1 Introduction

‘What’s the big idea?’ The phrase immediately came to mind as I contemplated different possible ways of introducing this book. It is a phrase that, in Anglo-American popular culture and discourse at least, seems almost too commonplace to definitively identify a single point of origin or key influence. To the point, indeed, where it might be argued that no such discussion is necessary: though it is tempting to refer at least to the phrase ‘Hey, what’s the idea?!’, and such variations as ‘What’s the big idea?!’, as uttered by one of The Three Stooges in shock and chagrin, usually after being struck in the face by one of their fellow ‘stooges’. Whatever the source, ‘What’s the big idea?’ seems an appropriate enough way to start: it is possible, I think, to characterize this book as being concerned with ‘big ideas’: ‘big’ in the sense of scale, and also in the (related) sense of being expansive and potentially far-reaching. In particular, as denoted by the book’s title, the book is concerned with what it terms as ‘the emergence of the planetary’, ways in which that might be seen to produce certain modes of ‘crisis’, and proposed means by which technologies might be used to manage those forms of crisis. ‘Big’ here also suggests, for some bodies of knowledge and scholarship at least, a scalar problem or issue to be grappled with: not least for the disciplinary study of International Relations (IR) and security as the field of scholarship from which this book project initially set out, and for which the emergence of the ‘planetary’ has, for some at least, come with the force of the kind of punch that Moe might deliver to Larry or Curly (to really hammer that vaudevillian trope of The Three Stooges).

In this book, these ‘big’ themes of scale and how to manage to conceptualize the planetary, and, just as much, how to conceptualize the planetary in order to manage ‘it’, occur, recur, and (re-)emerge in various and significant ways. Ways that relate to the study of both the international and of (in)security, broadly defined, but that also intersect with debates and contentions in other disciplines and in ways that might be said to criss-cross and traverse conventional boundaries and distinctions between the ‘natural’ and ‘social sciences’. In analysing these debates and contentions, this book pivots around three central concerns that relate in different ways around the ‘big idea’ of the planetary. By way of introduction, this first chapter sets out an overview of those key concerns below: a concern with ‘Concepts in Crisis’; a second concern entailing ‘The Emergence of the Planetary’ within, but not limited to the study of IR and (in)security; and a third concern with ‘Technopolitics’ which, this book suggests, provides a distinctive and productive analytical and methodological outlook on those preceding concerns. After outlining each of these, the chapter proceeds to a more in-depth discussion of ‘Theorizing Technopolitics’ by way of establishing the theoretical and methodological framework that underpins the contents of the proceeding chapters. More specifically, the book makes the case for and seeks to develop and apply a particular approach to the technopolitics of sociotechnical imaginaries of planetary emergency and crisis: providing a kind of immanent critique of different ‘technopolitical’ problems and solutions as envisaged within those imaginaries, and reflecting on the how they envisage and ‘co-produce’ the planetary in the process. As well as seeking to further establish those concerns and the approach the book takes, the proceeding sections of this Introduction also seek to provide some guide as to the chapters that follow.

‘Human beings have broken out of the circle of life, driven not by biological need, but by the social organization which they have devised to “conquer” nature: means of gaining wealth that are governed by requirements conflicting with those which govern nature. The end result is the environmental crisis, a crisis of survival. Once more, to survive, we must close the circle. We must learn how to restore to nature the wealth that we borrow from it.’ Barry Commoner’s words, published in the early 1970s in the final pages of The Closing Circle (Commoner 2020 [1971], 287–288) could, one suspects, easily blend into any number of more recent, urgent commentaries on ‘(the) planetary emergency’, or the Earth’s ecological or climate ‘crisis’. That judgement is, of course, subjective: whether Commoner’s thoughts might ‘fit’ in with more recent accounts might depend on precisely what accounts one has in mind. In metaphorical terms, though, Commoner would certainly seem to have struck ‘notes’ that continue to ‘resonate’ with at least some appraisals of planetary emergency and crisis as now established and expanding issues of both popular and scholarly concern. The ‘environmental crisis’ is, Commoner tells us, precisely that: an ongoing crisis. One that is marked by ‘conflict’—between modern forms of ‘social organization’ and wealth generation on the one hand, and ‘nature’ and its ‘requirements’ on the other. And it is a crisis that is, fundamentally, Commoner tells us, a ‘crisis of survival’.

Commoner’s characterization and concerns might thus be heard as being particularly in tune with more recent discourses on ‘emergency’ and ‘extinction(s)’. ‘Survival’, of both ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’, is seen by Commoner, and in more recent discourses on the latter, to be at risk: an insecure prospect unless significant actions are undertaken. Jump to the year 2023, and we might read that the sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is notable for its delivery of a ‘“final warning”’ on the climate crisis’ (Harvey 2023; IPCC 2023). United Nations Secretary General António Guterres is quoted as presenting the report as ‘a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once’ (as cited in Harvey 2023). The latter call to action most probably paraphrases the title of an academy award winning movie, but Guterres would also reach for characterizations of a ‘survival guide for humanity’, and a variation of the ‘ticking timebomb’ scenario:

Guterres called on governments to take drastic action to reduce emissions by investing in renewable energy and low-carbon technology. He said rich countries must try to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions ‘as close as possible to 2040’, rather than waiting for the 2050 deadline most have signed up to […] He said: ‘The climate timebomb is ticking. But today’s [IPCC Sixth Assessment] report is a how-to guide to defuse the climate timebomb. It is a survival guide for humanity. As it shows, the 1.5C limit is achievable.’ (Harvey 2023)

Guterres’s framing of climate crisis there not only reiterates, and urges, a goal of ‘limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the threshold beyond which our damage to the climate will rapidly become irreversible’ (Harvey 2023), as highlighted also by the Sixth Assessment Report. It also arguably seeks to amplify the necessity of achieving that goal by employing terminology associated with what some have termed as ‘existential security’ (Sears 2020). Elsewhere, Guterres has invoked martial language too, in terms that again carry echoes of Commoner’s assessment, in calls to ‘make peace with nature’ in order to mend a ‘broken planet’ (United Nations 2023a) and to ‘end relentless wars on nature’ in order to ‘protect our common home’ (United Nations 2023b). The terms used, and the position of their author, would seem to seek to establish the context of planetary emergency and climate crisis as subjects of (in)security. UN ‘peace operations’, Guterres seems to suggest, now extend far beyond the local, national, or even international activities of those wearing blue helmets or berets. Ending ‘humanity’s war on nature’, given the existential, planetary stakes, might be seen to take precedence. And Guterres’s is not the only attempt to render such issues and concerns in terms of martial metaphors and a vocabulary of existential (in)security. Noted environmental thinker and activist Bill McKibben had previously (see McKibben 2016) declared that ‘World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing.’ Moreover, McKibben had argued, the point is precisely not metaphorical or by way of analogy: ‘It’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. And we are losing’ (McKibben 2016, emphasis in original).

As explored in detail and in different ways by scholars such as Jacob Darwin Hamblin (2013) and Jairus Grove (2019), these sorts of framings are not necessarily novel or uncommon. They recur in different ways in some of the works and passages discussed in greater detail in later chapters of this book too. What the book seeks to explore and probe in greater detail, though, is the ‘technopolitical’ assumptions and implications of forms and structures of argumentation related to the topics of planetary emergency and crisis. For Guterres, key to ‘making peace with nature’ is a radical scaling up of the investment in renewable energy and low-carbon technology—especially by those states most able to afford it, but also worldwide in order to fix a ‘broken’ planet. Part of the point intended by McKibben’s argument that the ‘climate crisis’ is a world war, rather than simply being ‘like’ a world war, is that ‘our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII’ (McKibben 2016). Writing primarily with an American audience in mind, McKibben thus seems to suggest that a comparable effort to that of the mobilization of a US defence-industrial base during World War II, noting that at least some (but, McKibben argues, too few) ‘American scientists have been engaged in a quiet but concentrated effort to figure out how quickly existing technology can be deployed to defeat global warming; a modest start, in effect, for a mighty Manhattan Project’ (McKibben 2016). The form of that mobilization, McKibben argues, requires levels of effort comparable to that of the US war effort but, of course, would need to be very different in form (militarism, and its associated carbon footprint, have been estimated by some to be a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions—see Conflict and Environment Observatory 2022). ‘We’ are, Guterres and McKibben suggest, either ‘waging’ or required to ‘wage’ war in ways very different to predominant conceptions of war historically.

