Towards an International Political Ergonomics
| Author | Jonathan Luke Austin |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119842242 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119842242
European Journal of
International Relations
2019, Vol. 25(4) 979 –1006
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066119842242
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E
JR
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Towards an International
Political Ergonomics
Jonathan Luke Austin
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Switzerland
Abstract
This article introduces International Political Ergonomics. International Political
Ergonomics is a novel research programme focused on achieving political change
through the ergonomic (re)design of world politics. The approach is grounded on a
shift across International Relations which recognizes that its epistemic (i.e. knowledge-
producing) core is often inadequate to achieve change. Insights from the practice
turn and behaviouralist International Relations, as well as from philosophy, sociology
and neuroscience, demonstrate that much international behaviour is driven by the
‘unconscious’ or ‘non-reflexive’ re-articulation of repertoires of actions even where
the pathologies of this process are known. This implies that knowledge production and
dissemination (i.e. to policymakers, global publics) is often unable to effect influence over
social practices. What is thus required is a non-epistemic means of producing world
political change. International Political Ergonomics is a research programme that takes
up this task. It does so by describing how small material interventions into world politics
can radically shift individual behaviours by encouraging greater rationality, reflexivity and
deliberation. After laying out the theoretical basis for this claim, the article demonstrates
it by detailing the application of International Political Ergonomics to violence-prevention
efforts. The article concludes by reflecting on the radical implications that International
Political Ergonomics has for the vocation of International Relations.
Keywords
Design theory, ergonomics, materiality, policy relevance, political violence, practice
theory
Corresponding author:
Jonathan Luke Austin, Violence Prevention (VIPRE) Initiative, Graduate Institute of International and
Development Studies, Geneva 1211, Switzerland.
Email: jonathan.austin@graduateinstitute.ch
842242EJT0010.1177/1354066119842242European Journal of International RelationsAustin
research-article2019
Article
980 European Journal of International Relations 25(4)
Introduction
Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kömmt drauf an, sie zu
verändern.1
What do we, as students of International Relations (IR), do? We read. We write. Some of
us run numbers. Some of us go to archives; others head to the ‘field’ and observe this or
that. Some of us develop models; others theories. Things like that. That is what we typi-
cally do. Now — instead — imagine a student of world politics standing in a factory at
the end of a production line with little objects flowing towards her. Imagine her picking
one of these up and examining it with care. Or, imagine her sitting in a studio before an
architect’s desk, sketching; or sitting in a workshop surrounded by tools, metals and
plastics, making things. Imagine a student of world politics doing all that. This is hard to
imagine because, well, that is not what we do at the moment.
In this article, I suggest that we start doing things like that. I do so by advocating for
the development of an International Political Ergonomics (iPER). iPER is an applied
research programme founded on the idea that one promising means by which to effect
world political change is the ergonomic redesign of the socio-materiality of the situations
in which its events occur. In this, iPER seeks to reconfigure the vocation of IR such that
beyond studying, analysing and writing, we also begin designing, crafting, building and
distributing concrete things. Analogously, just as automobile engineers insert safety
mechanisms into vehicles (beeping seatbelt indicators, lane-departure warning systems)
that are ancillary to their main purpose, so I argue that it is possible for IR to not dissimi-
larly intervene in world politics in as-yet-unconsidered but positive political ways.
The need to develop an iPER stems from recent developments within practice-theoret-
ical and behavioural IR (as well as work across neuroscience, philosophy of mind and
psychology) that challenge conceptions of how science gains social influence. Whether
expressed via theories of Type-1 thinking, aliefs, habit or practice, IR theory has come to
identify factors that lead to the repetition of particular behaviours that are, at individual or
collective levels, questioned in their desirability (i.e. are deemed potentially negative).2 To
simplify, the suggestion is that cognitively held knowledge that should at least give indi-
viduals ‘pause for thought’ before carrying out an action (e.g. ethical norms, bureaucratic
‘best practices’, etc.) is frequently not enacted by humans, not necessarily because this
knowledge has been consciously socio-politically or individually rejected, but often due
to a bias against self-reflective thought that is intrinsic to human action and being.
These ideas suggest that undesirable outcomes in world politics sometimes emerge
less as the product of (more or less rational) choices/decisions framed by intersubjective
horizons of meaning (which might be altered via logics of argumentation) or cost–bene-
fit calculations founded on a logic of consequence meditated over by (more or less)
rational agents, so much as the product of an ‘unconscious’ or ‘non-reflexive’ re-articu-
lation of repertoires of actions that force repetition even if these processes are collec-
tively recognized as pathological or, at the very least, are the source of great socio-political
controversy (cf. Hopf, 2010; Pouliot, 2008; Ringmar, 2017). One central implication of
these findings is that knowledge production (i.e. epistemics) is typically a necessary but
rarely sufficient source of sustained world-political change.
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