The Security-Innovation Nexus in (Geo-)Political Imagination

ABSTRACT

Security and innovation have become increasingly entangled at the level of political rationalities, imagination, and material practice, forming what we conceptualise as the ‘nexus of security-innovation’. The extension of and various shifts in this nexus merit critical attention, as it engenders the emergence of new technopolitical issues, conflicts, and novel sets of actors involved. This article constitutes both an Introduction and an individual contribution to a Special Issue that examines recent shifts in the security-innovation nexus and its relation to geopolitical imaginations. Here, we propose to conceptualise the nexus along three lines – as an empirical phenomenon, a set of problems confronting security actors, and as an analytical approach. We then map the tensions between security and innovation rationalities before introducing the contributions to this Issue and their individual approaches to studying the security-innovation nexus. We conclude by discussing how the ‘innovationization’ of security reshapes security practices, co-constitutes new actors, and restructures the spaces – imagined and actual – in which they operate.

Introduction

The relationship between innovation and security is enjoying great popularity in current policy debates. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, innovation capacity and leadership have been (re)positioned to be crucial factors in contemporary geopolitics. Calls to address acute security issues and prepare for polymorphous future threats through advanced technological and policy innovation have established various innovation hubs by or within security and defence organisations such as the EU or NATO. The Chief Executive of the European Defence Agency’s Hub for EU Defence Innovation, HEDI, for example, described the role of security-innovation in and for geopolitics when the hub was created in 2022:

With the rapid development of new and often disruptive technologies and their fast weaponization, innovation has become a geostrategic factor shaping the international security environment and the global balance of power. The establishment of [Hub for EU Defence Innovation] HEDI is a clear signal that our Ministries of Defence take innovation seriously and that they want to invest more in it, and act together. (European Defence Agency 2022)

At the same time, however, much of this discourse also seems to suggest that understanding innovation only as a way to improve security is not enough. Often without specifying what exactly this might entail, becoming a so-called innovation leader is seen to constitute an obligation; for example, in 2022 the NATO Deputy Secretary General commented:

We live in a world where our security is tied to our ability not just to innovate, but to lead innovation. So it is paramount that we remain in the driving seat. For this, we have to innovate differently, responsibly, and cooperatively. That is what NATO strives for and stands for. (NATO 2022b)

In a way, these statements encapsulate a broad spectrum of issues and problems that characterise the current relationship between security and innovation: the challenges of developing innovation that can be weaponised, the understanding of innovation as a critical factor that shapes the balance of power in global politics, the trend of directing and driving innovation processes under a security imperative, and the numerous dilemmas related to the governance of innovation and its role in security politics.

This article – being both an independent contribution and the introduction to the special issue – critically examines and further conceptualises the relationship between (techno-political) innovation and security. It does so by situating the current nexus that links security with innovation rationalities and by elaborating the distinct forms of problematisations that address the multiple tensions between them.

The contributions to this special issue build on and expand the lively conversations between critical security studies (CSS) and science and technology studies (STS) by enriching these debates with a more explicit focus on ‘innovation’ in security governance. This is important, as the role and the meanings of innovation in society have dynamically evolved and shape-shifted in recent decades (Godin 2015). ‘Innovation’ has a particular momentum in governance today. It is seen as a panacea for many political, social, economic, and security problems (Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff 2017). For decades, security experts have invoked ‘technological innovation’ as a means to tackle security problems due to the fear of innovation’s power to disrupt existing orders of stability and security. Until recently, the term ‘innovation’ was mainly only used to signify degrees of novelty – new military technologies or proprietary security devices – and usually, only in a reified form. However, recent academic contributions have better highlighted how security governance has been closely interwoven with technological research and development – ‘security R&D’ (e.g. Bellanova, Lindskov Jacobsen, and Monsees 2020; Bourne, Johnson, and Lisle 2015; Leese, Lidén, and Nikolova 2019; Lisle 2018; Suchman, Follis, and Weber 2017; Valkenburg and van der Ploeg 2015). These works show how research and technology are not just tools of security but that the meaning and practices of security are powerfully shaped by – and simultaneously shape – the conduct of research and development of technologies in modern societies. When read closely with the history of technological development, this history of security may suggest that ‘innovation’ is just another term – a fashionable buzzword for the more traditional concepts of security technology or security R&D. However, we suggest a different perspective and contend that the narrower focus on R&D in security does not fully capture the shifts that have occurred recently within security governance, most importantly the expanding understanding of ‘innovation’ – from a more object-centred notion to a general ‘mindset’ of security governance – or, to be more precise, a political rationality of security.

