For our third and final exclusive interview, we spoke to the acting lead of our last content WP, James Shires, a member of the Virtual Routes team, hailing from the UK. As an active consortium member from the beginning, James is sharing the WP lead responsibility with his colleague Max Smeets. What is our final work package up to? What can we expect from them from the final project year? James will fill you in!
What are the themes of your work package, and what outputs are we looking to achieve – both big and small? Who are working with you, and what are their main contributions?
Within REMIT, our work package focuses on advancing a systematic understanding of the nature of digital technologies, considering them as both influences on and the subject of global governance efforts. By developing analytic capabilities to assess these interdependencies, WP5 contributes to the project’s overall goal to develop theoretically supported recommendations to strengthen multilateral approaches to technology governance. We are joined in this work package by colleagues in Belgium (KUL), Italy (LUISS), Finland (FIIA), and the Netherlands (Maastricht University)
This work package put forward a framework for analyzing the relationship between digital technologies and the international system, based on three key insights. First, it treats both digital technologies and the international system as structures, incorporating power distributions, adherence to certain values, and other structural properties. The second insight is to look for correspondences and/or conflicts and tensions between the structural properties of these two systems. The third insight is to treat digital technologies as having both intrinsic and socially constructed elements, along a spectrum that is constantly subject to review and revision.
We’ve used this framework – along with another social scientific framework used across REMIT as a whole, the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) – to analyse a range of emerging technology case studies, from spyware to 5G telecommunications, and from quantum computing to internet governance and military uses of AI. Each partner in the work package has analysed different cases using the above theoretical frameworks, and held scenario testing workshops with policy makers to assess the future direction of these technologies.
If and how has the ever-changing global politics changed the topics within your work package so far, and what do you foresee for the future?
Global politics has radically reshaped the scope of our work package. Digital technologies like military AI, satellite-navigating drones, and the global spread of hacking tools are now a reality, deployed in conflicts around the world. Traditional military alliances, like NATO, are struggling to maintain credibility in the face of the current US administration’s contempt for international institutions, international law, and conventional security alliances. The EU has a mammoth task to stimulate its own digital economy within the norms and principles embedded in regulation like the Cybersecurity Resilience Act, the Digital Services Act, and the AI Act – while also building its own “digital sovereignty” and reducing dependencies on US technologies.
As part of this work package, we at Virtual Routes have developed a new media outlet, Binding Hook, which encourages Europe-focused writers and researchers to discuss the latest policy and technological developments – and enables us to keep on top of the rapid changes in global politics we see today.
What would, at the end of the 4 years of our project, the work of your WP look like for you to call it a complete success?
We have some key elements of the project still to deliver, with a couple more scenario testing workshops and policy recommendations on the technology-focused case studies we researched last year, as well as a manuscript on strategic digital technologies. But aside from these deliverables, I would consider our work package a success if it has provided new thinking tools for researchers to use when approaching digital technologies and geopolitics, which avoid the simplistic pitfalls of technological determinism and a sense of contemporary exceptionalism. Many of the technological trends we see today have historical echoes – and the social solutions proposed then can also be relevant now.
But for our work package to be a complete success I would want our theoretical research to be translated into clear policy recommendations, for policymakers in Europe and beyond, so they can bring about concrete change in technology policy for a stronger, more secure, and more prosperous global society.