Samuel A. W. Evans' Research

I have begun a new position at the University of California, Berkeley, within the new Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society (CSTMS).   The Center is a vibrant hub of activity and research on the social and political dimensions of science, technology and medicine.  It takes an array of perspectives, from Science & Technology Studies, History of Science, and the Medical Humanities, to help us understand the past, and shape the present and future course of social and technical decisions.

As an Academic Coordinator, I am responsible for helping the Center create its identity, building its presence within the University and the broader community, and writing grants for new research initiatives.  It is an extremely exciting time to be in such a position, as there is a lot of momentum within Berkeley to expand research in this area.  Do keep an eye on our website, as it will be changing significantly in the coming weeks!

I am also a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley, and will be maintaining my Harvard University affiliation as an Associate Research Fellow in the Program for Science, Technology, & Society at the Kennedy School of Government.  Under these titles, I will be publishing at least one article about how states have come together over the last 400 years to try to jointly control militarily significant technology.  At different points in that history, there were very different visions of what the international order was and should be, and those visions significantly influenced (and were influenced by) how states envisioned what counted as militarily significant technology.

My research interests are shifting slightly this year, as I move from an international focus on export controls and the ambiguity of classification to a focus more on the role of government regulations on the conduct of university research.  I will be looking specifically at issues of deemed exports, where foreign nationals at US universities are given information that is considered militarily significant.  The questions I am asking are: Who decides what counts as militarily significant technology within an emerging research environment?  How are controls substantiated?  How are they legitimized and justified, and to whom?  Who has a say in the process of determining an acceptable level or government regulation?

Do get in touch if you would like to discuss any of these issues.

The Science, Power, and Politics reading group that I am running this year at Harvard this week looked at the role that maps play in creating ‘objective’ knowledge for a state.  The primary reading for this was Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, although James Scott also discussed this same point in Seeing Like a State. More recently in the August issue of Social Studies of Science, Christine Leuenberger and Izhak Schnell discuss “The politics of maps: Constructing national territories in Israel.”  The basic point is that maps allow a visualization of a territory, which in turns allows for state’s to promote their control over that territory.

Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega shows a map referring to the territorial dispute with Costa Rica during an address to the nation in Managua November 13, 2010. (Reuters)

While this point may have been true when map-making was largely in the hands of government officials (or companies closely aligned with governments) I was curious about what a company like Google might do with its powerful map website.  Would this company create a map of the world that was open to all?  A democratization of cartography?  We have already seen one consequence of Google’s mapping with the recent Nicaraguan invasion of Costa Rica, which I might add, is still ongoing.  Whether Google maps played a pivotal role, or whether it was just a rhetorical ploy of legitimation is a moot point here.  That it was invoked suggests that it was seen as being a source of legitimation.

So is Google an independent entity, or does the United States maintain some degree of control over this powerful metaphor of state power?  I decided to find out by looking at a couple other areas on Google maps that the US has some interest in.

The first point of note for me with the map of Kabul was the amazing inaccuracy of the streets that were labelled.  It was obvious that there the was only a general correlation between the location and direction of the streets on the image versus on the overlaid map.  The second point I noted was the lack of any detail on the streets.  I zoomed out to all of Afghanistan to look at it compared to its neighbors, and found more interesting things.

On the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, we can see that Pakistan has more detail shown in its road structure, and also names are shown in Arabic as well as English. The detail of the one country compared to the other is more obvious as one scrolls into the border, where we can see that the map in Pakistan closely aligns with the satellite imagery.  On the Afghan side, however, the map of the road that crosses the border is a good mile off of the satellite image.

Was Google complying with the US government to purposefully distort the maps in Afghanistan for security reasons?  To be clear, I am not adverse to such regulation.  I just am curious as to how states relate to this development of mass cartography.  To test this hypothesis, I thought I’d look at two other areas of interest to the US.  The first is Tehran:

Here we can see a stark difference to Kabul.  The city as well as streets are all labelled, and many in Arabic as well as English.  There are also links to public transportation.  The map lines up perfectly with the satellite image.  What’s going on here?  Is Google providing all this information because the US is not stopping it here?  But what about Iran?  Does the government want all of this detail in its capital?  Perhaps it does, but I thought I would look at a few other examples as well.  The first is Lhasa, the site in Tibet of several protests by Monks that has received publicity, most recently in 2008.

Here we can see what seems to be a combination of the first and second examples.  At a distant level, we can see the name of the city, at a medium level, we can see more detail of the streets.  But at a near level, all mapping is gone.  Curiously, at a very near level, we see that some buildings have been shaded blue and some red.  I have no explanation for this image shading, and a quick google search did not turn up anything.  We can guess about who had a say here about the level of detail available in the map, and I doubt it was the US.

The second example is of North Korea:

Perhaps it is no real surprise that there is absolutely no data on North Korea at all (other than its name), at any level.  But why not?  Surely it would be in the US interest to have maps of the roads there. Or even locations of the cities.

I think what these images (and my very quick analysis) tell us is that Google, far from being an independent entity, is still beholden to not one, but likely several governments in what information it can include on maps and what information it cannot.  Maps, it seems, are still a vital part of state-making, and one over which governments are not quick to relinquish control.

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.

[Update 22 May 2011] As for editors, I highly recommend Textmate (for Mac)

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).

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 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.

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.