Most scholars attending to the material dimensions of politics either tend to focus on the local, looking at particular infrastructures such as a road, a dam, or a power grid, or at the global, often assessing the capitalist reordering of the world, but overseeing or ignoring the international (Salter 2015, xiii). This oversight, we argue, is not accidental, as infrastructures bring to the fore conceptual problems of space, scale, and agency that constitute the international as a distinct lens for academic inquiry, delineating it from the global, national, or local. . . Infrastructures, we argue, have a generative role in constituting the international as a distinct realm of inquiry that is different from the local and the global. However, we also show how the contemporary infrastructural boom blurs the very same distinctions that infrastructures once helped in setting up. . . .
In other words, infrastructures are at the heart of contention between dynamics of crafting the unevenness between societies that constitute the international on the one hand, and contributing to boundary erosions, driven by an expansionist capitalist logic, on the other hand. https://academic.oup.com/isr/article/26/4/viae046/7831266
An example?
The astonishing thing about the Chinese Communist Party is that it really doesn’t want to rule the world, nor even to be a second hegemonic pole countering the first one. What they want is to rule China – plus the places they feel they’ve lost, like Hong Kong, Taiwan – and to trade freely with other countries. They would genuinely like a multipolar world, in which they would share power with their trading partners, but the problem is that they have only one way of achieving that, which is to use their tech sector, in concert with big finance, to create something like the Bretton Woods system within the BRICs. This would involve fixed exchange rates, essentially a common currency backed by the yuan. It would be a major project, equivalent to the New Dealers planning the world order in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference. The rest of BRICs are not ready for it, as we can see from the huge tensions between India and China. Much of the global south is not ready for this kind of multipolarity either. . .But if they don’t start pushing in that direction, then they will be stuck with a bipolar US–Chinese world, with all the risks that this entails. https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/quantity-to-quality?pc=1643
Or in recasted terms: such is the international dilemma of big tech and global finance.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 