This special issue investigates the dynamically evolving relations between security and innovation. This introduction approaches security and innovation as political rationalities that have expanded significantly – both vertically and horizontally – in recent years. Our aim is to bring attention to security-innovation nexus, understood as forms of innovation that are entwined with forms of security, and to provide a new basic framework to study this conjuncture. In more precise, yet bulky terms, we suggest to approach this nexus as a conjuncture in which particular forms of innovation are (articulated, imagined, and materially enacted as) inextricably entwined with specific forms of security. To conceptualise the security-innovation nexus, we draw first on two common definitions of ‘nexus’ (as derived from the Oxford Dictionary): as a connection or series of connections linking two or more things (the links connecting the fields of security and innovation, respectively) and as a focal point (the central nodes and pivotal points where the intersections between security and innovation condense and intensify). Here, we draw inspiration from Petryna’s and Kleinman (2006) study of globalising pharmaceutical industries and their conceptual understanding of nexus. We adopt their approach to delineate three dimensions we found useful as a heuristic for the security-innovation nexus: first, as a specific empirical phenomenon that can be historically and theoretically situated; second, as a series of problematizations that are articulated and coagulate in contemporary debates over global governance in the face of numerous insecurities and threats; and third, as an approach to investigating this phenomenon and the problematisations that accompany it. To do so, we trace how innovation historically emerged as a specific political rationality and discuss how this rationality has been inscribed into security thinking and practice, demonstrating this using the example of innovation hubs in security politics. We then offer a matrix of problematisations that routinely arise in the security-innovation nexus. Finally, to conclude, we present the individual contributions of this special issue and discuss the commonalities found in their approaches: a historically and politically situated understanding of security-innovation, a relational or ‘co-productionist’ perspective on the nexus, and a general focus on the imaginative dimension of security-innovation.

The Rise of the Security-Innovation Nexus

This special issue highlights the emergence of a significantly altered and expanded understanding of innovation-one that goes beyond technology development for security and defence and is leading to shifting security rationalities, or the ways in which security governance is conceptualised and practiced.¹ This focus follows the observations of STS scholars who have studied how the concept of innovation developed. Once a rather descriptive expert term, innovation today is a powerful discourse, a seemingly all-encompassing political imperative in contemporary policy debates (Pfotenhauer, Juhl, and Aarden 2019). STS scholars have therefore argued that innovation must be examined as its own political rationality in contemporary governance (Haddad and Benner 2021; Leary 2022), including in the realm of security (McCarthy 2021). As such, innovation rationality combines technological solutionism, market logics, and invocations of distributed creativity, ingenuity, and experimentality as ingredients for a remedy for almost all conceivable problems and challenges (Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff 2017), including for a multiplicity of security risks and threats.

This section briefly traces the trajectories of innovation and security as political rationalities in modern capitalist societies and shows the growing convergences between them. To demonstrate this empirically, we then briefly scrutinise hubs for security innovation (as recently popularised within the EU and NATO). This discussion exemplifies both the novel material and institutional arrangements arising out of security-innovation and the geopolitical imaginations related to such practices.

Trajectories of Innovation: From Confined Economic Function to All-Encompassing Technopolitical Panacea

The development and popularisation of the discourse of innovation, as both a powerful mindset and a preferred toolkit, has occurred only in the last few decades. Within that time, however, the meaning of innovation has shifted greatly: from economic activity to political rationality and an all-encompassing societal panacea. In the middle of the last century, ‘innovation’ mainly referred to the work of corporate R&D departments who aimed to make their companies more competitive by using the technological advancement of their production processes to expand their market position. In this context, innovation was mainly defined as the introduction of a novel technological process or internal production method at the company level or putting a technologically advanced product on the market. In Joseph Schumpeter’s ([1911] (2021) influential conception, innovation is driven exclusively by entrepreneurs while entrepreneurship is located firmly within private R&D-based corporations.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the concept of innovation underwent several developments towards more systemic, networked, and societal ideas. Significant developments in this regard have been driven by the OECD’s efforts to, for example, map the world’s national innovation systems and elaborate alternative concepts and policy frameworks, which have included social innovation, user-led innovation, and responsible innovation (Pfotenhauer and Winickoff 2018; Sébastien and Sandra 2019, Schot and Steinmueller 2018; Stilgoe 2020). Significant differences in those conceptualisations notwithstanding, most of these variants, however, remain wedded to the basic tenets of the innovation ideology Sebastian and Joakim (2017) describe as a ‘technology-market dyad’. The dominant assumptions that undergird this notion of innovation include the following: the centrality of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial spirit (even if is ‘social entrepreneurship’ and not economic entrepreneurship); the idea of the ‘market’, with all its naturalised assumptions as both an instrument and a targeted outcome of innovation policy (even in cases where market failure is problematised, innovation is typically invoked to repair or re-engineer market operations); and finally, technology-centred ideas of societal progress and human betterment, which – with regard to seemingly all possible societal problem situations – converge into the current wave of technological solutionism (Haddad and Benner 2021; Leary 2019; Pfotenhauer, Juhl, and Aarden 2019; Scott-Smith 2016; Tarvainen 2022).

