Samuel Evans’ Research

It is my pleasure to finally announce that my thesis has been published on the Oxford Research Archive.

This is a redacted version of my thesis.  The redactions were made in line with requests from the British Government, and include primarily a description of the location of the Wassenaar Secretariat, the Arrangement’s information system, and the reproduction in Appendix G of the Guidelines for the Drafting of Lists.  The redactions will be valid for 30 years or until I can get permission from the Government to remove them, whichever is sooner.

Abstract:

International cooperation on export controls for technology is based on three assumptions, that it is possible: to know against whom controls should be directed; to control the international transfer of technology; and to define the items to be controlled. These assumptions paint a very hierarchical framing of one of the central problems in export controls: dual-use technology. This hierarchical framing has been in continual contention with a competitive framing that views the problem as the marketability of technology. This thesis analyses historical and contemporary debates between these two framings of the problem of dual-use technology, focusing on the multilateral Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies. Using a framework of concepts from Science & Technology Studies and the theory of sociocultural viability, I analyse the Arrangement as a classification system, where political, economic, and social debates are codified in the lists of controlled items, which then structure future debates. How a technology is (not) defined, I argue, depends as much on the particular set of social relations in which the technology is enacted as on any tangible aspects the technology may have.

The hierarchical framing is currently hegemonic within Wassenaar, and I show how actors that express this framing use several strategies in resolving anomalies that arise concerning the classification of dual-use technology. These strategies have had mixed success, and I show how they have adequately resolved some cases (e.g. quantum cryptography), while other areas have proved much more difficult (e.g. focal plane arrays and computers). With the development of controls on intangible technology transfers, a third, egalitarian framing is arising, and I argue that initial steps have already been taken to incorporate this framing with the discourse on dual-use technology. However, the rise of this framing also calls into question the fundamental assumption of export controls that technology is excludable, and therefore definable.

To read the whole thesis (or just the parts that interest you!) head over to the Oxford Research Archive.

[UPDATE 9 July 2010: The ORA appears to be down right now.  I apologize for anyone trying to access my thesis.  I'll let you know when it is back up.]

[UPDATE 12 July 2010: The ORA is back up]

I have modified the Oxford Maths LaTeX template to work for the social sciences.  There are a lot of bells and whistles in this file, but I have tried to provide lots of comments to make the process of getting up and running with minimal effort.

I would also recommend perusing the LaTeX resources on the Maths website for lots of LaTeX tutorials and information.

You can find my thesis template folder here: Oxford LaTeX thesis

If you don’t have LaTeX installed yet, head over to CTAN.

I have long heard that Khrushchev once commented how ridiculous export controls were, saying that anything could be a militarily significant technology, even trouser buttons.  “How do you expect a military to fight if they can’t hold their trousers up?” is along the lines of what he is reported to have said.  No one seems to have the original statement however, which makes it dubious to use in academic writing.  While searching, however, I found this gem that I will be including somewhere.

Mr. Vishinsky, in a speech to the 1954 General Assembly, rejected the United States proposals for inspectors with broad powers.    He said:

“During the last World War, even button factories-at least in my country-began to make weapons to fight Germans, and they did so successfully. Do you suggest that with a view to the reduction of armed forces and armaments we have to supervise every factory making buttons for ladies’ suits and men’s trousers?” 1

Ambassador Wadsworth replied:

“Mr. Vishinsky pointed out yesterday that during the war certain button factories in the Soviet Union manufactured munitions. This, I can assure him, is quite parallel to the history of U. S. industry during the war-and indeed that of most of the countries in the war.    The international control commission must therefore, in our view, have the right to inspect button factories in order to determine whether or not they are manufacturing munitions.    That is precisely what the Soviet Union representative denied to us during the London talk. . . . If . . . we correctly interpret Mr. Vishinsky’s statement yesterday, any country can frustrate the international inspection simply by posting on a munitions factory a sign reading: ‘Keep out. This factory is making buttons.’”2

Taken from: Bechhoefer, B.G., 1958. Weapons Control. American Society of International Law Proceedings, 52, p. 236-7.

footnotes:

1 General Assembly, 9th Sess., 1st Committee, Official Records, p. 29, par. 98 (Oct. 11, 1954).

2 Ibid., p. 34, par. 37 (Oct. 12, 1954).

Last weekend, I attended a conference at Stanford University on “Uncertainty: Ambiguity and doubt in knowledge production”.  At it, I presented a paper on how the Wassenaar Arrangement uses ambiguity to both stabilize and change the classification system.  For instance, it was by purposefully creating ambiguity in the areas of concern for Wassenaar that countries such as Russia were able to buy into the Arrangement.  By not being directed at any state or group of states, Wassenaar may not be as clearly defined as its predecessor CoCom, but it gains the legitimacy of having major producers of militarily significant technology – like Russia – on board.  A more subtle point in favor of ambiguity in the target of the Arrangement is that it allows for more focus to be placed on harmonizing national export control systems to ensure that the distribution of what are considered militarily significant technologies only occurs with state discretion.  This allows states to retain sovereignty over deciding who gets their technology (something CoCom took away from them) while helping to ensure that those technologies do not lead to “destabilizing accumulations”.

