISTIAN BUEGER Extending the Empirical Scope The phenomena that style-B theorizing foregrounds are often similar to the cases in style-A. Yet instead of identifying how actors use and govern infrastructures, they investigate invisible and unrecognized everyday processes of infrastructuring. Studying SWIFT, for instance, De Goede and Westermeier (2022, 2) criticize that style-A research “often regard infrastructure as passive vehicles” and that they pay too little attention to the “agentic capacity” of infrastructures themselves. International finance is an important case in style-B scholarship, with, for instance, a recent special issue dedicated to better understand technological change in global finance through infrastructures (Bernads and Campbell-Verdun 2019), studies on international remittances to developing countries (Grimes and Rodima-Taylor 2019), or examinations of big data technologies (Langevin 2019). 5 Style-B theorizing, however, also expands the empirical scope. For instance, scholars explore the constitution of political spaces through infrastructures. Influentially, Opitz and Tellmann (2015) have shown how European integration was driven by joint energy installations that allowed for building a common electricity market. Peoples and Stevens (2020) demonstrate how orbital infrastructures condition conceptions and governance of security on a planetary level. Other important empirical cases for style-B have been infrastructures of migration management, counterterrorism, and digital data flows, including the politics of passenger name records, terrorist watch lists, surveillance, and privacy rules.5 Importantly, style-B also theorizes political processes, which are usually analyzed in institutionalist and dematerialized terms. A prime example here are knowledge production processes conventionally theorized in purely cognitive ways. Scholars evoke the term “epistemic infrastructures” to demonstrate how knowledge production, expertise, and the translation of knowledge to policy have inherent material qualities. Bureaucratic forms, physical centers, or material inscriptions become key explanatory elements to understand knowledge production in the UN Security Council (Bueger 2015), the World Bank (Williams 2022), or the making of the Sustainable Development Goals (Tichenor et al. 2022). Others scrutinize international bureaucracies and international law in those terms and show the infrastructuring work of administrators and lawyers (Kingsbury 2019; Bogojević and Zou 2021). Infrastructure Relations: An Outlook Scholars theorizing infrastructuring processes are concerned with generative forms of politics and power. They investigate how infrastructures enable and restrain actions, including how certain actors gain power, authority, and legitimacy. A central question then becomes how political ordering is enabled and constrained by infrastructural relations. The focus turns to examining how planning, designing, constructing, using, and maintaining of infrastructures generate political effects by continuously reproducing and transforming socio-material relations in processes of infrastructuring. In research relying on style-B theorizing, infrastructure, hence, provides a new and challenging theoretical concept that is integrated in increasingly established IR research frameworks and methodologies such as actor-network theory. Empirically, studies develop new and interesting insights into conventional infrastructures, but also political spaces, institutions, and practices of knowledge production. This substantial theoretical and empirical potential, together with the broader scientific euphoria around infrastructures, indicates a forthcoming wave of studies that embrace and further develop style-B theorizing. Infrastr ucturalism: Str ucturing Socio-Material Relations from Beneath Our third style of theorizing further extends the concept of infrastructure by drawing on and expanding the other theorizations and raising stronger theoretical ambitions. The notion of infrastructure is reformulated as an abstract and more generic analytical concept used for heuristic and sensitizing purposes. It becomes disassociated metaphorically from colloquial understandings and related empiri5 De Goede 2020; Leese, Noori and Scheel 2022, Leander 2021b; Bellanova and De Goede 2022; Bellanova and Glouftsios 2022. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/67/4/sqad101/7455679 by Faculty of Life Sciences Library user on 04 December 2023 and Kaijser 2006), anthropology (Harvey and Knox 2012; Larkin 2013; Jensen and Morita 2017), and geography (Furlong 2011). The infrastructuring style draws upon ontological and epistemological assumptions and methodological directions that gained traction and prominence in IR theory through ongoing debates on practice theory, relationalism, assemblage thinking, and new materialism. A key assumption in style-B theorizing is “socio-material symmetry,” that is, the claim that social and material factors should be given equal consideration in theorizing. Drawing on relational ontologies, including practice theory (Drieschova and Bueger 2022), actor-network theory (Best and Walters 2013) and assemblage thinking (Abrahamsen and Williams 2009; Bueger and Liebetrau 2023; Liebetrau and Christensen 2021), researchers strive for methodologies that allow for capturing material and ideational forces and pay attention to the interplay of humans and nonhuman objects. This implies a balanced focus on the physical properties of an infrastructure as well as on the norms, rules, standards, and