Innovation has become a powerful solutionist discourse in which all possible problems are being reframed in terms that lean towards technological innovation as their only or best solution (Pfotenhauer, Juhl, and Aarden 2019) – these problems include matters of security. Today, innovation is increasingly aligned with the need to respond to threats and insecurities facing humanity; this understanding can broadly be associated with a normative notion of society’s socio-ecological transformation (Schot and Steinmueller 2018). It is this unbounded notion of innovation that has enabled its rise into the ranks of a broader political rationality and, more specifically, a security rationality.

Trajectories of Security: Expansion of Security to Uncertain and Incalculable Risks and Threats

Security has traditionally taken a prominent place in state policy and governmental reasoning. Since the end of the Cold War, a broader and somewhat diffuse notion of (in)security has proliferated in public and expert discourses. Sources and sites of (in)security have started to include more topics, ranging from global warming, the depletion of global commons, cyber-terrorism, and global biohazards to the extension of armed conflicts to cyber- and outer space. Furthermore, security concerns have increasingly shifted from actual, knowable, and calculable dangers to anticipated, unknown risks that may or may not arise in the future (e.g. Amoore 2011; Aradau and van Munster 2011; De Goede 2008; Kinnvall, Manners, and Mitzen 2018). This rise of concern with preparedness and anticipation indicates that security thinking has indeed undergone several shifts and that its scope has been greatly extended: from national security to human and vital systems security (Collier and Lakoff 2015); from military concerns regarding tanks and bombs to concerns pertaining to viruses, microbial and digital alike (Elbe 2012; Haddad and Binder 2019; King 2002; Klimburg-Witjes and Wentland 2021), and the expansion of geostrategic issues with emergent biopolitical concerns (Aradau 2010; Aradau and Blanke 2010; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008).

Recent changes in security imaginaries towards unconventional, future, and ultimately unpredictable threats have also fuelled several prominent developments in security governance. These include the technologization of security, an increase in entanglements between security and research practices, and the commercialisation of security. These trends have been especially described in IR and STS literature, which provides a conceptual groundwork to further grasp security-innovation.

The entanglements of security and technology have deep historical and political roots, which have been explored in various fields of the social sciences and humanities. In recent years, generative work in particular has emerged and proliferated at the intersection of CSS and STS (Bellanova, Lindskov Jacobsen, and Monsees 2020; Evans, Leese, and Rychnovská 2021; Hoijtink and Leese 2019). Scholars have shown how, for example, in addressing potential future catastrophes, problems of security are frequently translated into matters of technological capacities and readiness and how, in turn, this translation promotes technology-based anticipation, preparedness, prevention, and protection (Aradau and van Munster 2011), which effectively contributes to the technologization of security (Aradau 2010; Ceyhan 2002). Researchers have also explored how technological solutions are entangled with political and security practices (Müller and Aaron Richmond 2023), how security technologies are part of identity projects (Klimburg-Witjes and Trauttmansdorff 2023; Monsees and Lambach 2022), and how these entanglements often draw on historical roots (de Goede 2021).

Critical scholars have also focused on collaboration between the security and research fields (Leese, Lidén, and Nikolova 2019; Martins and Küsters 2019; Martins and Mawdsley 2021). To anticipate and prepare for insecure futures, security governance relies on a broad scope of knowledge and expertise that brings policy-makers, security actors, scientists, and researchers together in a new way (Berling and Bueger 2015; Rychnovská, Pasgaard, and Villumsen Berling 2017). This topic has also been explored in STS, particularly around themes of bio- and cybersecurity or surveillance (Balmer 2013; Brian, Brian, and John 2008; Haddad and Binder 2019; Nina, Poechhacker, and Bowker 2021; Vogel 2013). Work in STS has developed new perspectives on state power, governmental regimes, and public orders mediated by science and technology and examined how statehood is being (re)envisioned, enacted, and operationalised through science and technology (Mayer, Carpes and Knoblich 2014; Barry 2001; Gottweis 1998; Jasanoff and Kim 2015; Hilgartner, Miller, and Hagendijk 2015). Curiously, however, even with such concern for state power, these strands of work hardly foreground security as one of the central domains through which state power has been exercised.

A final strand of research that has emerged around the commodification of security examines the global trend towards the privatisation of security tasks. This research has generally analysed implications for domestic and international security governance (Abrahamsen and Leander 2015) and problematised the destabilising effects that the market logic has on security (Leander 2005). Researchers have, for example, investigated the contracting of private firms for security tasks in Afghanistan (Leander 2013), studied European border management (Lemberg-Pedersen 2012), and assessed the entanglements between a growing civil security market and a discourse centred around crisis and emergency (Hoijtink 2014). In addition, security fairs and trade shows have each been identified as sites that demonstrate the commodification of security technologies and practices (Stockmarr 2015), and studies have traced how these commercial spaces co-create particular imaginaries of purchasable security (Baird 2017). This scholarship shows how the meaning and practices of security have changed and expanded and how the logic of technological solutionism, entrepreneurial spirit, and close ties to research have increasingly been incorporated into them.

