MdP Room S7 and Zoom
Spring Colloquium 2022
Abstract: This article investigates the role of infrastructure in international relations. It does so through a site ontological analysis of public health Emergency Operations Centres (EOCs) – the global health equivalent of war rooms that many countries now use to coordinate their strategic responses to global health emergencies like COVID-19. Building upon site ontology’s core analytical distinction between human practices and material arrangements, the article advances a novel conceptualisation of infrastructure as material arrangements. It argues that infrastructures – qua such material arrangements – continually channel the conduct of international relations through subtle processes of infrastructural prefiguration. It develops a methodological analytics for empirically capturing this prefigurative power of infrastructure through a three-step process of site ontological inventorying, sifting, and contact-tracing. It finally mobilises those prefiguration analytics to reveal how EOC infrastructures prefigure contemporary international relations through an oligoptical (rather than panoptical) diagram of power. Thus, the article advances the overall study of International Relations by developing a site ontological approach to the analysis of infrastructure, by initiating the methodological study of infrastructural prefiguration, and by empirically capturing the global circulation of oligoptical power. In so doing the article expounds how international relations are ultimately also infrastructural relations.
Speaker Bio: Stefan Elbe is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Centre for Global Health Policy at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on the international politics of health including Pandemics, Pills and Politics: Governing Global Health Security (JHUP) Security and Global Health: Towards the Medicalization of Insecurity (Polity Press), Virus Alert: Security, Governmentality and the AIDS Pandemic (Columbia University Press) and Strategic Implications of HIV/AIDS (Oxford University Press). Professor Elbe has served as the Head of the International Relations Department and as Director of Research for the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. He also served as the founding Chair of the Global Health Section of the International Studies Association, and as founding Co-Convener of the Global Health Working Group of the British International Studies Association.