Antoine Bousquet is an Associate Professor and Director of Studies at the Political Science department of the Swedish Defence University. His work combines studies of war and political violence, the history and philosophy of science and technology, and social and political theory in the information age. His work has analysed military technology, chaoplexic theory, terrorist networks, violent aesthetics, and how war is conceptualized. He is the author of The Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity (Hurst & Oxford University Press, 2009, 2022) which has recently received a second edition.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

From my perspective, some of the work that is most exciting and necessary has come from IR’s engagement with science and technology studies over the last decade or so. When I first came into the discipline at the height of its discursivist turn, the anathema of “technological determinism” consistently foreclosed treatments of technical objects in their material and operational specificity in favour of analyses privileging their “social construction.” Through the assimilation of assemblage theory, new materialism, and actor-network theory, we have thankfully moved past the sterile conceptual binary of technology and society towards much more productive and enriching explorations of our complex sociotechnical worlds. I am pleased to see a whole new generation of scholars that are unafraid to open up the black box of technology and apprehend the inner workings of technical systems as indispensable to understanding their implications for world politics. The stakes involved range far beyond parochial disciplinary debates within IR. In an anthropocenic age characterized by accelerating technological development, building bridges between technical knowledge and that of the social sciences and humanities is arguably the most crucial civilisational challenge facing us.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

The single most important encounter in my intellectual trajectory unquestionably occurred on the course on war and strategy that I took as part of my master’s degree in International Relations at the London School of Economics in the late 1990s. The course was taught by the recently departed and sadly missed Christopher Coker in his uniquely erudite and idiosyncratic style, ranging freely across philosophy, literature, and popular culture to illuminate the profound intertwinement of armed conflict with the past, present, and projected futures of our world. Christopher’s lectures were responsible for both my ensuing interest in the question of war and radically altering my conception of what academic scholarship could look like. When I returned to academia a few years later to undertake my PhD, I naturally sought out his supervision under which I wrote the thesis subsequently published as The Scientific Way of Warfare. Christopher was a supportive but hands-off supervisor who never imposed his ideas on his students; instead he gave me the freedom and........

© E-International