Taken together, these developments highlight the dynamic nature of the security-innovation nexus, emphasising the need for a more thorough conceptualisation and analysis. To achieve this, it is crucial to explore the specificity of the security-innovation nexus as a phenomenon. This involves, first, approaching the role of innovation in security governance as emerging and thus also underpinned by constantly evolving assemblages; second, critically reflecting on the claims of novelty, discontinuity, and disruption, characterising the debates on innovation in security (Csernatoni and Oliveira Martins 2023); and third, paying attention to the geopolitical imaginaries of technologically-mediated power and hegemony in which particular forms of security-innovation practices are situated.

Innovation Hubs: Emerging Focal Points in the Security-Innovation Nexus

As an example of the converging rationalities of security and innovation, international and intergovernmental organisations like NATO or the EU and nations, including the US, UK, France, Italy, and the Czech Republic, have rushed to establish novel arrangements for innovation-driven security governance: innovation hubs, accelerators, innovation units, and innovation agencies. Designed as boundary spaces for connecting actors and sectors to innovate security thinking and develop innovative solutions to security issues, these hubs are becoming an increasingly popular governance structure at the highest echelons of security policy. The EU develops and operates multiple innovation hubs, including the EU Innovation Hub for Internal Security, the European Defence Agency’s Defence Innovation Hub, and the European Digital Innovation Hubs Network. These hubs aim to bring together practitioners, academics, entrepreneurs, and other influential actors to foster research that will help the EU tackle future security challenges and implement this research as practice via public-private partnerships. As the co-chair of the EU Innovation Hub for Internal Security, Nicolas Bessot describes:

Security research is a priority for the EU, it is priority for the member states as well, and the geopolitical context is reminding us of that. It is therefore essential—through the hub—to fund research that will work for our future security. (EUROPOL 2022)

A similar vision guides the EU Defence Innovation Hub: quoted at the beginning of this article, Jiří Šedivý, the Chief Executive of the hub’s overseeing European Defence Agency, is concerned with the ‘fast weaponization’ of innovation, and sees it as ‘geostrategic factor shaping the international security environment and the global balance of power’ (European Defence Agency 2022). Meanwhile, the NATO Innovation Hub has a longer history. It was set up in the context of NATO engagement in Afghanistan to help the organisation ‘with outside-the-box thinking as well as implementation of creative solutions to problems’ (NATO 2022a). The proclaimed mission of the hub is to allow knowledge exchange and mutual learning to tackle security challenges and design solutions. The establishment of the hub is explained with regard to the need to improve the organisation’s adaptability to the changing global security environment. The hub specifically supports the development of two innovation approaches within NATO: open innovation and agile development. While open innovation aims at multi-disciplinary collaboration and the involvement of different types of expertise in addressing NATO challenges, agile development ‘ensures that solutions are developed in very close collaboration with the end-users, through short cycles (sprints) allowing to reassess the value of the solutions very often along the way, and match it to the evolution of the requirement and the technology’ (NATO Innovation Hub 2022, 2). Currently, its pivotal role is seen in bolstering the adaptability of the alliance in face of rapidly evolving insecurity:

In our fast-evolving environment, success and resilience depend on, more than anything else, one’s ability to adapt to emerging challenges and surprises. The end goal of [the Innovation Hub] is to make NATO adaptable, fast. This goal will be achieved only if the Innovation mindset and techniques spread all over the Alliance. (NATO Innovation Hub 2022, 1)

For that reason, the hub supports multi-disciplinary collaboration among ‘end-users’ (military experts from NATO and the national armies) who define the needs of the organisation, ‘providers/developers’ (researchers from academia and industry), and ‘capability designers’ (also experts from NATO and the national armies) who translate the suggested solutions to meet the needs of the end-users (NATO 2023).

While the proliferation of these hubs is an intriguing phenomenon in its own right, these hubs epitomise a broader shift in how security is being re-imagined through the prism of innovation. Specifically, the capacity to innovate is equated with the capacity to adapt to a new global security environment and, thus, to provide a readily available fix for each geopolitical risk. At the same time, this discourse highlights the importance of broadening security expertise for such innovation-based approaches to new actors who can design marketable, creative, and ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions. In the following section, we discuss four basic ways in which the security-innovation nexus has been problematized. These four examples of problematisation are outlined as a rough guide highlighting the different ways of relating security and innovation policies and thus constructing the nexus of security-innovation as object of political discussion, expert discourse, and public debate (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The dynamic security-innovation nexus

Security-Innovation: Four Basic Problematizations of the Nexus

In contemporary policy, expert, and academic discourses, we can observe four basic ways the nexus of security-innovation is problematised: innovation as a fix for insecurity, innovation as a security challenge, security as a fix to innovation, and security as a barrier to innovation. Table 1 (below) depicts the different framings of security-innovation. In the following, we tentatively map these different problematisations and provide examples for each type of nexus.