cultural codes that regulate the usage of infrastructure. This symmetrical stance marks a major difference to style-A theorizing, and allows to develop a different understanding of the politics of infrastructures. According to the style, politics does not evolve outside of infrastructure but is deeply inscribed in it. Scholars claim that infrastructures “act” in political ways. Aradau (2010, 493), for instance, stresses that “infrastructures play an agential role, both constraining and enabling particular configurations [of materializations of security].” De Goede and Westermeier (2022, 2) suggest that infrastructures “can themselves route, block, challenge, or rework power.” Infrastructures, in that sense, have power, in that they shape and organize behavior by prescribing and defining specific actions and limitations. Contrary to style-A theorizing, infrastructures are also understood as fluid and fragile. Driven by their intrinsic agency, and interacting with other forces, practices, and actors, infrastructures evolve in dynamic ways. Infrastructures, hence, are understood as embedded in relational processes through which power is generated and renegotiated in specific local environments with transnational or global effects. In other words, infrastructures influence everyday interactions, and conversely, these interactions shape infrastructures. Studying such reciprocal processes implies understanding infrastructuring as a dynamic and microlevel phenomenon. ET AL. 6 Theorizing infrastructures in global politics Relating Infrastructuralism to Other Approaches The notion and idea of “infrastructuralism” is not widespread in international theory so far. The term “infrastructuralism” can be accredited, to some degree, to anthropologist Sahlins (2010), who was one of the first to prominently use it to stress the materiality of culture and to provide a contrast to scholars interested in superstructures. In media studies, Peters (2015a, b) has laid out an influential agenda of infrastructuralism, contrasting it with structuralism. On the one side, the term is gaining traction across the humanities, including in anthropology, media, and literature studies, to lay out an extensive methodology and research agenda based on the vocabulary of infrastructures as material structures from below (Levine 2010; Peters (2015b; Rubenstein, Robbins, and Beal 2015). On the other side, also ecosystem researchers promote an extensive research agenda in which infrastructure is the core category (Anderies and Janssen 2016). For proponents of infrastructuralism, infrastructure provides a new ontology grounded in the philosophy of technology and system theory, as well as a new methodology. In ontological terms, such outlines are not too distant from what McCourt (2016) has described as “new constructivism”: structures are seen as fragile and fluid, grounded in materiality and based on everyday practical enactments and socio-material relations. Ontologically, the overlap to styleB is considerable, since these are also assumptions that infrastructuring researchers share. Style-B and C share the understanding of structures as built and enacted in specific local contexts and environments, the call for the study of microlevel processes through which macrostructures and phenomena—such as international organizations, international law, or global finance—are created and enacted through everyday practices, and the need for going beyond the material versus nonmaterial dichotomy that underpins style-A. Yet, style-B makes sense of infrastructure by taking them as empirical sites to be explained by other concepts, such 6 In the broader infrastructure debate, proposals concern, for instance, to study people and ecosystems as infrastructures, see e.g., Simone 2004; Carse 2016, and Blok et al. 2016. as actor-networks or assemblages. In style-C, it is the concept of infrastructure in its own right that provides the basic theoretical category and analytical concept under which other phenomena, including institutions, can be subsumed. This difference is best explained in contrasting the style-C understanding of infrastructure with the structuralist concepts used by style-A and B. Style-A and B draw on concepts such as “regimes,” “fields,” or “assemblages.” Regimes are formed by nonmaterial norms, rules, and principles (Steffeck et al. 2021), and fields are constituted by practical struggles over symbolic power (Krause 2017). By contrast, infrastructures are stabilized socio-material arrangements that underpin and enable practices from underneath. They structure the conditions under which other structural phenomena emerge and operate. In this way, infrastructures introduce a hierarchy between notions of structure in the sense that they enable and are therefore ontologically prior to other structures. Thus, one can think of infrastructures as the foundations on which regimes, fields, and other macrostructures are built upon. Infrastructuralism also draws attention to the material underpinnings of “ideational structures” (Wendt 1999, 7) such as norms, ideas, and discourses (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). Norms, ideas, and discourses do not flow freely through the international system. They rely on digital and real-world networks to circulate and shape behavior. That is, ideational phenomena need to be enshrined in material arrangements to produce structuring effects. And these networks need to be designed, build, and repaired—activities that are vital in infrastructuralism but are often neglected in