title: Citizen Monitoring and the Entrenchment of the Nuclear Order: Foucault’s “Panopticon” and Winner’s “Autonomous Technology” as Two Approaches to Understanding Their Relationship
Creators: name: Al-Sayed, Sara
Publisher: name: UNSPECIFIED
Year: 2024

description: The monitoring of activities around the world that may be connected to the development or deployment of nuclear weapons is traditionally the purview of states, using their national technical means and in pursuit of national security interests. However, technological developments, such as the growth in internet connectivity, online publicly available data and tools, and cheap ubiquitous sensing from mobile cameras to commercial satellites, have extended the privilege of nuclear-activity monitoring to non-state actors that make up today’s so-called nuclear non-state open-source intelligence (OSINT) community. Based mostly in the U.S. and West, the civil-society actors work with open sources and methods and disseminate their analyses through public media channels to raise publics’ awareness of nuclear risks and shape policy responses.


While this development is laudable for its potential to expand efforts at guaranteeing government accountability and increasing nuclear safety and security, the thesis project argues that the community’s efforts contribute instead to the entrenchment of the nuclear order. The thesis project characterizes the order’s entrenchment through the increasing salience of nuclear weapons in military planning by nuclear-weapon states, the insufficiently questioned utility and legitimacy of nuclear deterrence for security and peace, the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear weapons use through accident, misperception, or miscalculation, and internationally inequitable access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.


The thesis project advances the argument using Langdon Winner’s framework of ‘autonomous technology’, suggesting that entrenchment can be explained via the increasing autonomy of the large-scale technical system underpinning nuclear non-state OSINT, where the system comprises technologies, technical tools, and technical practices, as well as administrative and market processes. This increasing autonomy progressively removes the system from democratic control, undercutting social and political agency to guide choices around the use and development of the system. ‘Reverse adaptation’ is one mechanism Winner conceived to explain this technological autonomy. In this mechanism, human ends are adjusted to match the character of the available means instead of human ends controlling the technical means. Reverse adaptation is demonstrated in nuclear non-state OSINT along several dimensions: culture, market processes, the international outer space legal regime, the re-purposing of Cold War intelligence and military establishments, and the amplification of nuclear risk discourse and the consolidation of the nuclear risk paradigm in dealing with the nuclear predicament. Regarding the latter, the thesis project dwells on the nuclear non-state OSINT community’s practices’ promoting the paradigmatic nuclear risk reduction approach – an approach that is plagued with indeterminacy and accountability assignment challenges. These challenges provide powerful status-quo nuclear actors a blank cheque to assert their interests using the available means, thus strengthening the nuclear deterrence camp while staging “nuclear politics without politics.”


The thesis project also appropriates Michel Foucault’s ‘panopticon’ to further the understanding of the connection between nuclear non-state OSINT and the entrenchment of the nuclear order, primarily by highlighting the contemporary role of civil-society nuclear-activity monitoring efforts, despite or increasingly perhaps due to the community’s “global transparency” injunction, in consciously or inadvertently democratically legitimizing the policies of the most powerful actors in the nuclear order. Therefore, whereas Foucault was optimistic about the fate of panoptic institutions in view of their full transparency and amenability to democratic control, the thesis project shows how perceived transparency and democratic control of the panoptic mechanism aren’t sufficient safeguards against the entrenchment of the nuclear order.


The thesis project further discusses the challenges of the demand for global transparency as enabled by the extension of the surveillance privileges to civil society. Apart from material and political obstacles, it is shown how nuclear non-state OSINT practices have lent or are lending themselves to co-optation by powerful governments. While democratic legitimization is one consequence, the thesis project notes the implications in terms of the shielding of the states’ secrecy regimes from challenge and amplifying nuclear risk discourse in such a way as to justify the expansion of nuclear non-/anti-/counter-proliferation efforts at the expense of the fulfilment of nuclear disarmament obligations.


The thesis project concludes with a discussion of Winner’s conceptualization of human agency as applied to the context of civil-society nuclear-activity monitoring, with implications for technology assessment efforts. Connections are also made to contemporary forward-looking proposals for a potentially emancipatory practice of citizen monitoring of nuclear activities.