Returning to Commoner’s The Closing Circle, humans’ ‘conflict’ with nature was also envisaged to require very different means of address and understanding. Indeed, to secure the ‘ecosphere’ and ensure ‘survival’ a key part of what was required, which Commoner argued for and sought to develop, would be the study and practice of ‘ecology’ as ‘the science of planetary housekeeping’ (Commoner 2020 [1971], 29). The term ‘ecology’ has, though, evolved in interesting ways in terms of its usage. Grove (2019), as already cited, invites readers to consider an understanding of ‘savage ecology’; and Mike Davis (1999) suggests the concept of ‘an ecology of fear’. In similar vein, it might be worth reflecting on what kind of ‘ecologies’ of fear—and hope—are mobilized by concepts of planetary crisis and emergency. This kind of consideration is explored and discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2, where the proposition is considered that ‘crisis’ might itself be critically engaged with as mobilizing different modalities of fear and hope. Later chapters of the book also engage with this concern in different ways—particularly in analysing the ‘technopolitics’ of different framings of planetary emergency and what ‘technology’ can do or offer in response, by way of ‘crisis management’. In that sense, then, the book in part seeks to extend and deepen in different ways the sorts of propositions and provocations set out by Erik Swyngedouw in particular. Swyngedouw, it might be suggested, is suspicious of ‘clarion calls’ to action centred on forms of planetary emergency and crisis that lead, ultimately, to catastrophe if unheeded:

Imaginaries of a dystopian future are nurtured, not in the least by various political and economic elites, to invoke the specter of the inevitable if NOTHING is done so that SOMETHING WILL be done. Their performative gesture is, of course, to turn the revealed (ecological or political-economic) ENDGAME into a manageable CRISIS. While catastrophe denotes the irreversible radical transformation of the existing into a spiralling abyssal decline, crisis is a conjunctural condition that requires particular techno-managerial attention by those entitled or assigned to do so. The notion of crisis also promises the possibility to contain the crisis such that the dystopian revelation is postponed or deflected. Thus, the embrace of catastrophic language serves primarily to turn nightmare into crisis management, to assure that the situation is serious but not catastrophic. (Swyngedouw 2013, 10, emphasis (use of upper case) in the original)

Fundamentally, Swyngedouw suspects that ‘the imaginary of crisis and potential collapse produces an ecology of fear, danger, and uncertainty while reassuring “the people” (or, rather, the population) that the techno-scientific and socio-economic elites have the necessary tool-kit to readjust the machine such that things can stay basically as they are’ (2013, 10–11). So too does Clark A. Miller caution that ‘drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . dystopian fantasies of insecurity fall upon the surface of public imagination, rippling through civic consciousness, reconfiguring flows of planetary ontology and authority as communities reconstruct impressions of danger and defense’ (Miller 2015, 294).

These lines read, potentially, not simply as provocations, but as invitations. Swyngedouw and Miller (and others) go a long way to addressing what kinds of ecologies of fear and hope might be mobilized in concepts of planetary emergency and crisis, the political imagination of recommended responses and courses of action, and the key roles that ‘technology’ might play in providing fixes to manage such crises. This is a starting point, though, that demands further consideration as the remainder of this book seeks to illustrate and analyse. In particular, and in ways that relate to but also somewhat depart from the lines of Swyngedouw above, the later chapters of the book might suggest that there is not one, singular ‘imaginary of crisis and potential collapse’ but instead multiple, different, and variegated imaginaries, plural. Later chapters also seek to offer, in some ways, a contribution to and extension of Miller’s suggestion to consider how ‘dystopian fantasies of insecurity’ might ‘reconfigur[e] flows of planetary ontology’ in the face of existential threats and fears of ‘The End’.

A second major concern of the book, following on from the context set out above, is the ‘emergence of the planetary’. The titling of that concern is a not-so-subtle play on both discussions of ‘planetary emergency’ within policy and wider discourses centred on, but not necessarily limited to, issues of climatic crisis, species extinctions, and risks associated with collapsing biodiversity on the one hand (see, for example, Gore 2006; Smith 2022) and, on the other hand, a body of academic scholarship on broadly related issues that reflects on, and seeks to grapple with, ‘the planetary’ as an emergent context or consideration. If ‘context or consideration’ reads as an evasive phrasing, that is because it is: as is discussed in relation to the fallout from the ‘planet politics’ debates (Burke et al. 2016) within the study of IR, the emergence of the planetary, what it entails, whether it is meaningful as a category, whether and how it can or should supplant concepts of ‘the international’ or displace notions of ‘the global’, has been the source of much contention. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 of the book undertake a form of immanent critical disciplinary sociology that suggests recent debates on these lines within international studies is more a case of ‘re-emergence’. Work such as Richard Falk’s (1972)  This Endangered Planet, Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival for example, recently cited as being one of the ‘Books for the Century’ (see Ikenberry 2022) along with, as discussed in Chapter 2, E. H. Carr’s (1939)  The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939, An Introduction to the Study of International Relations and Karl Polanyi’s (1957)  The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, serves to evidence ‘early’ consideration of forms of ‘planetary’ endangerment relative to the study of the international. Ikenberry’s grouping of Falk’s work in direct relation to key contributions to the study of crisis and modernity is also telling. The fact This Endangered Planet is presented by Ikenberry (2022) as sounding an ‘alarm’ that seems to ring even louder now than it did on its publication in the 1970s is indicative of a time in which the planetary seems to loom larger. Not just within the discipline of IR, or, even if understood as being more porous in terms of disciplinary boundaries, ‘international studies’ in a wider sense; but, also, in a range of diverse work that, to borrow a phrase from William Connolly, consciously seeks to ‘face the planetary’ (Connolly 2017).

Though the two concepts are not necessarily always interconnected, a plausible case can be made, as set out further in Chapter 3, that the seeming ‘re-emergence’ of the planetary within IR (and, arguably, more generally across a wide variety of disciplines) is crucially bound up with the even more prominent accumulation of work and debates on the ‘Anthropocene’ (excellent overviews, of which there are many, that are also substantive contributions in their own right include, Lewis and Maslin 2018; and Hamilton, Bonneuil, and Gemenne 2015; Yusoff 2017; 2018) and in the study of politics and IR specifically, Dryzek and Pickering 2019; Chandler, Müller, and Rothe 2021).

The (re-)emergence of the planetary ‘now’ suggests the timeliness of interventions that question why, seemingly, the planetary was managed out of modern international studies for quite so long: prompting critical reflections on why, for example, Falk’s This Endangered Planet can now plausibly be re-read and presented as being ‘ahead of its time’ (even though its substance is in many ways very much tied to its own historical context). Such characterizations, of course, run the risk of over-simplifying a more complex account of the ways in which conceptions of the planetary might be argued to loom in the background of international studies. Not just, as Chapter 2 seeks to illustrate, in relation to more recent debates on ‘planet(ary) politics’ of different sorts; but also within what might be considered as a sort of disciplinary pre-history of anglophone IR in particular in which specific concepts of ‘crisis’ (were) managed to delimit, and most often preclude, the emergence of the planetary.

Moreover, as a key facet of this book’s interventions into and contributions to the study of planetary crisis management, what, precisely, facing the planetary might mean or entail varies and so generalization needs to be approached with caution. It is in this sense that the political significance of ‘planetary crisis management’, and the parameters ‘it’ sets and resets, might best be approached and understood. Often, and as is exemplified and discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3, scholarship of this sort often suggests that the concept of ‘the planetary’ is (now, more than ever, urgently) meaningful; that it is potentially related to but also crucially distinct from ostensibly similar concepts such as ‘the global’ or ‘globalities’ (van Munster and Sylvest 2016); and understanding the planetary is and should be informed by a breakdown of boundaries between disciplines of the natural and social sciences (Clark and Szerszynski 2021; Latour 2017; 2018; Chakrabarty 2018). Some even go so far as to argue that facing the planetary comes with an attendant effacing of conventional, ‘modern’ boundaries between ‘N/nature’ and ‘C/culture’, or between the ‘human’ and ‘non-human’. Of course, claims as big as that have generated criticisms and counterpoints. The work of Anne Fremaux and John Barry (2019) in some ways encapsulates both of these aspects, by way of illustration. Though Fremaux and Barry (2019, 172) contend that a contemporary context of ‘repeated failures of ecological modernization and environmental managerialism should be an opportunity to rethink our place on the planet and to accept the fragility and vulnerability of the human species in the face of complex and unpredictable natural phenomena’, they proceed to warn that in debates on the planetary ‘the human species is seen as socially and historically “unified” and issues of class, gender, race, and geographical position are all erased, as an undifferentiated “humanity” faces the “planet”’ (2019, 173). Any accompanying or alternative ‘post-humanist’ accounts of planetary politics (they have in mind thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour) should also be approached with caution for similar reasons. ‘Entanglements’ between the human and non-human should not lead, they argue, to erasure of distinctions between the two; and the idea of ‘post-humanism’ again risks the assumption that there is (or was) an undifferentiated mass of humanity that is now somehow in ‘post-’ condition (2019, 179–180).