ideational scholarship. Infrastructuralism, then, sheds light on how actors manufacture and maintain the material arrangements that underpin and sustain ideational structures. The concept of infrastructures is also related to—but different from—that of “assemblage” (Gilles Deleuze). Indeed, in style-B scholarship, infrastructures are often defined as assemblages, or both terms are even used synonymously because they both capture the stabilization of sociomaterial entanglements and how local and global arrangements intersect. Yet assemblages are generally more fragile and fluid and less sturdy and durable than infrastructures. Paul Rabinow (2003, 56), for instance, makes the point that an “assemblage is not the kind of thing that is intended to endure.” Assemblages “are comparatively effervescent, disappearing in years and decades, rather than centuries” (Rabinow 2003, 56). In this sense, assemblages, have a different temporality and stability than infrastructures. Yet assemblages and infrastructures also overlap. For example, an assemblages’ heterogeneous elements might stabilize in an infrastructure. Moreover, infrastructures remain malleable and contested, as style-B scholars note. Infrastructures consist of complex and carefully calibrated arrangements that interact and create friction and resistance. Consequently, infrastructures need to be maintained and adjusted to ensure that they function properly and guarantee circulation. Importantly, infrastructuralism’s main concern is not only about giving the concept of infrastructure center stage. It also proposes a methodology that aims at questioning, following Levine (2015, 49), “what lies underneath or behind apparently powerful institutions” in order “to see what organizes social life”? Or, as Peters (2015a, 44) in more general relational terms asks: what is a structure infra to? The interest in advancing infrastructuralism as a generic theoretical vocabulary and methodology in IR clearly differs from those in the humanities and ecosystem studies. In the next step, we provide a tentative outline of how Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/67/4/sqad101/7455679 by Faculty of Life Sciences Library user on 04 December 2023 cal manifestations that are grounded in material sites and physical objects. Instead, infrastructure becomes a concept that aims at shedding light on the dynamics that underlie specific sociopolitical processes, phenomena, and practices. It becomes a concept that stands for the collection of “a heterogeneous, changing group of elements ‘beneath’ some higher-order goal” (Carse 2016, 36). Consequently, any kind of stabilized social process or structured relation can be studied as having an underlying infrastructure. The concept, hence, invites a specific analytical question: What is the (collection of) infrastructure underneath a particular phenomenon or entity that provides for its foundations and enables it in a particular way? The key argument of style-C is that infrastructures provide order: they shape and stabilize complex systems and processes from underneath by providing a grid for interactions that enables and constrains behavior. Thus, scholars have proposed that phenomena such as ethics, culture, or even ecosystems and nature can be meaningfully studied as infrastructure if they stabilize and organize socio-material arrangements.6 Generalized in this way, the concept of infrastructure is turned into a more generic new theoretical paradigm: infrastructuralism. CHRISTIAN BUEGER these questions translate into pathways that directly speak to major concerns in international theory: processes, agency, and inter-infrastructural relations. Our intention is to provide direction, recognizing that developing these pathways requires more lengthy treatments that go beyond the scope of this theory note. Pathways to Theorizing: Process, Agency, and Friction 7 construct infrastructures and infrastructures’ agency to condition practices also provide new avenues of research. Perhaps, most importantly, the agency of infrastructural repair and maintenance adds a dimension to international theory that is often neglected: much of IR research is concerned with the “making” of new structures, norms, or regimes, but how they are maintained and what work is required hardly scrutinized. Since infrastructures do not operate in isolation from each other, the relations between them constitute another field of research. Studying these relations, in what some term “coupled infrastructures” (Anderies and Janssen 2016) promises, for instance, different understandings of the relations between international organizations or regime complexity. This will allow to understand the frictions and tensions that arise at the overlap of infrastructures. The Theoretical Promises of Infrastructuralism Infrastructuralism promises a new ontological vocabulary and methodology that allows for new pathways to study and reconceptualize agency, change, and the limits of international orders. For example, studies on how infrastructures are designed and built can provide new understandings of agency, and studies on maintenance can shed light on the microlevel work required to order and stabilize international institutions. Thus, infrastructuralism promises to generate new insights into core theoretical puzzles and questions. Advancing this route will build upon empirical insights from style-A and style-B research in order to reflect on the implications for key social theory puzzles. Advancing infrastructuralism, then, could amount to a collective and