Table 1. Four dominant frames of security-innovation.

	Innovation to security	Security to innovation
Fix/remedy	Innovation solutionism in security governance (e.g., innovation hubs in security and defence; vaccine R&D platforms for rapid vaccine development)	Security field as a new market for researchers and entrepreneurs (e.g., security R&D programmes; private military research; tenders)
Threat/challenge/barrier	Innovation as a source of insecurity to the desired (geo)political orders (e.g., disruptive technologies like blockchain, big data, or artificial intelligence; dual-use biomedical research)	Security infringing the functioning of research and private enterprise (e.g., international sanctions; regimes of secrecy; regulatory frameworks restricting innovation activities)

Innovation as a Fix for Insecurity

To start, innovation is prominently framed as a fix to security problems. These framings include cases where a social problem has been securitised and the suggested solutions involve a technological fix or a new research focus. Under the neoliberal market logic, prevailing innovation discourse often implies that the ‘best’ solution for a particular security problem consists of a novel technology, which has been selected by market logic (Pfotenhauer and Juhl 2017). This infusion of innovation rationality into that of security thus changes the latter’s logic and materiality, incorporating into the design processes of security technologies not only the requirements to be marketable and commercially viable but also highly profitable (Hoijtink 2014; Leander 2005; Lemberg-Pedersen 2012; Loader 1999). In effect, while security practices are influenced by market logics, the logic of security also shapes the market for innovations. Examples of innovation as a fix to insecurity are numerous: new surveillance technologies and data infrastructures to control ‘risky’ borders (Csernatoni 2018; Martins and Ahmad 2020; Trauttmansdorff and Felt 2023) or detect pathogenic outbreaks (Roberts 2019), medical countermeasures in public health emergencies (Elbe, Roemer-Mahler, and Long 2014; Nele, Barry, and Kelly 2023), or a new app that is supposed to de-risk dangerous social behaviours, such as domestic violence (UNDP 2020). In these cases, innovation is typically conceived of in reified terms of specific security devices (Amicelle, Aradau, and Jeandesboz 2015) or in terms of necessary infrastructures and institutions (e.g. R&D accelerators, incubators, or public-private partnerships) that should incentivise and enable the rapid development of technological fixes to security issues. ‘Disruption’ here has a predominantly positive connotation that conforms with the dominant discourses of ‘creative destruction’ under techno-capitalist development.

Innovation as a Security Challenge

On the other hand, innovation often has the potential to disrupt existing social orders and their embedded regimes of safety and security (Csernatoni 2022). In the contemporary imagination, it is often the developments of life sciences and digital technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence) that are seen to be the most disruptive, whereas, in security, the perils of ‘destructive creation’ (Soete 2019) become their own objects of political articulation and sociotechnical imagination. For instance, while the problematic nature of dual-use technologies has clearly preoccupied policymakers and security experts for decades (Rath, Ischi, and Perkins 2014), other still-pertinent examples include more mundane products and practices. For example, an apparently innocuous fitness app, Strava, generated considerable national security concern when it published a ‘heatmap’ that tracks the paths its users log as they run. In doing so, the app appeared to expose the structure and location of military bases, including in Syria and Afghanistan, and soldiers’ movement on and around the base; this revelation triggered significant debates regarding national security (BBC 2018). Other examples include new digital workplace practices that open businesses to cybercrime and cyberattacks and consequently reframe digitally inept users of technology as security problems – first at the firm level but with the risk of spilling over into a broader matter of national security (Haddad and Binder 2019; Klimburg-Witjes and Wentland 2021). What is apparent here is that innovations are often seen as problematic when they are out of control (legally, politically, and technologically) of securitising actors, especially when the innovations are imagined getting into the wrong hands. This problematisation leads to the need to ‘lead’ innovation processes, as emphasised by NATO’s Deputy General in the quotation cited earlier. While this framing portrays innovation as a security problem, it is not uncommon that discussions to figure out how to solve it will be drawn from an innovation register. This self-reinforcing tendency, which partly accounts for the power of the innovation discourse (Pfotenhauer, Juhl, and Aarden 2019), can lead to a further lock-in of security-innovation imaginaries; however, it can also introduce discontinuities. In both cases, this must be considered analytically.