The ‘planet politics’ debates (for example, Burke et al. 2016; Chandler et al. 2018) as engaged with in greater detail later in the book in some ways capture and reflect those lines of argument, facing ‘the planetary’ risks, critics contend among other things, effacing crucial issues of divergence, difference, and inequalities by assuming or implying the planet as singular political space (cf. Yusoff 2018). Debates about ‘nature’ and the nature of the ‘post/human’ condition feature there too. More specifically in relation to ‘the international’, even those sympathetic to the concept of the planetary caution that solely focusing on or assuming its ontological primacy too often misses the continuing significance of IR (see, especially Corry 2020b)—not least in relation to the politics of what some have identified as ‘the grand challenges of planetary governance’, such as the climate emergency, control of the spread of infectious diseases ‘that may prove more severe than COVID-19’, and the potentially deleterious impacts of ‘evolving digital technologies’ and ‘the revolution in biotechnology’ (Young, O. R. 2023, 1; cf. Sears 2020). It has also been suggested that notions of the planetary are misguided when it comes to characterizing issues associated with climate and biodiversity, the biosphere, and hence biospheric security, might seem a more appropriate classification when it comes to consideration of threats to the prospects of survival for human and non-human life (Dalby 1998, 302; see also Dalby 2022, 134).

Those latter charges are doubtless worthy of consideration, and in part that is what the proceeding chapters of the book engage with. The emergence of the planetary is, though, a concern worth considering in greater detail precisely for those reasons, as it would seem that ‘the planetary’ has fired the imagination in at least some parts of the scholarly world. Arguably the most prominent usage of the concept of ‘biospheric security’ has been in critique of its implications (Duffield and Evans 2011), among a more limited body of scholarship. By comparison references to ‘the planetary’ abound, generally, and specifically in relation to debates on survival and security. Moreover, the ‘planet’ in ‘the planetary’ is often assumed as self-evidently Earth. Concepts such as ‘Whole Earth Security’ (Deudney 1983; Dalby 2022, 131–150) could as easily be argued to pertain and to better specify the nature of the referent object. Or it could simply be contended that notions of the planetary too often assume that the Earth as ‘the’ planet is defined purely by continuance of its conditions of habitability for human and non-human life. In the event that, for example, extreme warming leads to an ‘uninhabitable Earth’ (see Wallace-Wells 2019) then there is still a strong likelihood that the planet once commonly known as Earth will still exist, albeit in planetary conditions radically different to that of today (cf. McKibben’s (2010) conception of ‘Eaarth’, with an additional ‘a’ by way of distinction, as a ‘tough new planet’). There would still be a planet in that kind of scenario, just not one existing in conditions that are necessarily conducive to human habitability and so without humans around to remember or conceive of ‘it’ as the ‘Earth’ (cf. Clark 2014). Alternatively, and put in rather different terms by one of those who foresee a different pathway based on technological ‘breakthroughs’, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 7, some suggest that ‘talk of “saving the planet”’ from becoming entirely uninhabitable ‘is overstated […] Earth will be fine, no matter what; so will life. It is humans who are in trouble. But since we got ourselves into this fix, we should be able to get ourselves out of it’ (Brand 2010, 2).

Those kinds of arguments about Earthly exceptionalism are in many ways entirely relevant to the subject matter of this book. There are, as the proceeding chapters seek to illustrate, very good reasons to approach ‘the planetary’ with a degree of circumspection and a constant awareness that ‘[r]econceptualisations of the planet not only offer a new description of the Earth, but also enclose subjectivity within new limits and concepts of powers’ (Yusoff 2017, 260). That not least because the planetary might itself be said to constitute a particular point of view—to the point of view or ‘optic’ that, Joseph Masco suggests, might be worth considering further. A ‘planetary imaginary’, Masco (2015, 137) contends,

includes globalities of every kind (finance, technology, international relations)—along with geology, atmosphere, glaciers, oceans, and the biosphere—as one totality. What is increasingly powerful about this point of view is that it both relies on the national security state for the technologies, finances, and interests that create the possibility of seeing in this fashion, but also, in a single gesture, exceeds the nation-state as the political form that matters. A planetary optic is thus a national security creation (in its scientific infrastructures, visualization technologies, and governing ambitions) that transcends these structures to offer an alternative ground for politics and future making. Proliferating forms of globality—including the specific visualizations of science, finance, politics, and environment—each achieve ultimate scale and are unified at the level of the planetary. This achievement ultimately raises an important set of questions about how collective security problems can, and should, be imagined.

That concern of ‘an important set of questions about how collective security problems can, and should, be imagined’—and, often by consequence, managed—is one that recurs in this book. It invokes and links to, as discussed in greater detail below, an approach that might be informed by awareness of and sensitivity to the roles of technology, (security) politics, and ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ as key aspects of planetary emergence and the technopolitics of crisis management. And this matters and relates critically, potentially, to the subject of security.

A key observation of, and point of critical intervention for, the book is that there are interesting and important parallels between the re-emergence of the planetary within international studies (Chapters 2, 3, and 4) and the re-emergence, often explicitly characterized as such, of consideration of different forms of (planetary) geoengineering (Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8). Part of the immanent critical intervention of the book, though, is to simultaneously seek to highlight the points of imbrication and, at times, intersection between these two related ‘tales’ of re-emergence. This is important to engage with as, for some, those imbrications and intersections in turn amount to a normative case for a new planetary (techno)politics of security. For Masco, the case is clear that ‘the cumulative toxic fallout of the twentieth century continues to shift both global and earth systems, requiring a new politics of air, soil, water, energy, and finance, while also demanding new concepts of planetary security. Toxicity is now a planetary force, a realization that requires new critical theory as well as different concepts of the political’ (Masco 2015, 144). Simon Dalby elsewhere likewise sees practical policy implications of a planetary optic, ‘If the whole earth is understood in terms of the ecosphere, or as an arena for conflict arbitrated ultimately by the threat of the use of firepower, then dramatically different notions of security inform policy’ (Dalby 2022, 134). Furthermore, Dalby continues, underlying such notions of security are ‘simple but powerful matters of geopolitical assumptions’. Geopolitical not just in the conventional sense but, as is discussed in various parts of the book and especially in Chapters 6, 7, and 8, in terms of how ‘technology’ is seen to inform, define, and engineer the parameters of planetary (in)security. Indeed as later parts of the book, specifically Chapter 8, go on to discuss, there are also interesting ways in which the technopolitics of Earthly planetary crisis management might also encompass visions for ‘Other Earths’, either in the forms of the Earth (re-)engineered in ways envisaged to secure the planet (or, at least, parts of it) from the worst effects of climate crisis and planetary emergency; or in visions for ‘new’ Earths that might be created elsewhere, but envisioned and simulated in the here and now in the form of experimental biospheres, technospheres, or computer models.