collaborative theoretical project in IR. Style A and B researchers, however, will (rightfully) not fully sympathizes with such a project, given the dedicated strengths of the different styles to which we turn next. Conclusion: Infrastructure as Focal Point and Foundational Concept IR scholars have long studied infrastructures, but infrastructure analysis has only recently become a major research trend. This reflects the fact that infrastructures increasingly shape global life and that international actors extensively use and even “weaponize” infrastructures to realize political projects. Yet studying infrastructures has also opened new opportunities for theorizing and to reconsider the nature, materiality, and processes of international transactions. Given its analytical potential, infrastructure research is becoming an important integrative focal point for different established theoretical lenses (style-A and B) and as a new conceptual and methodological pathway in international theory (style-C). In this theory note, we have developed new categories of theorizing infrastructures. Thinking with three styles helps organize the theoretical controversy and confusion on the concept of infrastructure and identifies different modalities of infrastructure research and theorizing. Instead of arguing for fixing and defining “infrastructure” in singular terms, we have argued for the benefits of allowing the concept to assume multiple forms. Multiple concepts of infrastructure are “useful for addressing a wider range of problems, both through the extension of their own internal multiplicities or through strategic and flexible alliances forged with other concepts” (Gane 2009, 93). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/67/4/sqad101/7455679 by Faculty of Life Sciences Library user on 04 December 2023 The vocabulary of infrastructuralism brings three distinct processes to the fore: the building, use, and maintaining of infrastructures. All studies of infrastructures, as indicated in our reconstruction of styles A and B, in one way or the other scrutinize these processes. Yet taken as more generic lenses, infrastructuralism opens up these processes as analytical lenses to address core puzzles in international theory. Scrutinizing the process of designing, planning, and building infrastructures holds the potential to provide new perspectives on the evolution and change of the international system, including its institutions and organizations. While style-A studies these processes as a (rational) choice with a focus on physical infrastructures, infrastructuralism highlights that more diffuse relations, including the complex politics of planning, designing, and replacing infrastructures need to be taken into account. Infrastructuralism stresses the series of deliberate, reflexive, and creative acts and negotiations involving material artifacts and objects, aimed at installing socio-material arrangements for higher order purposes. Here, infrastructuralism will, for instance, complement and challenge recent practice theoretical outlines of the evolution of world order (e.g., Adler 2019) and allow to incorporate recent research that emphasizes design (Austin and Leander 2021) or the creativity of agency (Schmidt 2021). Studying the process of using infrastructures brings issues of routines and stabilized behavior to the fore. Extending ideas from style-B, this allows a focus on the material power effects inscribed in an infrastructure and how they condition practices. This focus can, for instance, bring innovation to international practice-theoretical accounts, which struggle in how to conceptualize the macroscale (Bueger and Gadinger 2018). In this sense, studying “usage” raises important questions about the relations and co-constitution between practices and infrastructure, and the source of slippage and structural decay of routines (Pouliot 2022). A third process focuses on maintenance and repair in the light of the decay of infrastructure. Infrastructures are strong systems with solid foundations that do not change easily. Yet maintaining and repairing infrastructures is important to prevent endogenous decay and increase infrastructure resilience against massive exogenous shocks. Decay might be the outcome of continuous use, tear, and wear, or linked to the planning and buildup of alternative infrastructures. This includes studying how infrastructures decay and become “ruins,” or how and why they are abandoned (Howe et al. 2016). Here, infrastructuralism might provide new answers to understand the end of empires, or issues such as the diagnosed failure of the liberal world order (Ikenberry 2018). The three processes not only provide specific readings of transformation and continuity—in terms of the construction, use, repair, and decay of infrastructures—but also introduce new actors and forms of agency to international theory debates. In what Bowker (1994, 10) has termed “infrastructural work,” actors such as planners, designers, and engineers and their organizations come into focus as relevant actors of global politics. The agency (and power) to ET AL. 8 Theorizing infrastructures in global politics national infrastructures. Investigating these three processes can generate new insights into theoretical puzzles such as international change and what constitutes agency, structure, and power. Theorized in this way, infrastructures could become a new anchoring concept, which helps to develop a theoretical perspective in a similar way that “discourse,” “practice,” “field,” or “assemblage” did. Infrastructuralism