Security as a Fix to Innovation

The flipside of the current innovation discourse, which frames innovation as a cure-all for every possible problem, is the discourse’s constant problematisation of innovation performance, outputs, and capacities. Innovation is thus framed in terms of a ‘deficit model’ (Pfotenhauer, Juhl, and Aarden 2019). In these circumstances, security crises can also ‘fix’ innovation deficits in areas without sufficient incentives for innovators to invest their capital, time, and effort. For instance, while pharmaceutical innovation is seen as an important security strategy for pandemic preparedness, drug developers are often somewhat reluctant to invest in these areas because of market uncertainties (Elbe 2018; Long 2021). Here, security issues ensuing public attention, political prioritisation, and executive solutionism offer several push-and-pull mechanisms for innovation-driven initiatives, e.g., by building networks, creating incentives, or channelling funding. A recent example of this has been the European Commission’s responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, which have weaved together health security concerns with a significant problematisation of pharmaceutical innovation for medical countermeasures (Haddad 2023). History shows that crises tend to boost innovation when society seeks to mobilise its technological and creative capacities to address new problems under changing circumstances (irrespective of how these innovations are later judged). Furthermore, under contemporary capitalism, the emphasis on innovation-based security solutions is inextricably entwined with the increasing trend to articulate and materially configure insecurity as a market opportunity (Burgess et al. 2018; King 2002). This discourse is not new: it has already been pursued for a long time in entrepreneurial circles, common topics in the pages of magazines like Forbes or Entrepreneur, which routinely advise small and big businesses on how to look for investment opportunities during global crises and geopolitical turmoil. In this discourse, business opportunities, patriotic sentiment, and techno-scientific progress are firmly welded together. A recent article about how to get funding from the US Department of Defense exemplifies this point:

American innovation holds the key to sustained peace and unlocks tremendous opportunities for prosperity when entrepreneurs can commercialize dual-use technologies for societal benefit. Harnessing scientific breakthroughs is the reason America prevailed in previous wars. (…) Serving your country by building a tech start-up, licensing defense-funded innovations, and presenting solutions to national security challenges are opportunities that every entrepreneur should seize. (Seper 2022)

This framing exemplifies the connections between innovation and security, where the aims and needs of one are articulated in the terms of the aims and needs of the other – linking the interests of corporate entrepreneurship with the (inter-)national security interests of political actors.

Security as a Barrier to Innovation

The last type of framing security-innovation constructs security as a barrier to innovation, under which certain forms and practices of innovation must be restricted, halted, recategorised to fall under a different framework of governance, or even excluded from political rationality. Precisely because of the disruptive potential of innovation, invoking ‘security’ can impede, restrict, or sequester innovation activities. Exemplative cases of this are situations where access to knowledge, technology, or networks is restricted for security reasons. A prominent case of halting innovation in this way is the moratorium on gain-of-function research in life sciences, implemented in 2014 by the US government to temporarily suspend innovation activities in research that enhance the capabilities of pathogens (Lakoff 2017). Due to safety and security concerns, the moratorium was imposed to temporarily halt such research so that scientific authorities and security professionals could assess the risks and benefits associated with this research and establish guidelines and regulations for its responsible conduct (Rychnovská 2016). Furthermore, constraining certain types of innovation for security reasons is often followed by shifting those innovation activities to the realm of secrecy under a more state-controlled regulatory framework – this has been the case in some areas of biological, chemical, nuclear, and cybernetic research (Balmer 2013; Rid 2016; Wellerstein 2021). These governance models can include even tighter control of entry to an innovation field, additional regulations on the conduct of research, export controls, responsible research and innovation frameworks, and beyond.

However, such breaks in innovation activity are often only temporary, they are time-bound until the security issue has been sufficiently addressed and resolved. In this respect, securitisation functions less as a strict limit and more as a temporal and domain-specific barrier to innovation, which, paradoxically, can set innovation dynamics in motion to solve the security dimensions and overcome the barrier. This underlines the dialectic of security and innovation.

Each of these examples reveals the entangled relationships between security and innovation. It is vital to attend to, empirically and conceptually, these dialectical tensions of security-innovations. Fulfilling this need requires a dynamic and multi-layered perspective. It may be the case that several problematisations are being considered simultaneously (by different actors or even by the same actors) in the case of one phenomenon. Furthermore, the dominant problematisation can change; for example, when a potential security issue initially stimulates innovation activities but a sudden acute emergency leads to a situation where this innovation comes to a temporary standstill. In rough terms, each problematisation preconfigures how articulations, materialities, and imaginaries of security-innovation can be conceived of, experienced, and constructed in specific contexts. The contributions in this special issue show different ways of studying the discourses and practices of security-innovation, while sharing a theoretical commitment to the co-productive sensitivity towards security and innovation and attentiveness to geopolitical imaginations in which this nexus is situated.

Approaching the Security-Innovation Nexus: Contributions to the Special Issue

This special issue gathers a series of contributions that explore different sites, aspects, and conjunctures of the security-innovation nexus and discuss their political implications. The individual contributions focus on specific aspects of security-innovation as a phenomenon and scrutinise various problematisations of this changing nexus. In doing so, they help us understand how pathways towards (geo-)political futures are increasingly defined, envisioned, and negotiated in terms of security-innovation.