Per the subtitle of this book, the concept of ‘technopolitics’ is central to the analysis undertaken in the proceeding chapters. In many ways it is what binds the book: both in the sense of tying the chapters together, and also (pace  Chapter 4’s substantive discussions) setting the boundaries of the book’s interventions and intended contributions. However, as noted in one recent overview of the ‘technopolitics of security’, the concept of technopolitics is itself subject to a relatively wide variety of understanding and interpretations, with Müller and Richmond (2023, 8) contending that though the term ‘has been in circulation in the social sciences for at least two decades’ there is ‘currently no widely agreed definition of this potentially powerful concept’. As is discussed in greater detail below, the terms ‘technopolitics’ (or, sometimes as ‘techno-politics’) and ‘technopolitical’ have been applied and illustrated in a range of different works. These range from subjects including technology and democracy (Kellner 2021), to modern Egyptian statehood (Mitchell 2002), and the ‘making of Brazil’s new middle class’ (Kopper 2020); and also include attempts to directly relate considerations of technopolitics to security, borders, and the constitution of the international (see, variously, Peoples and Stevens 2020; Dijstelbloem 2021; Müller and Richmond 2023).

As Müller and Richmond also legitimately argue, though, the work of Gabrielle Hecht (1998, 2011, 2012), and sometimes co-authored with Paul N. Edwards (Hecht and Edwards 2010a; 2010b; cf. Edwards 1996; 2010), constitutes the most sustained attempt to theorize ‘the technopolitical’ around which other meanings, interpretations, and engagements might then be considered in relation to, and possibly contrasted with. Distilled by Hecht and Edwards (2010, 274), for them: ‘Technopolitics is the strategic practice of designing or using technology to enact political goals. Such practices are not simply politics by another name. They produce artifacts whose design features matter fundamentally to their success, and to the ways in which they act upon the world.’ That distillation is, in turn, produced out of, and put to work in application to, extensive and forensically detailed analysis of, in Hecht’s case, the ‘interweaving’ of ‘technology and politics’ in the production of nuclear power and French national identity (Hecht 1998, 56), and, elsewhere, the ‘power of nuclear things’ and the politics of the global uranium trade (Hecht 2012). Those works also usefully illustrate the ways in which ‘national’ and ‘global’ technopolitics of identities, institutions, and infrastructures are ‘interwoven’. Hecht’s (2012)  Being Nuclear is particularly directed towards theorizing and analysing the linkages between uranium mining in parts of Africa such as South Africa and Namibia and the wider, global markets of nuclear industry, ‘civil’ and ‘military’, and the deeper (if the metaphor be allowed) and abiding significance of colonialism. Indeed, as well as arguing the significance of technopolitics in the constitution of specific forms of national and state identity, Hecht and Edwards have also explicitly advocated the adoption of a ‘transregional perspective’ in, for example, analysis of the technopolitics of the Cold War:

When political actors work with engineers to solve problems, such as how to manage the command and control of nuclear-armed military forces on a global scale, they orient each other to particular solutions. As politicians and designers work together—very often indirectly, mediated through institutions—emerging technical capabilities both create and constrain political possibilities. At the same time, technical capabilities expand and take on directionality to the extent that they acquire political support and effectiveness; unsupported designs come to seem impractical (even if they are not) once large resources have been committed to another alternative. (Hecht and Edwards 2010a, 274, emphasis added)

Hecht, in a related vein, has also sought to articulate the substance of technopolitics as being ‘a concept that captures the hybrid forms of power embedded in technological artifacts, systems, and practices’ (2011, 3); and in terms of ‘entangled’ national and global geographies of the Cold War, and the associated ‘displacement of power onto technical things’—nuclear weapons, industrial systems of production, technologies of transportation, communication, and health. In that sense, technopolitical analysis of the Cold War entails, for Hecht, drawing attention to ‘how the material properties of technologies shaped the exercise of political power in the second half of the twentieth century’ (2011, 3).

‘Shaped’ is, as above, worth emphasizing in that context, as rather than technologies determining political power (or vice versa), and Hecht and Edwards’s contention that ‘emerging technical capabilities both create and constrain political possibilities’ might also be read as a caution against presuming straight lines of determination running either way in that respect and, simultaneously, as an invitation to investigate the context specificities of technologies, systems, and practices. As Hecht goes on to argue, even where technical capabilities might be deliberately planned and circumscribed, by, for example, ‘politicians and designers’, to ‘work’ and empower only in specific ways, unintended political possibilities might follow: ‘The allure of technopolitical strategies is the displacement of power onto technical things, a displacement that designers and politicians sometimes hope to make permanent. But the very material properties of technopolitical assemblages, the way they reshape landscapes, for example, or their capacity to give or take life, sometimes offers other actors an unforeseen purchase on power by providing unexpected means for them to act’ (Hecht 2011, 3). It is in this sense, then, that Hecht detects strong resonance with Timothy Mitchell’s (2002) understanding of ‘techno-politics’. The latter’s study of the ‘rule of experts’ in the formation of the ‘modern’ Egyptian state, Hecht argues, is aligned in terms of its emphasis on ‘the unpredictable power effects of technical assemblages’ (Hecht 2011, 3); and, similarly, Müller and Richmond see clear overlap between Hecht’s concept of technopolitics and Mitchell’s understanding of an ‘assembly of elements’ (Müller and Richmond 2023, 4) that are ‘both human and nonhuman, both intentional and not, and in which the intentional or the human is always somewhat overrun by the unintended’ (Mitchell 2002, 42; as quoted in Müller and Richmond 2023, 4).

All the above, Müller and Richmond argue, should lead us to ‘[ask] what happens if we take the techno-materiality of security seriously and see it as intertwined with, rather than separate from, security politics’ (2023, 4). Given that, for those who read on, the approach taken to the technopolitics of crisis management in this book might come across as something of a deviation from that steer towards taking the ‘techno-materiality of security seriously’; and, some might argue, there are not necessarily gains to be made either from trying to ‘excavate’ a related but somewhat different approach to technopolitics, or by seeking to ‘extend’ that approach to encompass a slightly different range of considerations and possibilities.

But the book takes an approach to studying technopolitics that, while arguably broadly consistent with Hecht and Edwards’s investigations into the creation and constraint of political possibilities, also seeks to address that concern via a more distinct focus on and critical engagement with the contention that ‘technology is itself a political phenomenon’ (Winner 1977, 324, emphasis in original); and, for reasons set out in further detail below, also draws heavily on scholarship and ideas associated with the study of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff and Kim 2009; Jasanoff 2015a; 2015b; 2020). In those respects, the book also somewhat stands apart from other variants and interpolations of Science and Technology Studies (STS) within IR and security studies, broadly conceived (as well as Müller and Richmond 2023, see for example: Barry 2013; Bellanova, Jacobsen, and Monsees 2020; Lidskog and Sundqvist 2015; Salter 2015; 2016). Distinctions can matter in productive ways, too, though. The difference in and originality of studying the imminent technopolitics of planetary crisis management, and the thematic and conceptual issues that arise as a result, also intersects in potentially interesting ways with wider, related scholarship: on ‘entanglements’ and ‘assemblages’ of human and non-human entities ‘across multiple scales from the nanoparticle to the planetary’ (Lisle 2021, 439; see also, for example, Acuto and Curtis 2014; Cudworth and Hobden 2013); on ‘failing’, and potentially conflictual and ‘savage’, ecologies of the Anthropocene (Agathangelou 2016; Grove 2019); and on questions of governance, ethics, and accountability arising from ‘the politics of techniques, devices and acts’ (Aradau and Huysmans 2013; see also, variously: Amoore 2020; 2023; Aradau 2023; Aradau and Blanke 2022; Bellanova and Glouftsios 2022; de Goede 2018; Martins 2023). To better understand where the imminent technopolitics of planetary crisis management stands relative to such scholarship, and how and where such intersections might arise, a fuller and deeper exploration of what the former might entail is in order.

Though the concept of technopolitics is of relatively recent provenance, Hecht notes that its terms of reference, especially if cast broadly as focusing on the ‘relationship between technology and political power’, is ‘an old and important concern in historical and social analysis, dating back at least as far as Karl Marx’s discussions of means of production as a controlling factor in political economy and continuing on into the twentieth century with public intellectuals such as Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul’ (Hecht 2011, 11). More recent work in ‘the modern field of Science and Technology Studies’, Hecht continues, ‘has vastly expanded and deepened such reflections’. Among the latter, Hecht cites the work of Langdon Winner, and Winner’s work—particularly Autonomous Technology, Technics-out-of-control as a Concern in Political Thought (Winner 1977) and The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Winner 1986)—is indeed oft-cited in such discussions of the relationship between technology and political power. With good reason, not least as Winner’s work is among one of the earlier instances of the use of the phrase ‘technopolitical theory’ (Winner 1977, 264).