Ambiguity can also help classification systems change.  I showed this in my presentation by walking through the history of controls on computers, from the first public lists of CoCom in 1954 to their current definition.  Each time the controls changed, they did so because arguments were made that the current definition  had some flaw in the conception of what a “dual-use computer” should be.  Is the definition of a dual-use computer based only on its processing rate?  When computers entered the market with multiple processors, that became problematic.  The same problem in definition occurred when multiple memories were introduced.  Each time, the definition of a dual-use computer became ambiguous, and each time, it was resolved by picking another parameter to define it.  However, with the development of grid computing, where every computer connected to the internet could, in theory, be part of a global grid supercomputer, the definition of a dual-use computer was no longer able to be satisfactorily resolved.  As a result, controls shifted to defining the software needed to harness grid computing.  It was by creating enough ambiguity in the definition that such change came about.

That’s the basic point of the talk.  I hope to put it in a paper at some point, and it is in much more detail in my thesis, which should be going online within the month.  Stay tuned.

In the Autumn of 2009, I will take up a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University.  The post is divided between the Kennedy School of Government (and in particular the Program on Science, Technology, & Society) and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). My job will involve building links between the two schools, helping to design an undergraduate course in Technology & Society, publishing at least one journal article, and preparing my thesis for publication as a book. I will be working closely with Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies,  and Venky Narayanamurti, former Dean of SEAS, and now Director of Science, Technology and Public Policy Program at Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School.

For a more personal take on this transition, please see my Journal entry.

I am currently in the thick of writing up my thesis, to be handed in on 19 June 2009.  Please feel free to contact me, but it may be a few days before I am able to respond.

Next week may prove to be a precipitous moment in the life of the Wassenaar Arrangement.  Brinley Salzmann has organised a two-day conference in Paris called “Export and Security Controls in the Globalised Marketplace of the 21st Century“.  The morning of the first day is given over completely to Wassenaar, with talks by Ambassador Sune Danielsson (Head of the Wassenaar Secretariat), Barry Fletcher, Anne-Charlotte Merrell Wetterwik, and members of the US, Australian, and Chinese governments.

With the series of GAO reports stacking up, and much work by the Center for International Trade and Security on how to improve the international export control scene, perhaps this may be a watershed conference, where past disputes can be put behind us and the groundwork laid for serious consideration of how to modify the shape of export controls to adequately address the needs of a diverse international community in the 21st Century.

There will be no report from this meeting, in order to allow more candid discussion among the participants.  I will not, unfortunately, be attending, as I am focusing all my effort on finishing my thesis at the moment.  Anyone who does attend and wishes to say something is welcome to comment on this post.

I recently got back from a trip to California, where I met a few people at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Clara’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society, and gave a talk at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, part of the Monterey Institute for International Studies.

The talk, I think, went quite well. I outlined how the Wassenaar Arrangement, and export controls generally, are based on three assumptions:

• That it is possible to know from whom one wishes to keep technology;
• That it is possible to actually control the export of technology;
• That it is possible to define what the technology is one wishes to control.

My research focuses primarily on the last of these assumptions, and in the talk I gave a few examples of how it can be difficult to decide on a definition of a ‘dual-use’ technology when changing the Dual-Use List of the Wassenaar Arrangement.  The three basic views on how to define the text of the Dual-Use List can be crudely labelled as security, bureaucractic, and economic.  The security discourse will generally want to broaden the current categorisation to incorporate the technology, say by taking away a de-control note (which remove controls for items with specific parameters or uses) or by removing a parameter (instead of controlling “aerial quantum cryptography”, just control “quantum cryptography”) .  The bureaucractic discourse will want to refine the List, preferably by making a new entry or sub-entry for the technology; a place for everything and everything in its place.  The economic discourse will argue, not surprisingly, for the technology not to be on the List at all, and if it is, for their particular technologies not to be controlled, perhaps by fighting for more parameters – thus more narrowly defining the technology – or else specific decontrols for their uses, such as the Cryptography decontrol Note (Category 5, Part 2, Note 3). Each of these interact in the list-modification process at Wassenaar, often constructively, though not always.

The talk was well attended, and I hope to engage in further dialogue with CNS in the future.

Welcome to my research website.  This site is wholly dedicated to providing access to my ideas and information about my career.  It is in the early stages of development, so check back in a while for more information.

After much hard work, my Confirmation of Status for my DPhil has now been completed.  I produced two chapters for my Confirmation: my Literature Review and a history of the Wassenaar Arrangement.  If you would like to read these drafts, please let me know, either by commenting below or by using the contact form.