Abstract
Following the cold war, interest grew in the possible rise of new forms of imperial rule and in the likely role of science and technology in processes of global governance. In particular, just as the life sciences advanced the interests of bygone empires, so modern biotechnology is poised to support today’s transboundary exercises of political, economic, and cultural power. Drawing on analyses of large-scale political and technological systems, this paper suggests that contemporary biotechnology may be enrolled into empire-making in several different modes, including bottom-up resistance, top-down ideological imposition, administrative standardization, and consensual constitutionalism. At present, biotechnology seems more likely to increase the power of metropolitan centers of science and technology than that of people at the periphery. Institutional innovations will be needed to bring global biosciences and biotechnologies under effective democratic control.
I am grateful to the Universities of Wageningen, Netherlands, and Halle, Germany, for invitations to present earlier versions of this paper. This chapter is an updated and revised version of “Biotechnology and Empire: The Global Power of Seeds and Science,” Osiris (2006) 21: 273–292.
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Notes
- 1.
American progressives would like to detach what many see as the illegitimate path of unilateral militarism from the legitimate, indeed desirable, path of economic and social globalization driven by the “soft power” of culture and markets, see Joseph S. Nye (2004). Celebrations of America’s role in leading the world to free-market democracy include Friedman (1999).
- 2.
Directed by George Lucas, the trilogy opened in 1977 with Star Wars, the film that gave its title to the series. It was succeeded by The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). Appearing in the waning years of the cold war, the films exercised a particular influence on Ronald Reagan, America’s first Hollywood president. The idea of a satellite-based missile defense shield was initially broached in the Reagan era, and the project, which remained mired in conflict during his presidency, was nicknamed Star Wars.
- 3.
See, e.g., the account of collectors and collecting in the eighteenth-century British and French proto-empires, Maya Jasanoff (2005).
- 4.
This way of thinking about empires is consistent with contemporary work in science and technology studies—see, in particular: Jasanoff (2004), Latour (1990). Richard Drayton (1993) adopts a similar perspective when he speaks of empire as “an ecological system,” stressing the interconnections among politics, economy, and nature that define empires.
- 5.
For an argument that such demands are already being expressed through a tacit and unwritten form of global constitution-making, see Jasanoff (2003).
- 6.
The first Green Revolution was the introduction worldwide of high-yielding grain varieties pioneered by Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug and other plant biologists. Their work was sponsored in part by the Rockefeller Foundation. For accounts of the scientific and social dimensions of the Green Revolution, see Anderson et al. (1988), Hazell and Ramasamy (1991), Kay (1993).
- 7.
- 8.
Consider, for example, the U.S. military’s practice of “embedding” journalists with ground forces during the conduct of the 2003 Iraq war.
- 9.
Under India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi, in close association with her son Sanjay Gandhi, the slogan garibi hatao (eradicate poverty) became equated with a program of forcible slum clearance—in other words, eradicating not poverty but the visibly poor.
- 10.
Laid out on modern lines in the 1950s by the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, at the behest of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the city of Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab and Haryana, accommodates a degree of traffic surveillance that I have not encountered in other Indian cities. Just over a hundred years before Chandigarh was inaugurated, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann substantially rebuilt Paris for Napoleon III, razing many old districts and replacing winding streets with broad boulevards so that the state could better control potential revolutionaries.
- 11.
The ten new members met the so-called Copenhagen criteria, according to which they had to “be a stable democracy, respecting human rights, the rule of law, and the protection of minorities; have a functioning market economy; and adopt the common rules, standards and policies that make up the body of EU law.” See http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/ (accessed Feb. 2014).
- 12.
- 13.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., an enthusiast for eugenics, wrote the majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, 274 US 200 (1927).
- 14.
For an account of the changing social contract among science, state, and industry with respect to the life sciences, see Jasanoff (2005a).
- 15.
Theodore Kaczynski, a mathematician educated at Harvard and the University of Michigan, conducted a single-handed letter-bombing campaign against representatives of various industries from his cabin in Montana between 1978 and 1996. These attacks killed three people and injured many others. He was caught when his brother recognized as his work a long letter he had sent to the New York Times, see Kaczynski (1995).
- 16.
On transatlantic divisions over genetically modified crops and food, see Bernauer (2003).
- 17.
The Terminator gene would have disabled grain seeds from sprouting in consecutive years. Farmers who had routinely planted seed stored from the previous year’s harvest would then have been forced to buy new seed each year. The coalition that forced Monsanto to abandon this technology, at least for a time, included both indigenous organizations and the influential Rockefeller Foundation (Jasanoff 2003: 171).
- 18.
Roundup is a popular weed killer marketed by Monsanto, and Roundup Ready plants are genetically modified to withstand the use of that product. Many observers thought Monsanto’s decision was motivated by opposition to GM crops in Europe and Japan (New Scientist 2004).
- 19.
Senator Christopher Bond, Annual Meeting, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC, Feb. 23, 2000.
- 20.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Annual Meeting, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC, Feb. 21, 2000.
- 21.
The most unprecedented feature of this process was a nationwide public consultation known as GM Nation? See http://www.gmnation.org.uk/ (accessed Feb. 2014).
- 22.
For details of the case, as well as an argument against the U.S. positions on science and risk assessment, see Winickoff et al. (2005).
- 23.
Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser, [2004] 1S.C.R. 902, 2004 SCC 34.
- 24.
Such ontological hybridity is taken as part of the order of things in the work of many science studies scholars, see, in particular Callon (1986), Latour (1993). Hybrids complicate the clean separation that philosophers such as Ian Hacking (1999) have sought to draw between natural (“indifferent”) and social (“interactive”) kinds.
- 25.
“Volunteer” plants are those that emerge spontaneously, usually from a previous season’s growth, in places where they were not intentionally planted.
- 26.
- 27.
This system of distributed accountability has resulted in a union whose members have not equally bought into all aspects of the EU vision. Thus, Sweden, Denmark, and Britain have not adopted the single currency (euro); Ireland and Britain are not parties to the Schengen agreement on frontier controls; and Britain thus far has not adopted the Community Charter of Fundamental Social Rights for Workers.
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Jasanoff, S. (2014). Biotechnology and Empire: The Global Power of Seeds and Science. In: Mayer, M., Carpes, M., Knoblich, R. (eds) The Global Politics of Science and Technology - Vol. 1. Global Power Shift. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55007-2_10
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