In their article on energy security in the Baltic Sea region, Villumsen et al (2022) investigate articulations of security related to technological innovations in the realm of energy policy and explore what imaginations of identity and ontological security arise from this security-innovation nexus. They draw on the analysis of sociotechnical imaginaries and further develop the framework by focusing on the politics of identity and ontological security in the imaginaries of desired energy futures. The paper focuses on the interconnected nature of energy security visions and the meaning of national (in)security in Poland and Lithuania. Their study shows how the understanding of sovereignty and independence is co-produced through innovations in the energy realm.

Andreas Baur (Baur 2023) explores how imaginations of innovation and political control in a globalised world are materialised in cloud infrastructures. Baur investigates three European cloud projects – Microsoft’s cloud, Bundescloud, and GAIA-X – and analyses the political work of the imaginaries in which these projects are situated, focusing on innovation, boundary-making, and material properties. The paper shows how privacy and data security issues have become incorporated into cloud innovation and how political ideas of control (specifically, that of digital sovereignty) become integrated into technological innovation. The research highlights the entanglement between dreams of innovation and political control, pointing out that digital globalisation is not free from attempts to reintroduce traditional concepts of governance linked to territoriality and sovereignty.

The paper by Nina Klimburg-Witjes (Klimburg-Witjes 2023) studies the co-production of European integration and the commercial and security use of outer space. The paper highlights how the increasingly securitised global space race shapes the practices and visions of innovation related to human futures in outer space. Focusing on the European rocket programme, Ariane, Klimburg-Witjes shows how controversies and debates about the European space programme are also struggles over different visions of geopolitical constellations and of security and innovation in Europe. To do this, the paper unpacks the politics of strategic autonomy and investigates the broader geopolitical dimension of the European space programme, the politics of dual-use, the intertwinement of civilian and military innovations, and the technopolitical aspects of European integration and the related shifts in the structure of power relations. Ultimately, the paper argues that the securitisation of outer space enabled the rise of innovation and, in turn, also shaped the imaginaries of European geopolitical futures.

Raluca Csernatoni and Bruno Oliveira Martins (Csernatoni and Olivera Martins 2023) focus on the notion of security-innovation as a disruption in the security and military fields. They trace the emergence of the imaginations of disruptive technologies and critically reflect on the social and political effects of the articulations of disruptive security and defence technologies. To study this articulation, they propose a novel framework that builds on three analytical dimensions: temporality, performativity, and imagination. Using this framework, they contend that the notion of disruption assumes that technological development in society has otherwise a linear temporal character and this is ‘disrupted’ in the security context. Instead, they argue, we need to see claims of disruption as a performative act that can trigger or enact pre-imagined socio-technical futures.

Together, the contributions not only represent diverse theoretical and conceptual engagements with the entangled relations between security and innovation, but they also map their shifts across several empirical domains. Notwithstanding differences in exact approach, there are a range of commonalities shared by the articles of this special issue; three of the most significant of these commonalities are explained below.

First, these contributions understand security and innovation as historically contingent forms of practice – as assemblages of dynamic relationships between various elements that cannot be completely attributed to a common origin or the intentional actions of individual actors. These approaches thus underscore the need to resist reducing technopolitical phenomena exclusively to discursive constructions or material interests. Instead, they understand security and innovation as powerful discourses that, on the one hand, ‘systematically create the things they speak of’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007; Hajer 2002) and, on the other, pay attention to their specific materiality and historical trajectories (Peer and Maximilian 2017).

Second, each contribution expands the typical analytical attention beyond security devices (tools or ‘instruments’ of security governance) to also include the logics and rationalities in which specific forms of research and technology development are articulated. This general approach explicitly rests on a co-productionist research perspective (e.g., Bellanova and de Goede 2021; Jasanoff and Kim 2015; Nolte and Westermeier 2020). In other words, each of this issue’s contributions investigates the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between knowledge and power, facts, and norms illuminating the ways in which science, security, and society shape each other through a continuous process of interaction. In taking such relational and process-oriented perspectives to attend to the dynamic and dialectical character of security-innovation, these contributions stay attuned to the multiple tensions, frictions, incommensurate values, and contending practices, which take their shape from their co-productive relationships.

Third, the contributions also share the perspective that the imaginative dimensions of security and innovation logics co-constitute technopolitical futures (McCarthy 2021); each article investigates how expectations, imagination, and anticipation shape the struggles over technoscientific developments and projects (see also Borup et al. 2006; Felt 2015; McNeil et al. 2017; Taylor 2003). Together, the contributions add to the growing attention that critical security scholars have had on political (or ‘sociotechnical’) imaginaries of (in)security by showing how imaginaries provide a backdrop for tacit assumptions, historical experiences, and political values to condense into social forms that can be, relatively speaking, simultaneously stable or elusive – hard to fully spell out or nail down (Haddad et al. 2022; Laclau 1990). This research reinforces the idea that collective imagination is an inevitable component of security apparatuses as their scopes, tactics, instruments, boundaries, and discourses are envisioned and defined (Klimburg-Witjes and Trauttmansdorff 2023).