thus promises to create new spaces for debate where scholars can develop original answers to theoretical puzzles such as what constitutes structure, power, and agency, and how processes of change and transformation unfold. This, however, might clearly be an overpromise as is so often the case with calls for turns or new paradigms. Accepting and developing infrastructuralism in IR’s theoretical repertoire is in any case the most challenging and provocative claim one can advance with the concept of infrastructures. Each of the three understandings of infrastructure offers important new vantage points for the discipline. Each has promises and weaknesses. Yet the fact that infrastructural research appeals to a broad range of IR scholars demonstrates that the three styles of theorizing can promote productive debates across theoretical divides within IR and the borders to other disciplines. The three styles of theorizing carry potential to develop IR’s theoretical toolbox for the time to come. References ABRAHAMSEN, RITA, AND MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS 2009. “Security Beyond the State: Global Security Assemblages in International Politics.” International Political Sociology 3 (1): 1–17. ADLER, EMANUEL. 2019. World Ordering: A Social Theory of Cognitive Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ANDERIES, JOHN M, AND MARCO A JANSSEN. 2016. “Institutions and the Performance of Coupled Infrastructure Systems.” International Journal of the Commons 10 (2): 495–16. ANGHEL, SUZANA, BEATRIX IMMENKAMP, ELENA LAZAROU, JERÔME LEON SAULNIER, AND ALEX BENJAMIN WILSON. 2020. On the Path to “Strategic Autonomy”: The EU in an Evolving Geopolitical Environment. Brussels: European Parliamentary Research Service. ARADAU, CLAUDIA. 2010. “Security that Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection.” Security Dialogue 41 (5): 491–14. 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Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/67/4/sqad101/7455679 by Faculty of Life Sciences Library user on 04 December 2023 Our categories reveal the advantages and disadvantages of each theorization of infrastructure and chart avenues for future research. It also shows how these approaches build on each other and how they provide a framework for conversations across styles of theorizing. Style-A theorizing offers the most tangible and concrete understanding of infrastructures as physical networks that create structural interdependencies in trade, finance, communication, and other areas. This understanding can be straightforwardly accommodated and integrated into existing IR theory where infrastructures provide an interesting and underappreciated empirical object. Research here largely responds to the empirical fact that infrastructures are expanding, that they raise governance challenges, and that they are increasingly used as a tool (or even weapon) in geopolitical struggles. Studying infrastructures is vital to shed light on governance and geopolitics in an interdependent world. Style-B theorizing highlights some weaknesses of this understanding—mainly that infrastructures are more than passive and structural material systems. They might have a deeper impact on international politics. Anchored in new variants of constructivism, critical security studies, and international political sociology, style-B scholars conceptualize infrastructures as socio-material entanglements and relational processes. The interest in infrastructures is most often driven by the call for reconsidering materiality, beyond material determinism, and the invitation to reflect on technology more carefully. This theorizing allows scholars to demonstrate the sociality of infrastructures and how these are comprised of social and culture elements, including ideas, norms, and rules. It also highlights the agentic capacity of infrastructures and suggests that infrastructures are, in fact, fluid and constantly changing entanglements rather than stable objects. These engagements shape—and are shaped—through everyday interactions in concrete situations. Yet there is a risk that style-B theorizing overemphasizes the fragility and context-specificity of infrastructures, as style-A suggests, and that it underplays the role of actors operating outside infrastructural entanglements. StyleB theorizing also underestimate other forces, such as national interests, identities, norms, and ideas, which have independent effect both on infrastructures and how actors use and govern them. Both style-A and B theorizing, moreover, might overlook how profound and transformative the shift to infrastructures as a foundational concept of world politics actually could be, and that it potentially constitutes an alternative independent theoretical project, instead of a complementary focus on empirical objects. For style-C, studying infrastructures implies theorizing foundational processes in world politics. Infrastructuralism argues that our reliance on infrastructures is so profound that the concept is better thought of as a generic analytical concept or a novel theoretical perspective to study the nature and making of international structures that underpin world politics from beneath. Infrastructure in this sense is not an additional phenomenon to be integrated within existing theoretical perspectives and methodologies. Instead, it paves the way for a novel paradigm. Infrastructuralism here might become a new theoretical alternative to established theoretical frameworks. 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