Of note, though, is the way in which Winner conceives of, and uses, ‘technopolitical theory’ and ‘technopolitical ideas’ as a kind of shorthand for a particular genre of writing, or, as Winner titles it a ‘concern’, more broadly characterizable as ‘technological politics’ (Winner 1977, ix, 207). That ‘concern’, consistent with the term used also by Hecht above, is one which Winner seeks to both categorize and, in many ways, critique and take issue with: ‘Technological politics’, and the ‘technopolitical theory’ and ‘ideas’ in the work of thinkers including, among others, Mumford (1967; 1970), Ellul (1964), as mentioned by Hecht, and also the likes of Herbert Marcuse (1964), and J. K. Galbraith (1968). The ideas expounded in those works are, for Winner, emblematic of ‘technics-out-of-control’: hence, ‘autonomous technology’, distinguishable as ‘the belief that somehow technology has gotten out of control and follows its own course, independent of human direction’ (Winner 1977, 13; cf. Commoner 2020 [1971]) as being a, if not the, defining characteristic of political modernity:

One now finds persistent depositions given about the following kinds of phenomena, large-scale systems that appear to expand by some inherent momentum or growth—weapons systems, freeways, skyscrapers, power, and communications networks which make the notions of controlled application and reasonable use seem absurd; a continuing and ever-accelerating process of technical innovation in all spheres of life, which brings with it numerous ‘unintended’ and uncontrolled consequences in nature and society; technical systems entirely removed from the possibility of influence through outside direction, which respond only to the requirements of their own internal operations. In other words, the same technologies that have extended man’s control over the world are themselves difficult to control. (Winner 1977, 28–29)

In the context of such ‘persistent depositions’, the general sense that Winner’s work might be said to convey, out of an in-depth engagement with works and authors such as those cited above, is that works engaging with this theme of ‘technics-out-of-control’ might be thought-provoking but also potentially politically disabling. As Winner notes, work on the technics-out-of-control concern seeks to offer a corrective to any lingering assumptions that ‘technology’ refers to a range of neutral things, instruments, tools that ‘we’ simply use to produce a given set of outcomes, goods or ends. Winner generally exhibits a good degree of sympathy with the intention of that corrective. Modern political life—and indeed all aspects of human life—exists, Winner suggests at several points, in the condition of a ‘technopolis’ (Winner 1986, ix), and ‘in many ways we are already its citizens’, ‘If one observes how thoroughly our lives are shaped by interconnected systems of modern technology […] one begins to understand that, like it or not, we have become members of a new order in human history. To an ever-increasing extent, this order of things transcends national boundaries to create roles and relationships grounded in vast, complex instrumentalities of industrial production, electronic communications, transportation, agribusiness, medicine, and warfare. Observing the structures and processes of these vast systems, one begins to comprehend a distinctively modern form of power, the foundations of a technopolitan culture.’

However, too often, Winner seems to suggest, do theorists writing in this vein conflate ‘technology’ with technological determinism, and with the latter often (assumed to be) omnipresent, irresistible, and overwhelming. Humans, sometimes rendered by Winner, as in the quote above, in the gendered terminology of ‘man’/‘men’, might still have a greater degree of political agency than such accounts of technological politics assume or allow for, hence, arguably, Winner’s call for greater recognition that ‘technology is itself a political phenomenon’. Yes, Winner concedes: ‘A crucial turning point comes when one is able to acknowledge that modern technics, much more than politics as conventionally understood, now legislates the conditions of human existence. New technologies are institutional structures within an evolving constitution that gives shape to a new polity, the technopolis in which we do increasingly live’; but ‘there is no reason why the recognition of technology’s intrinsic political aspect should wed us permanently to the ills of the present order’. There is still scope, and hope, Winner argues, for attempts to be made to ‘redefine an authentic politics and reinvent conditions under which it might be practiced’—a hope which Winner sees as being ‘carried forward’ in an alternative body of work by theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, and Carole Pateman (Winner 1977, 324). Even in the modern technopolis, ‘Perhaps’, and this is where Winner’s Autonomous Technology ends, ‘means can be found to rid the human world of our self-made afflictions.’

Why go ‘back’ to Winner, the question might be asked, in attempting to theorize technopolitics? Winner’s work is consciously styled as being in a more philosophical mode of engagement than the more direct kind of concern with the material aspects of ‘techno-materiality’ that Müller and Richmond (2023, 4) position as central to the technopolitics of security, and is also ostensibly less closely related to Hecht’s identification of the study of technopolitics which entails a concern with ‘how the material properties of technologies shaped the exercise of political power’ (2011, 3; see also Salter 2015; 2016). Winner, arguably, also critiques but, at times, seems to reproduce, a ‘control’/‘out of control’ dichotomy that fits less well with Hecht’s emphasis of the ‘interwoven’ nature of technopolitics, or with Mitchell’s understanding of technopolitics as entailing complex ‘assemblies of human and nonhuman elements’. Winner’s work is in some ways attuned to similar concerns, in its persistent ‘search for limits’ (Winner 1986; a point expanded upon and discussed in Chapter 7). But that search often seems to presume a requirement to navigate between a Scylla of technics and technology as pure, neutral instrumentality available to human ends, and a Charybdis of technology out of human control. In doing so it arguably embeds an either/or framing as a starting point that subsequent STS scholarship of various stripes has arguably sought to move away from, or to not begin from in the first place (see, again, for example, Hecht 1998; and, for comparison, Hughes 1983; Bijker, Pinch, and Hughes 1987; MacKenzie 1993; Latour 1987; and, by way of response, Winner 1993). Even if looking for work in a more critical philosophical vein and a more ‘emancipatory’ approach to Winner’s later (1986, xi) self-posed question ‘How can we limit modern technology to match our best sense of who we are and the kind of world we would like to build?’, the work of Andrew Feenberg (1991, 2010) or even updates to, as cited by Winner (1986, x), contemporaneous debates on ‘appropriate technology’ could arguably provide more logical points of engagements and sources of inspiration (Dunn 1978; Fritsch and Gallimore 2007).

In some ways, though, Winner might be seen to have staked out questions and provocations that can still be seen as both particularly germane to analysing the technopolitics of planetary crisis management, and broadly consistent with the mode of immanent critique set out in the proceeding section. In his analysis of Ellul, Mumford, Marcuse, and others propounding the ‘technics-out-of-control’ concern, Winner (1977, 108) poses the key question: ‘What claims do theories of this sort attempt to make?’ Indeed, the entirety of that work might be read as seeking to address that question—with Winner interrogating the claims that theories of that ‘sort’ make, in general, but particularly in terms of claims made in relation to ‘technology’. Part of the approach and purpose of the later chapters of this book proceeds in what might be regarded as a similar spirit. Rather than simply seeking to assert and establish that there is a technopolitics of planetary crisis management, the book seeks to analyse and question ‘what sort of claims are made’ about ‘technology’ in the technopolitics of planetary crisis management. In the analysis of works and passages that are encountered in later chapters of this book, then, rather than treating ‘technopolitics’ as a given or monolithic thing, a key guiding question asked in each of those encounters is What kind of technopolitics is this?

Winner’s work is also germane as a point of reference in other ways. His juxtaposition between ‘control’ and ‘out-of-control’, might in some ways come across as potentially oversimplifying ways of understanding technology (and politics), especially, again, in light of directions taken in more recent STS scholarship (including scholarship on technopolitics). But, as might be seen in later chapters, particularly in relation to debates and discussions of ‘geoengineering’, framings of ‘control’ and ‘out-of-control’ would seem to resonate strongly — not least for those who might seek to analyse and critique the pursuit of, for example, ‘climate engineering’ techniques and technologies as representative of a (misguided) pursuit of planetary mastery (Hamilton 2013). As an interesting point of contrast to that, and as discussed in Chapter 7, the work of Jonathan Symons (2019), cites Winner explicitly by way of a countervailing interpretation that seeks to advance an argument for democratic control of geoengineering. Winner’s provocations might be interesting and still relevant in that light, not least in the contention that ‘the conclusion that something is “out of control” is interesting to us only insofar as we expect that it ought to be in control in the first place […] Western culture, however, has long believed that its continued existence and advancement depend upon the ability to manipulate the circumstances of the material world. In a spirit that many have called Faustian, we believe that control is possible and that we must strive for it. As a both necessary and noble aspect of Western self-identity, we strive to isolate the variable conditions of the environment and manipulate them for our own advantage’ (Winner 1977, 19).