Conclusion and Openings

The scope and meaning of both ‘innovation’ and ‘security’ have changed and expanded in recent decades. Since the mid-twentieth century, innovation has grown from an entrepreneurial in-house activity of R&D-based firms in the name of competition to presently denoting a political imperative, a social obligation that compels and subjects almost all actors across various policy fields, including security. Similarly, security has grown from its military and defence focus that was marked by narrow circles of security expertise and now encompasses hybrid, polymorphous threats. It is precisely because innovation has become a powerful political rationality – widely seen as a panacea for all sorts of challenges – and the scope and meaning of security have substantially expanded that their growing nexus has such wide-reaching implications. Innovation practices have come to form part of the DNA of many areas of security rationality and practice. And, at the same time, security logics and practices are forces of their own when it comes to innovation – frequently guiding the channelling of resources and marshalling of funds and, moreover, generating political legitimacy and mobilising key actors towards particular forms and practices of research, innovation, and commodification of knowledge and technology that are deemed ‘security-relevant’. For researchers of global politics, this means being attentive to how specific forms of security-innovation are articulated, constructed, and justified; what visions of politics they outspokenly promote or tacitly encode; how, where, and by whom they become contested; and what broader implications they prefigure and entail.

This paper has explored and mapped the complex intersections of security and innovation, focusing on four distinct problematisations within contemporary discourses: innovation as a fix for insecurity, innovation as a security challenge, security as a fix to innovation, and security as a barrier to innovation. These problematisations, which illustrate the basic tensions inherent in the security-innovation nexus, encourage further empirical and conceptual exploration to better comprehend the evolving nature of security-innovation dynamics in specific contexts. Yet, these problematisations also acknowledge the potential for simultaneous and shifting aspects, which can shape the articulations, materialities, and imaginaries in this complex relationship – new research on the militarisation of big tech and its (geo)political implications (González 2023) already exemplifies this potential.

We conclude here by foregrounding the direction in which security practices are (re)shaped by innovation rationality. The ‘innovationization’ of security enables restructuring of the space for legitimate security actors, who now have a direct bearing on the framing, understanding, and imagined capacity to tackle security problems. This shift has consequences for the functioning of democratic institutions and processes (Huysmans 2014), which may be especially problematic when it comes to core domains of security, including warfare, defence, and policing practices. In this respect, because innovation is often conceived of as a technical fix to the problem, innovation rationality may further depoliticise security issues if it manages to circumvent or sugar-coat more ‘radical’ questions about broader structural issues and conditions. Similarly, with the increasing innovationization of security, there is the risk that the pro-innovation bias – the rough notion that innovation, by default, is something desirable and good – also trickles into thinking about security and insecurity. Here it is not only problematic that market-driven innovation practice is growth- and profit-oriented, but also that the commodification of security solutions must meet specific design requirements. Unfortunately, this could result in the situation that only those security problems which are feasible and profitable from the perspective of innovation logic are translated into solutions. In light of these perils, critical research is needed to shed light on the role of security-innovation within shifting geopolitical orders as well as on the implications for restructuring the power relations (including gender, race, class) that shape the politics of security. To the extent that innovation as a political rationality has become an intrinsic part of geopolitical imaginations and calculations, the question arises as to which new orders and political geographies – of power and hegemony, of international competition and collaboration – are taking shape. The disparity between the geography of global innovation networks and traditional international security frameworks highlights the urgency to critically examine the evolving relationship between security and innovation. Such analysis will continue to offer important insights into the shifting landscape of these multi-faceted geopolitical dynamics.

Acknowledgements

This contribution is the result of a sustained and collaborative effort among the authors. The initial conceptualization was first introduced at the International Studies Association 2019 Annual Meeting in Toronto during a panel focused on Evolving Governance Challenges: Critical Ontologies. It was also presented at the EWIS Workshop on Global Reconfigurations of Science, Technology, Security in Krakow, 2019. Subsequent drafts benefited from the authors’ participation in the special issue’s workshop, Imaginaries of (In)security: Technopolitical Futures at the Nexus of Security and Innovation, organized by the authors in October 2021. More recently, the key argument was presented at the Central European University’s IR Departmental Seminar in February 2023. We extend our gratitude to Dr. Linda Monsees, Dr. Julia Sachseder, and the two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and insightful suggestions during the earlier drafts of the paper. Their contributions significantly enhanced the quality of our work.

We are grateful to have received support from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna for language editing. We also express our appreciation to Kai Strycker and Harry Wynands for their meticulous proofreading and language editing, which greatly contributed to the clarity and coherence of our manuscript

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Nina Klimburg-Witjes work has been funded by the European Union (ERC, FutureSpace, project number 101076020). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Notes

1. We draw on governmentality studies to conceive of political rationalities as a term to refer to the underlying principles, logic, and strategies that shape how political power is exercised and how societies are governed (Rose and Miller 2010).