Digital Power in World Politics: Databases, Panopticons and Erwin Cuntz
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829811409178 |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Author | Josef Teboho Ansorge |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
MILLENNIU
M
Journal of International Studies
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
40(1) 65–83
© The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829811409178
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Corresponding author:
Josef Teboho Ansorge, University of Cambridge, UK.
Email: josef.ansorge@gmail.com
Article
Digital Power in
World Politics:
Databases, Panopticons
and Erwin Cuntz
Josef Teboho Ansorge
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
The nature of political power has changed with the advent of modern information technology
while our theories and metaphors to understand it remain wedded to earlier periods. This article
begins with a discussion of some of the work done by databases in domestic and world politics. In
particular, it introduces the political effects of contemporary data-management practices through
short examples of terrorist information databases, the 2008 Obama campaign’s database, as well
as biometric databases deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Liberia. This leads to a consideration
of the finite applicability and relevance of the widespread metaphor of the Panopticon to these
kinds of cases. Given the limitations of such an image, the concept of digital power and the
political metaphor of Cuntz’s Tower are proposed. Digital power foregrounds the importance
of machines for contemporary sovereignty while moving beyond ocular-centric notions of
surveillance. Cuntz’s Tower illustrates the power of identification and sorting in addition to the
Panopticon’s emphasis on self-discipline. This article acts as an initial ground-clearing exercise for
more extensive analyses of databases in domestic and world politics.
Keywords
information technology, Panopticon, political theory
These are ideas which have been engaging me for close to 30 years. I have the feeling that they
can no longer be treated as fantasies, but that their time has now come.1
1. Letter from Erwin Cuntz to Adolf Hitler, 22 November 1934, GStA, Rep. 77, Tit. 343, vol. no. 107a.
66 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40(1)
Introduction
Contemporary information technologies are used by states and a variety of political
actors to identify, sort and act on human individuals and populations. They belong to
what Michel Foucault called the ‘bio-politics of populations’ or ‘bio-power’2 and James
Scott refers to as ‘state simplifications’.3 From this vantage point, the history of the
international system can be told as a story of the refining and standardisation of consti-
tutive tools of governance, moving roughly from census, cadastre and other maps, ber-
tillonage, ID cards and fingerprinting to biometric passports. For now, the different
strands of that history have led to the networked relational database – a tool which fea-
tures an unprecedented ability to combine both variety and quantity of information into
a system productive of new forms of immediate legibility of populations and identifica-
tion of individuals.
A database is commonly defined as a structured organisation of information (data)
stored on a computer system. Bits of data are retained according to a model that logically
relates them to each other. Databases therefore have architectures ranging from the hier-
archic to the rhizomatic, even anarchic. As the material basis for – and expression of –
what Edmund Husserl referred to as ‘an arithmetization of reality’, databases entail
calculation.4 They are the modern apparatus of a particular form of knowledge about the
human and the international that collects and weighs massive quantities of information
to be organised into attributes and objects, presented in rows and columns. This informa-
tion is inherently instrumental, it is produced through what Max Weber referred to as
‘knowledge of the techniques by which life – both external things and the behaviour of
people – can be ruled through calculation’.5
It is difficult to exaggerate the need for political thought on the power and functions
of the database. Databases are pervasive and proliferating, practically ubiquitous in
global politics, while there is a lack and lag of thought dealing with the fundamental
political implications of the retention, manipulation and mining of data. How is this new
tool of governance best conceptualised? It exists somewhere between ideal and material,
theory and practice, structure and agency. It is at once wholly political, yet emerges
removed from politics through grounding in utility, thus maintaining an apodictic, fac-
tual appearance. One popular metaphor acting as a shorthand for centralised power and
surveillance stems from George Orwell’s dystopia 1984. It is the notion of a big brother:
2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 139. By ‘bio-power …
I mean the mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the
object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the
eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human
beings are a species.’ Michel Foucault, Michel Senellart, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the
Collège de France, 1977–1978, Michel Senellart and Arnold I. Davidson (Houndmills, Basingstoke,
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1.
3. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
4. Edmund Husserl, ‘Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften’, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. H.L. Van
Breda (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962 [1937]).
5. Max Weber, ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’, in Max Weber Schriften 1894–1922, ed. Dirk Kaesler (Stuttgart:
Kroener, 2002 [1919]), 504.
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