Again, that contention seems to explicitly stretch to an over-generalization of how technology has been understood in relation to ‘Western self-identity’; but as later chapters in the book arguably attest to, it is an understanding that does appear to commonly recur in the technopolitics of planetary crisis management. Conversely, as is also discussed in later chapters, the ‘out-of-control’ framing identified by Winner might be argued to have interesting parallels in at least some scholarship and debates on technology in ‘the Anthropocene’. Winner’s conception of ‘the technopolis’ as a condition of modern political life—‘The map of the world shows no country called Technopolis, yet in many ways we are already its citizens’ (1986, ix)—for example, stands as interesting comparison to concepts discussed later in the book such as that of ‘the planet’ as ‘technosphere’ (Haff 2014a; 2014b; Zalasiewicz, Williams, Waters et al. 2017; Orlov 2016).

Lastly, Winner’s discussion and analysis of the concept of technology, or, more precisely, how Winner perceived contemporaneous discussions and analysis of the concept of technology, exhibits clear symptoms associated with a diagnosis of conceptual crisis. Indeed, Winner’s account of the historical trajectory of the ‘meaning’ of technology seems to carry echoes of, as argued later in the book (especially in Chapter 2), the suspicion put forward by some that ‘modern’ conceptions of ‘crisis’ are by now often most notable for the way in which they often seek to contrast contemporary diffuse meaning and boundaries of concepts with a more settled, stable past. ‘What we lack’, Winner (1977, 7–8) tells us, ‘is our bearings. The contemporary experience of things technological has repeatedly confounded our visions, our expectations, and our capacity to make intelligent judgements. Categories, arguments, conclusions, and choices that would have been entirely obvious in earlier times are obvious no longer.’ Instead, things have reached a point at which:

Many of our standard conceptions of technology reveal a disorientation that borders on dissociation from reality. […] A good illustration of this state of disorientation can be seen in the peculiar way in which the word technology appears in academic and everyday speech. In past decades the term had a very specific, limited, and unproblematic meaning […] In the twentieth century, however, the linguistic convention has gradually changed. Technology has expanded rapidly in both its denotative and connotative meanings. It is now widely used in ordinary and academic speech to talk about an unbelievably diverse collection of phenomena—tools, instruments, machines, organizations, methods, techniques, systems, and the totality of all these and similar things in our experience. The shift in meaning from something relatively precise, limited, and unimportant to something vague, expansive, and highly significant. (Winner 1977, 8)

‘What’, Winner wonders, ‘does this chaotic use of the term technology indicate to us?’ (1977, 10). It is hard to disagree with the accompanying proposition that ‘it should be seen as an interesting sign’ (for an interesting comparative discussion of the ‘emergence’ of technology as a ‘keyword’, see Lawson 2017). Interesting, not least, as Winner’s own thinking suggests, that technological artefacts do ‘have politics’, to paraphrase the title of one of his best known essays (1986, 19); but that should be understood as not necessarily being entirely determined by the intentions of ‘politicians and designers’, even if the latter might, in some contexts, be argued to play a key role (Hecht and Edwards 2010a, 274).

‘Imagine’, Winner asks readers to consider, ‘a world in which technologies accomplish only the specific purposes one had in mind in advance and nothing more. It would be a radically constricted world and one totally unlike the world we now inhabit’ (Winner 1977, 98). In that respect, Winner’s thinking shades closer to the emphasis Hecht puts on being attentive to the unintended possibilities inherent within technopolitics; and, even closer, to questions of ‘imagination’ as an aspect of the study of technopolitics that warrants further consideration. While also arguably a facet of work on technopolitics in the Hechtian vein, Hecht’s (1998) work on nuclear power and national identity in France, for example, can in some ways be read as analysing the technopolitics of a particular form of national imaginary, that latter aspect has been developed even more explicitly and examined most extensively by scholars engaged in the study of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff and Kim 2009; 2013; 2015; Jasanoff 2015a; 2015b; 2020). According to Sheila Jasanoff, the term ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ can be defined as referring to ‘collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology’ (Jasanoff 2015a, 4). With the study of technopolitics, scholarship on sociotechnical imaginaries shares a concern with the ‘fabrication of power’ (Jasanoff and Kim 2015), and Jasanoff suggests that ‘we can ask how actors with authority to shape the public imagination construct stories of progress in their programmatic statements and how they blend into these their expectations of science and technology […] Those questions, in turn, can be turned towards specific types of technopolitical order’ (Jasanoff 2015a, 25–26).

Asking these questions does again take the study of technopolitics in a direction that retains a sense of the significance of ‘techno-materiality’ and ‘assemblages’ or ‘assemblies’ of human and non-human elements. But, for Jasanoff, a concern with sociotechnical imaginaries has distinctive value in that it ‘[occupies] the theoretically undeveloped space between the idealistic collective imaginations identified by social and political theorists and the hybrid but politically neutered networks or assemblages with which STS scholars often describe reality’ (Jasanoff 2015a, 19). As Jasanoff puts it:

The materiality of technoscience […] is surely implicated in the stability and instability of social arrangements, but just as important are the belief systems out of which those materialities emerge and which give them value and meaning. A better balance needs to be struck between the theoretical poles of abstract idealism and deterministic materialism. By turning to sociotechnical imaginaries, we can engage directly with the ways in which people’s hopes and desires for the future—their sense of self and their passion for how things ought to be—get bound up with the hard stuff of past achievements, whether the material infrastructures of roads, power plants, and the security state or the normative infrastructures of constitutional principles, juridical practices, and public reason […] Technological systems serve on this view a doubly deictic function, pointing back at past cultural achievements and ahead to promising and attainable futures, or to futures to be shunned and avoided. (Jasanoff 2015a, 22)

Jasanoff (2020, 31) consequently makes the case for a concept of ‘co-production’—‘the proposition that the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the way we chose to live in it’—and sees this as both building from but also ‘complicating’ Winner’s attribution of ‘politics’ to ‘artifacts’, arguing that Winner ‘represented’ both the political and technological ‘worlds as more static and invariant than they are in practice’. In place of statis, Jasanoff argues that the analysis of co-production mitigates such tendencies; and ‘by allowing for competition among different visions of futures, the framework of sociotechnical imaginaries restores some of the indeterminacy of history and avoids the determinism built into grand narratives of scientific progress’ (Jasanoff 2015a, 23).

Later chapters and analysis in this book attempt to pursue similar questions, in relation to the technopolitics of planetary crisis management, in which, so the book seeks to argue, visions of desirable (and undesirable) futures are significant and notable not least for the ‘forms of social life and social order’ (Jasanoff 2015a, 4) they envision as being attainable (or unattainable) ‘through’ science and technology, ‘Imaginaries reveal a dynamic interplay between binaries that are too often kept analytically distinct; they build on the world as it is, but they also project futures as they ought to be’ (Jasanoff 2015b, 323). Indeed, those visions, plural, often seem to seek to fix the meaning, and limits, of what might be attainable through science and technology in contending ways, a key part of the ‘politics’ of the technopolitics of planetary crisis management lies, so the book seeks to demonstrates, in the spaces between divergent, and, sometimes, opposed, claims and contentions about what ‘technology’ can and cannot, or ought and ought not be able to do to secure futures in the context of ‘planetary crisis’. Such questions of and concerns with sociotechnical imaginaries, as also already identified and explored by scholars such as, most notably, Olaf Corry (2017a, 299; 2017b, 66), would again seem particularly germane in the context of discussions of the international/politics of geoengineering and the possibilities of and for future ‘remaking’ of ‘planetary order’ (McLaren and Corry 2021, 20). Similarly Jeremy Baskin, focusing specifically on solar geoengineering as ‘still a technology operating in the space between imagination and demonstration’, draws on Jasanoff to pose the wider question of ‘what work does the idea [of geoengineering] do and what is at stake in its adoption?’ (Baskin 2019, 111–112, ix). Jasanoff notes, directly in relation to such considerations, that ‘the rising preoccupation with futures has dragged the policy world towards a new age of engineered solutions, though opinions differ as to whether the objects most in need of engineering are human actors and their behaviours or the biogeochemical systems within which the species so abundantly, and consequentially, proliferates’ (Jasanoff 2020, 36; cf. Jasanoff 2010). As evidence of and debates on planetary crisis and emergency continue to accumulate, then, there is much more to be said on those kinds of questions and concerns. Not least because ‘discrepancies persist in responses to new and emerging technologies and technological disasters, suggesting that even earth-shattering events are absorbed and integrated into preexisting imaginaries in ways that forestall globally homogeneous meaning making and policy formulation’ (Jasanoff 2015a, 21). The later chapters of this book constitute an attempt to identify and engage visions of what ‘technology’ is and what it can ‘do’ within, arguably, ‘discrepant’ framings of and responses to planetary crisis and emergency.

