Geopolitics of Technological Futures
Warfare Technologies and Future Battlefields in German Security Debates
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3948675 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lothar Ruppert (0000-0003-0080-9611, Department of Environmental Social Sciences and Geography, Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg, Germany, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 581-606 |
| Publication date | 2024-03-14 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Geopolitics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14650045.2023.2174431 |
| OpenAlex | W4321371809 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 11 |
| References cited | 63 |
Germany’s role in global geopolitics is being renegotiated within current debates about future security architecture, weapons technology capabilities, and the spatiality of future battlefields. This paper introduces a critical geopolitics of technological futures approach and analyses weapons technology discourses through poststructuralist discourse theory and scholarship on technological expectations. It investigates German security policy documents’ construction of future threat scenarios, technological visions, battlefields, and the material-technological consequences associated with these futures. It identifies how the geopolitical scenario of ‘Westlessness’ discursively shifted after Russia’s war in Ukraine. It also considers the socio-technical imagination of ‘hyperwar’, which justifies the development of artificial intelligence-based weapons technologies. Such socio-technical imaginations construct desirable weapons and influence geopolitical leitmotifs. In turn, geopolitical imaginaries affect expectations of future weapons technologies and legitimate the acquisition of specific technologies. Therefore, this paper offers an approach to examining geopolitical power-knowledge constructions in relation to (new) technologies of killing
Economics · Futures contract · Geopolitics · German · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Vision · Global Security and Public Health · History · Humanities and Social Sciences · Law · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
Digital geographies of/and childhood and youth
Crisis and Change in Post-Zeitenwende German Security Policy
Imagining the enhanced soldier
The offset imaginary
The UK Ministry of Defence, “Low-Carbon Warfare,” and the struggle to construct novel sociotechnical imaginaries of future war
Interrogating the imaginary turn
War economy vs European Silicon Valley? The EU's competing sociotechnical imaginaries of defence innovation and industry
Technovation futures and state activism
The Geopolitics of AI-Driven Arms Races
Armaments projects in times of geopolitical tension - German renegotiations of the FCAS in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian War
Transformation, insecurity, and uncontrolled automation
Near Abroad
Diplomatic Material
Geographical imaginations
Germany and the Use of Force
Diskurse von Geopolitik und ‚Neuem Kaltem Krieg‘ – Zur Veränderung medialer Repräsentationen von Russland und ‚dem Osten‘
Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption
The state, all at sea
Social media, gender and the mediatization of war
German Geopolitics in Transition
AI-enabled remote warfare
Performing preemption
The emergence of lethal surveillance
Sociotechnical Imaginaries and National Energy Policies
Geographies of the future
The proliferation of peripheries
Pharmaceutical prospects
Autonomous weapons systems and changing norms in international relations
Geographical imagination
Matter(s) in social and cultural geography
Politics of expectations
How does war become a legitimate undertaking? Re-engaging the post-structuralist foundation of securitization theory
Political geography and language
Reshaping critical geopolitics? The materialist challenge
Becoming war
Geographies of science and technology 1
Politische Geographie
Forging volumetric methods
Critical geopolitics
Securitization as Discursive (Re)Articulation
Preemption, precaution, preparedness
Critical Geopolitics/critical geopolitics 25 years on
Secure the volume
Algorithmic warfare and the reinvention of accuracy
The technological rationality of the drone strike
Becoming weapon
Weapons, desire, and the making of war
Towards a new German military identity? Change and continuity of military representations of self and other(s) in Germany
Re-Orientating Vertical Geopolitics
The everywhere war
Precaution, Preemption
Hope and micropolitics
On Geography and Materiality
Regions, Strategies and Empire in the Global War on Terror
Introduction
Introduction to the Special Issue
"The Mass Media and Russia's "Sphere of Interests
Historical Geographies of the Future
Remote Warfare and the Retooling of American Primacy
Materialist returns
Politics of prediction
From a View to a Kill
| Unique citing works | 11 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 11 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 10 |