ACUNS presentation – NOT FOR CIRCULATION BEYOND ACUNS This project is about how certain ways of using language to enact expertise produces authority. More specifically, I am interested in how language, expert knowledge, and authority are enacted together, and how these interconnected regimes change over time through shifting epistemic paradigms. I understand epistemic paradigms to be normative social/cultural frameworks that govern what is considered knowledge, how something can be known and to what extent. The thing to remember is that epistemic paradigms are historical and contingent, they can change, be challenged, and transformed. The context for this project is a world in which the invention of nuclear weapons has reproduced imperial power relations, in which the nuclear capacity of a nation-state is related to its geopolitical status, and in which knowledge about nuclear things is always morally charged and potentially dangerous. The production and regulation of nuclear knowledge is fundamentally a technopolitical concern. Technopolitics is a term that describes the strategic practice of designing or using technology to constitute, embody, or enact political goals. Historian Gabrielle Hecht has argued that the IAEA is governed by a technopolitical regime which is the product of no t only Cold War politics but also the politics of decolonization. One of Hecht’s key insights is that what is considered “nuclear” is not stable over time and space. “Nuclearity” is an effect of technopolitics. The International Atomic Energy Agency is the organization charged with spreading the beneficial applications of nuclear technologies while preventing their use for military purposes. When it was founded in Vienna in 1957 (its founding is usually traced back to Eisenhower’s 1954 Atoms for Peace speech before the UN), its founding was seen (by the US and the political community at large) as a way to redeem the destructive potential of nuclear technologies. 1
ACUNS presentation – NOT FOR CIRCULATION BEYOND ACUNS The prevailing nuclear order of “haves” and “have nots” was institutionalized in the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (commonly called NPT), which went into force in 1970. This treaty allowed the five nuclear weapons states at the time to keep their weapons, while all other signatories renounced them for the promise of assistance in the development of peaceful nuclear technologies. This order and the fear in the west about the spread of nuclear weapons to “unauthorized” countries or actors have been described as nuclear orientalism by Hugh Gusterson in his 1999 article entitled “ Nuclear weapons and the other in the Western imagination. ” With the coming into force of the NPT, the IAEA assumed the task of verifying the treaty ’s stipulations by regular inspections of declared nuclear facilities in non-nuclear weapons states. This regime of verification is made possible by the adherence to a safeguards system, which is the placement of nuclear facilities under inspection control. Safeguards are designed to deter unauthorized diversion of nuclear material by increasing the likelihood of early detection. Verification by inspection is based on the technological knowability of nuclear technologies and the nuclear fuel cycle. There are only so many types of reactors and ways of enriching nuclear materials. The verifiability of the technical aspects of nuclear energy programs is generally seen as providing an objective, politically neutral, and fundamentally democratic way of enforcing the NPT. This system reached its limits within the first 20 years of its existence. In the aftermath of the (first) Gulf War, the IAEA was caught with its pants down when the remains of an undeclared 2
ACUNS presentation – NOT FOR CIRCULATION BEYOND ACUNS nuclear weapons program were found in Iraq. In response to the Iraq failure, the IAEA Safeguards Department has been changing its inspections regime, moving towards what they call an “information - driven”, “ state-based ” approach, which is supposed to assist the detection of undeclared activities by providing a broader picture of the state. As you know, the Model Additional Protocol is the legal instrument that attempts to shore up the statutory inability of the IAEA to declare their declarations complete. In 2011, the apparent incorporation of information provided by sources external to the IAEA in reports on Iran has been challenged by member states and observers who see the IAEA as overstepping its mandate. The focus of these debates is on the “language” of the reports and documents. This “language” is interesting because it is a special hybrid of technical, legal, and political discourses that are enrolled into the IAEA’s bureaucratic voice. One of my questions is how this translation across professional discourses happens especially considering that there are all kinds of translation also going on across the IAEA’s 6 official languages and among a multilingual workforce. T he IAEA’s l egitimacy rests on a particular kind of technical expertise which is demonstrated by the regular publication of reports and evaluations. This legitimacy is regularly performed through these documents in ways that must be maximally persuasive to multiple audiences. I ask, what makes them maximally persuasive? To whom? What does “ objective, ” apolitical language sound like? What kind of language and information is unassailable? What is overstepping the boundaries? These questions assume that the efficacious production of expertise happens through the proper and convincing use of expert discourse. But expert discourses are not all alike and 3
ACUNS presentation – NOT FOR CIRCULATION BEYOND ACUNS different evidentiary standards can sometimes produce misunderstanding and confusion for communication among people with different professional and educational backgrounds. The IAEA is currently grappling with the tensions between competing epistemic paradigms and the kinds of knowledge and authority they produce. If the IAEA’s “technical independence” used to be based on the audit-like forms of quantitative and list-based materials accounting which appear to provide “objective” information by their mechanical and rote nature, the attempt to include more qualitative, intelligence-like information, and employ analytical methods to draw conclusions from the data gathered could seriously challenge the IAEA’s legitimacy. And member states have raised objections to the “state - level approach”. These types of knowledge rely on different types of authorship and representation. There is a concern that the incorporation of less “technical” forms of expertise will further open the IAEA up to political manipulation from powerful member states. I would now like to show a brief video that came out last year in January called “Super Inspectors” unless you have all seen it . You will notice that it locates the tensions about the credibility of the IAEA’s inspectors within a context of political power play as well individual self-interest. VIDEO (3mins) Within the Agency there are competing voices about which kinds of safeguards and inspections regimes would be most effective within the limits of the IAEA’s manda te. I’ve been told, for example, that one problem is how to evaluate information (for example, intelligence given to the IAEA by member states) for which they have no in-house expertise. This points to a division of 4
ACUNS presentation – NOT FOR CIRCULATION BEYOND ACUNS labor between various experts with some people arguing that inspectors are technical people who should not be expected to make qualitative evaluations of non-technical information. Given that the IAEA’s work is fraught with many and multiple tensions, m y project will try to look at two sites of consensus construction (which I have identified, there are surely others) in order to investigate the ways in which technical meanings, legal categories, and types of legitimate knowledge are brought together through the bureaucratic work of the Agency. The first is the consensus that must be established among the inspectors and analysts working on a particular state evaluation. The second is consensus crafted among the delegates representing member states at the General Conference with the drafting and agreement on a resolution. I propose that the procedures and practices by which these very different technoscientific and political forms of consensus are formed, give us a window into how the tensions between different epistemic paradigms and political agendas are negotiated. In this ethnography of the paper trail, I see the documents that are the (very material) products of these bureaucratic processes as key objects in the production and circulation of knowledge and the display of authority. Drawing on social scientific scholarship about bureaucracies, I will analyze the symbolic production of expertise by studying the material and discursive forms of different genres of documents and thinking about how the categories of the document structure the information contained. With document genres I mean that for different types of communication there are normative and “proper” ways that govern this communication: think about “thank you cards” as a genre of communication, or recommendation letters, or white papers, or newspaper articles, or user agreements: each of these genres can be identified by their genre-appropriate material forms and certain way of using language. An IAEA Board Report has material and visual features that identify it as such, and it also uses language in a particular way. 5
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