How, then, might we identify, approach, and critically engage with sociotechnical imaginaries of planetary crisis management, and the kinds of technopolitics that they envision? Work done in ‘the imaginaries framework’, Jasanoff (2015b, 322–323) suggests, ‘necessarily invites us to examine the origin of new scientific ideas and technologies and the social arrangements or rearrangements they help sustain. This is a fundamentally humanistic inquiry that recognizes the capacity of individuals and groups to see and think things differently from what was previously seen or thought’; hence, it follows that ‘the methods best suited to studying sociotechnical imaginaries therefore are the methods of interpretive research and analysis that probe the nature of structure–agency relationships through inquiries into meaning making’ (Jasanoff 2015a, 24). That position in itself, deliberately, leaves quite a degree of scope as to what ‘humanistic inquiry’ and ‘methods of interpretive research and analysis’ might entail more specifically; and, though with clear influences coming from, among others, works such as those of Benedict Anderson (1983) and Charles Taylor (2004), the range of multiple contributions to the existing literature on sociotechnical imaginaries evidences a good degree of flexibility in determining potentially appropriate methods (see, for example, the contributions to Jasanoff and Kim 2015).

To that range, this book adopts and adds a methodology inspired by and based around ‘immanent critique’. Invoking immanent critique and linking it to concerns and issues of ‘methods’ or ‘methodology’ is, it might be suggested, likely to raise more questions than answers and to risk ambiguity rather than providing an easily used methodological ‘toolkit’. Argued by some to have antecedents that go back as far as Plato (Finlayson 2014) and Aristotle (Sabia 2010), others more commonly argue and perceive immanent critique as being at ‘the core’ of contemporary Critical Theory (Antonio 1981; cf. Benhabib 1986; Browne 2008; Stahl 2021; Jay 2023), particularly that of thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School and dialectical modes of thinking that originate in Hegel and Marx. Ostensibly, too, there is a core meaning or sense to immanent critique that, for some at least (though this characterization itself is contested—see, for example, the debates captured in Sørensen 2022) allows for lines of continuity to be drawn from ‘[Max] Horkheimer to [Axel] Honneth’ (Sørensen 2022, 185) by way of contrast to the otherwise prevalent tendency to present individual or groups of theorists associated with the Frankfurt School in terms of distinct ‘generations’. Diehl (2022, 677), for example, broadly endorses the idea that immanent critique might be seen as ‘the guiding idea of the tradition’ of Critical Theory and characterizes the idea itself as denoting and entailing ‘very roughly, the evaluation of society according to criteria that are in some sense contained within it, rather than imposed from without’.

Diehl takes care to insert the ‘very roughly’ qualifier there—scholarship on immanent critique, including but not limited to Diehl’s, goes into extensive detail and debate over what, in a more fine-grained sense, immanent critique might entail. That ‘roughly’ articulated version of immanent critique would, though, seem to resonate with, for example, Theodor Adorno’s iteration of the idea in a 1958 lecture as, ‘immanent critique, that is, a process where what is criticized is measured against its own assumptions, its own principles of form. Now the path of dialectic is always that of immanent critique—that is, in the sense I have just been explaining, we cannot simply confront the matter in question with some criterion external to it or introduce any “assurances” or “random thoughts” of our own. Rather, the matter in question, if it is to be disclosed as it is, must be measured, in itself, against its own concept’ (cited in Sørensen 2022, 187; for the original, Adorno 2017 [1958]). Articulated in those terms, immanent critique itself seems to take some form as an idea, and to point to methodological implications and directions to be taken (cf. Browne 2008). It should also be noted, though, that Sørensen cites that quote from Adorno as a touchpoint in debates over the possible meanings and implications of the idea. Some offer proposals for distinctions between ‘slender’ and ‘thick’ versions of immanent critique (Finlayson 2014) and argue that even Adorno slides somewhat inconsistently between those. Stahl (2021) provides an extensively detailed account of the idea that focuses primarily on the Frankfurt School-Critical Theoretic tradition and runs to almost three hundred pages of discussion; others contend that ‘immanent critique is actually best construed as a family of philosophical–hermeneutical practices bearing a complex lineage and associations with a wide variety of moral and political projects and thinkers’ (Sabia 2010, 684), not just thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, but also, independent of that, such as Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, and John Rawls as philosophers engaged ‘a form of hermeneutical practice and second-order political and normative criticism’. Others, while generally sympathetic to immanent critique, are circumspect about assuming or treating it as a ‘methodology’, suggesting that while the idea has general merit immanent critique requires some sort of methodological supplement from sources such as discourse analysis (Herzog 2016) or critical realism (Isaksen 2018).

Acknowledging the extent and intensity of these debates, the book adopts an outlook and a methodology that proceeds ‘in a spirit’ of immanent critique. Whether the proceeding account is ‘properly’ understood as constituting a form of immanent critique is, per the debates noted above, a possible point of contention; and some readers might suggest that the mode of immanent critique adopted here is potentially categorizable as ‘improper’ relative to those debates. Yet some features of the ‘ethos’ (Peoples 2020, 56), if that is what it is, of immanent critique seem particularly relevant to engagement with sociotechnical imaginaries of planetary crisis management, and the kinds of technopolitics that they envision. Certainly, a case might be made to say that immanent critique, even in it is multiple varieties, fits with the categories of ‘humanistic inquiry’ and ‘methods of interpretive research and analysis’ that Jasanoff (2015a, 24) argues are ‘best suited to studying sociotechnical imaginaries’. More than that, the analysis of sociotechnical imaginaries, it might be argued, can be conceived of as centrally concerned with identifying and critically reflecting upon what assumptions about social and political order are imminent within such imaginaries. ‘An imaginary’, Jasanoff suggests, ‘is neither cause nor effect in a conventional sense but rather a continually rearticulated awareness of order in social life’ (2015a, 26). What forms of order—or even, orders, plural—are imminent within claims about the nature of ‘planetary emergency’, the ‘technosphere’, visions of and proposals for a geoengineered Earth? If an imaginary is a ‘continually rearticulated awareness of order in social life’, per Jasanoff, that specifies the nature—and ‘ordering’ of—‘technology’, ‘humanity’, ‘nature’, ‘non-human nature’, then, per Adorno, ‘the matter in question, if it is to be disclosed as it is, must be measured, in itself, against its own concept’, how, and in what ways, do imaginaries of planetary crisis management seek to ‘disclose’ the world as it was, is now, and is yet to come? How might concepts of crisis, even as disorder, co-produce emergent spaces of the planetary to be secured and managed within different technopolitical imaginaries? Conversely, how might different technopolitical imaginaries work to secure concepts of crisis?

