Abstract: What are the consequences of the emergence of robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence for international politics? Are these new technologies going to promote instability and conflict, as many warn, or are they going to reinforce U.S. military primacy? In particular, will China be able to gain and eventually exploit the unfolding technological revolution - the so-called Second Machine age - or are such concerns exaggerated? The literature in political science and international relations theory has either largely neglected technology and technological innovation, or simply assumed that technology is a substitute for labor that reduces countries' constraints to go to war. Drawing from the scholarship in economics and management, in this article we look at technology in terms of a set complements and nodes-in-the-network. Thus, while technological innovation reduces the prices of some goods or tasks, it simultaneously makes their complementary assets more difficult to procure (through an increase in the demand). The resulting distributional effects, we argue, explain why actors will benefit unevenly from technological change. We test our theoretical insights by looking at seapower in the first and in the emerging second machine age: respectively, the time of the steam engine, steel hulls, quick-firing long-range guns and the telegraph; as well as the unfolding era of neural networks, fast processors and real-time communications. Our preliminary empirical results corroborate our framework, namely that the effects of technological change are much more complex than the literature acknowledges and highlights the challenges countries will have to face in the military realm during the second machine age.

Speaker bios: Andrea Gilli is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School of Harvard University and a former Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation of Stanford University. Andrea has conducted research for several organizations, including the European Union Institute for Security Studies, RUSI in London and the Office of Net Assessment of the U.S. Department of Defense. He holds a Ph.D. in social and political science from the European University Institute, an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a B.A. from the University of Turin.

Mauro Gilli is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies of ETH-Zurich (Switzerland). During the academic year 2015-16, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding of Dartmouth College. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University, an MA from SAIS-Johns Hopkins and a B.A. from the University of Turin.

Co-sponsored by the Southeast Asia Program and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies

Transnational Islam lacks the centralized leadership and institutions associated with Catholicism. Yet hierarchical and authoritative bodies do make decisions regarding Islam in various contemporary settings, including within the institutional frameworks of states. What happens when Muslim faith and practice are adapted to the terms and procedures of bureaucracy and the modern nation-state?

Dr. Müller will present an original conceptual framework for studying the bureaucratization of Islam. He will apply it to five Southeast Asian cases—Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. State bureaucracies in these countries vary widely, but generally they aim to influence or control trends and meanings in local Islamic discourse. Drawing on current debates in the anthropology of the state, with particular reference to Brunei and Singapore, Müller will offer an original analytic framework to explain similarities and differences in bureaucratized Islam in Southeast Asia. Possible implications beyond the region will also be explored.

Dominik Müller

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