Relative to the methodological form and substance of the proceeding chapters, to grapple with questions and concerns raised above the book employs a variation of what might be termed as ‘passage-work’. Each of the chapters assemble and then dissect passages from works that in some way relate to one or more of the concerns introduced above: concepts of crisis, the emergence of the planetary, technopolitics. They do so to identify and critically reflect upon the imminent technopolitics or various approaches to these concerns, often presenting key quotes or passages and then seeking to drill further into assumptions made, not least about what ‘technology’ might ‘do’ in contexts of planetary crisis and emergency. The book is not, in that sense, intended as a straightforward historical account or chronological analysis of those concerns (some of the works cited and discussed later better serve those kind of purposes); nor is it intended, beyond a degree of context-setting for the more detailed forms of passage-work, as a direct introduction to those concerns. Instead, taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin (1999) this is a more circuitous kind of project that has a more circuitous kind of methodology. It is an effort to ‘map the terrain’ (McCole 1985, 498–499) of debates, discourses, and scholarship relevant to planetary emergence and the technopolitics of crisis management. And as such, the chapters necessarily make judgements about which works, and which passages, to focus on. Some subjects, most notably concepts of ‘planetary boundaries’, debates on ‘planet politics’, concepts of ‘the technosphere’, ideas of ‘geoengineering’, hove into view more clearly than others as a result, and the analysis often goes to the point where it is argued that the imminent technopolitics of treatments of those subjects might be best illustrated and reflected upon. The methodology, and thus the content of the book is necessarily and admittedly selective in that respect. It is not intended to be an exhaustive map of the terrain, though, or to replicate or re-form ‘terra’ (as some of the ideas and proposals discussed in the later chapters recommend). Instead it is more exploratory—not in the way The Arcades Project is, and not by a long way; but with some homologies, perhaps, in terms of an approach that opens up different aspects of Benjamin’s proposition that ‘just as technology is always revealing nature from a new perspective, so also, as it impinges on human beings, it constantly makes for variations in their most primordial passions, fears, and images of longing’ (Benjamin 1999, 392–393).

Immanence then, yes, but whither ‘critique’? Does the book simply seek to catalogue ways in which sociotechnical imaginaries of planetary crisis management disclose the world and seek to present the matter at hand? In part that is a large part of what the book seeks to do, but in doing so the analysis in the process also circles back to and seeks to highlight the technopolitics imminent in planetary crisis management. Precisely because (as is discussed in Chapters 2 and 3) ‘crisis’ is seen to pertain, and with ‘it’ question marks over the future survival and the continued existence of the Earth as a ‘safe operating space’ (Rockström et al. 2009; and see Chapter 4), critical reflection is required. Modes of planetary crisis management are not necessarily homogenous—nor, as discussed in Chapter 5, are they always completely novel. They often crossover with related approaches to crisis management in relation to nuclear technologies as a potential source of existential insecurity (cf. Sears 2020) at a planetary scale; and also sometimes pull in radically different directions as the proceeding analysis seeks to show, sometimes towards proposals for ‘stratospheric aerosol injection’, at other times towards propositions for reconsidering trees as technologies (see Chapter 3 and Chapters 6, 7, and 8). In some instances, technological ‘modernity’ itself is seen as inherently problematic, in others as providing the tools necessary to ‘fix’ climate crisis and planetary emergency, as is discussed most directly in Chapter 7, and returned to by way of conclusion in Chapter 9.

There are diverse forms of political imagination at play in such visions and attending to that diversity heightens the scope for critical appreciation of and engagement with those visions. In this sense the proceeding analysis shades as close to Walter Benjamin’s mode of imminent critique (cf. Forrest 2015) as much as it does to that as articulated by Adorno further above. Science fiction, of course, provides (often self-consciously) example of genre in which ‘dreamscapes’ of political life are imagined, ‘express[ing] fears and yearnings that are rooted in current discontents, either signaling possible escape routes or painting in morbid colors the horrific consequences of heedlessness in the present’ (Jasanoff 2015a, 337). But as Jasanoff also contends, more formal public discourses of politics and technoscience sometimes also might be argued to do similar work without being in or even appealing to the genre of science fiction; and, as Clive Hamilton cautions, the temptation to dismiss some of the ‘mastery projects’ (Hamilton 2013, 124; see also Hulme 2008; 2014; and Baskin 2019) discussed in Chapters 5, 6, and 7 as purely fictive and fantastical, as ‘science fiction’ in a more pejorative, dismissive sense, risks missing their potentially wider significance. For that reason, the book’s analysis is generally limited to an analysis of those more formal public discourses of politics and technoscience rather than extending to include literary or televisual/filmic conceptions of planetary emergency or crisis management in the science fiction genre. The boundaries are, of course, potentially more porous than that. Some of the forms of discussion and analysis of what to do about potential ‘climate catastrophe’, as discussed later in the book explicitly consider the roles of contemporary science (and technologies) in relation to ‘fictional scenarios’ (Buck 2019, 8–23) and ‘invite the reader into alternative imaginations of the future’ (Buck 2019, 48). And, for example, some reporting and academic accounts of geoengineering initiatives and proposals in particular often do note potential parallels with or echoes of science fiction, ‘brave new world(s)’ (see, as but one example, Barrett 2014), Frankenstein, or the ‘classical’ as well as ‘modern’ versions of the Promethean myth (see, again but one example, Hamilton 2013, 200–201; 107–137). But in those cases, the book generally limits itself to folding the observation of those parallels and echoes into an analysis of the roles such referent points might play in constituting a wider sociotechnical imaginary—as opposed to including and engaging with science fiction as a broad genre more directly, that would no doubt be an extremely worthwhile, but different, form of intellectual enterprise. So too would an approach more directly focused on visual politics, particularly when it comes to future-oriented, ‘artists’ impressions’ of, for example, geoengineering technologies. Where applicable, the book primarily focuses on analysing how such imagery and practices of visualization supplement conceptual imaginaries articulated in textual form, rather than reproducing and then analysing images. In part as it is the latter that is the primary focus of the book, but also as the work of those such as Benner and Rothe (2023) already develops a thoroughgoing analysis of the ‘Global Visual Politics of Climate Engineering’ and its accompanying imagery (see also Baskin 2019).

In that sense the book of course operates within certain parameters. Not least because the ‘question of limits’, how, and where to set ‘boundaries’, of the planetary but all sorts of others too, also often seems to pertain to the substance of the discussions in the proceeding chapters, the Conclusion (Chapter 9) also reflects in greater depth on the potential limitations, as well as possibilities, of the way in which sociotechnical imaginaries of planetary crisis management are approached in the book. Those are worth foreshadowing more briefly here too. Some readers might hope or expect that this book will or should definitively provide answers, to the question of what ‘crisis’ really means; as to whether ‘the planetary’ is either a necessary or desirable scale or referent object for the study of security; of whether and how we can fix climate crisis, and the wider causes and consequences of planetary emergency. As concerned with these questions as the book is, it is not intended, with apologies to those disappointed, to answer those questions definitively. Instead, the book aims to analyse ‘answers’ that have already been given to those sorts of questions, and to critically reflect on the immanent techopolitical imaginaries they invoke, articulate, and sustain. Readers will, over the course of chapters and pages to come, find ample references to work that, variously, seeks to fix the definition of crisis once and for all; or, proposing definitively solutions as to what ‘we’ need to do in order to fix the climate or to resolve or reverse planetary emergency. Key parts of that activity of critical reflection, the book seeks to both argue and illustrate, entails considering how crisis fixes—in a more metaphorical sense of ‘fastening’ and ‘securing’, but that relates in turn to pertinent discussions (and critiques) of ‘techno-fix(es)’ (cf. Asayama 2015; Fleming 2010; Goodell 2010; Hulme 2014)—potential answers to questions of the boundaries and ‘limits’ of politics (and technology), of who ‘we’ are in the process, and of what can be done to ‘manage’ planetary emergency.

A focus on what is immanent in sociotechnical imaginaries of planetary crisis management—necessarily also encompassing visions of what is imminent, in the sense of envisioned times to come—leaves open questions as to why those imaginaries and not others, and the risk more plausible or desirable futures (and presents and pasts) are being articulated and created elsewhere in texts and practices not covered by the book. The book has its own limits in that sense. Whether it comes across this way or not, the book tries to proceed with a sense of humility in its analysis in the proceeding chapters. The ideas and the questions engaged with might be ‘big’; the analysis, though, tries to be more modest in what it claims and to recognize the limits of what it can achieve (cf. Allen 2016, 33; Jasanoff 2021). For some readers, I suspect, that might ultimately constitute a kind of evasion and a failure to sufficiently answer the ‘big’ questions of possible planetary futures that the book engages with; slipping, like sand in the hourglass, past key questions remaining as to where that might leave ‘us’. Endings, and questions and visions of how things might end, are very much germane to these discussions. So, skip to the Conclusion to find the questions upon questions generated by the analysis of the preceding chapters. In particular, with an emphasis on consideration of the ways in which attempts to manage and ‘fix’ planetary emergency are in turn bound up with efforts to constitute a planetary ‘we’.