This project is about how certain ways of using language to enact - - PDF document

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This project is about how certain ways of using language to enact expertise produces authority. More specifically, I am interested in how language, expert knowledge, and authority are enacted together, and how these interconnected regimes change over time through shifting epistemic

• paradigms. I understand epistemic paradigms to be normative social/cultural frameworks that govern what is

considered knowledge, how something can be known and to what extent. The thing to remember is that epistemic paradigms are historical and contingent, they can change, be challenged, and transformed.

The context for this project is a world in which the invention of nuclear weapons has reproduced imperial power relations, in which the nuclear capacity of a nation-state is related to its geopolitical status, and in which knowledge about nuclear things is always morally charged and potentially dangerous. The production and regulation of nuclear knowledge is fundamentally a technopolitical concern.

Technopolitics is a term that describes the strategic practice of designing or using technology to constitute, embody,

• r enact political goals. Historian Gabrielle Hecht has argued that the IAEA is governed by a technopolitical regime

which is the product of not only Cold War politics but also the politics of decolonization. One of Hecht’s key insights is that what is considered “nuclear” is not stable over time and space. “Nuclearity” is an effect of technopolitics.

The International Atomic Energy Agency is the organization charged with spreading the beneficial applications of nuclear technologies while preventing their use for military purposes. When it was founded in Vienna in 1957 (its founding is usually traced back to Eisenhower’s 1954 Atoms for Peace speech before the UN), its founding was seen (by the US and the political community at large) as a way to redeem the destructive potential of nuclear technologies.

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The prevailing nuclear order of “haves” and “have nots” was institutionalized in the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (commonly called NPT), which went into force in

• 1970. This treaty allowed the five nuclear weapons states at the time to keep their weapons,

while all other signatories renounced them for the promise of assistance in the development of peaceful nuclear technologies. This order and the fear in the west about the spread of nuclear weapons to “unauthorized” countries or actors have been described as nuclear orientalism by Hugh Gusterson in his 1999 article entitled “Nuclear weapons and the other in the Western imagination.” With the coming into force of the NPT, the IAEA assumed the task of verifying the treaty’s stipulations by regular inspections of declared nuclear facilities in non-nuclear weapons states. This regime of verification is made possible by the adherence to a safeguards system, which is the placement of nuclear facilities under inspection control. Safeguards are designed to deter unauthorized diversion of nuclear material by increasing the likelihood of early detection. Verification by inspection is based on the technological knowability of nuclear technologies and the nuclear fuel cycle. There are only so many types of reactors and ways of enriching nuclear

• materials. The verifiability of the technical aspects of nuclear energy programs is generally seen

as providing an objective, politically neutral, and fundamentally democratic way of enforcing the NPT. This system reached its limits within the first 20 years of its existence. In the aftermath of the (first) Gulf War, the IAEA was caught with its pants down when the remains of an undeclared

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nuclear weapons program were found in Iraq. In response to the Iraq failure, the IAEA Safeguards Department has been changing its inspections regime, moving towards what they call an “information-driven”, “state-based” approach, which is supposed to assist the detection of undeclared activities by providing a broader picture of the state. As you know, the Model Additional Protocol is the legal instrument that attempts to shore up the statutory inability of the IAEA to declare their declarations complete. In 2011, the apparent incorporation of information provided by sources external to the IAEA in reports on Iran has been challenged by member states and observers who see the IAEA as

• verstepping its mandate. The focus of these debates is on the “language” of the reports and
• documents. This “language” is interesting because it is a special hybrid of technical, legal, and

political discourses that are enrolled into the IAEA’s bureaucratic voice. One of my questions is how this translation across professional discourses happens especially considering that there are all kinds of translation also going on across the IAEA’s 6 official languages and among a multilingual workforce. The IAEA’s legitimacy rests on a particular kind of technical expertise which is demonstrated by the regular publication of reports and evaluations. This legitimacy is regularly performed through these documents in ways that must be maximally persuasive to multiple audiences. I ask, what makes them maximally persuasive? To whom? What does “objective,” apolitical language sound like? What kind of language and information is unassailable? What is overstepping the boundaries? These questions assume that the efficacious production of expertise happens through the proper and convincing use of expert discourse. But expert discourses are not all alike and

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different evidentiary standards can sometimes produce misunderstanding and confusion for communication among people with different professional and educational backgrounds. The IAEA is currently grappling with the tensions between competing epistemic paradigms and the kinds of knowledge and authority they produce. If the IAEA’s “technical independence” used to be based on the audit-like forms of quantitative and list-based materials accounting which appear to provide “objective” information by their mechanical and rote nature, the attempt to include more qualitative, intelligence-like information, and employ analytical methods to draw conclusions from the data gathered could seriously challenge the IAEA’s legitimacy. And member states have raised objections to the “state-level approach”. These types of knowledge rely on different types of authorship and representation. There is a concern that the incorporation

• f less “technical” forms of expertise will further open the IAEA up to political manipulation

from powerful member states. I would now like to show a brief video that came out last year in January called “Super Inspectors” unless you have all seen it. You will notice that it locates the tensions about the credibility of the IAEA’s inspectors within a context of political power play as well individual self-interest. VIDEO (3mins) Within the Agency there are competing voices about which kinds of safeguards and inspections regimes would be most effective within the limits of the IAEA’s mandate. I’ve been told, for example, that one problem is how to evaluate information (for example, intelligence given to the IAEA by member states) for which they have no in-house expertise. This points to a division of

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labor between various experts with some people arguing that inspectors are technical people who should not be expected to make qualitative evaluations of non-technical information. Given that the IAEA’s work is fraught with many and multiple tensions, my project will try to look at two sites of consensus construction (which I have identified, there are surely others) in

• rder to investigate the ways in which technical meanings, legal categories, and types of

legitimate knowledge are brought together through the bureaucratic work of the Agency. The first is the consensus that must be established among the inspectors and analysts working on a particular state evaluation. The second is consensus crafted among the delegates representing member states at the General Conference with the drafting and agreement on a resolution. I propose that the procedures and practices by which these very different technoscientific and political forms of consensus are formed, give us a window into how the tensions between different epistemic paradigms and political agendas are negotiated. In this ethnography of the paper trail, I see the documents that are the (very material) products of these bureaucratic processes as key objects in the production and circulation of knowledge and the display of authority. Drawing on social scientific scholarship about bureaucracies, I will analyze the symbolic production of expertise by studying the material and discursive forms of different genres of documents and thinking about how the categories of the document structure the information contained. With document genres I mean that for different types of communication there are

normative and “proper” ways that govern this communication: think about “thank you cards” as a genre of communication, or recommendation letters, or white papers, or newspaper articles, or user agreements: each of these genres can be identified by their genre-appropriate material forms and certain way of using language. An IAEA Board Report has material and visual features that identify it as such, and it also uses language in a particular way.

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The question of how expertise is produced or contested becomes especially complex at this international organization which is made up of actors with multiple forms of expertise, multilingual competence, and a multitude of national backgrounds. On top of that, I will also consider how the efficacy of expert discourse and bureaucratic documents relies on a widespread ideology of transparency in which certain languages and semiotic forms appear to give immediate access to that which they represent. I see the bureaucratic regulation of nuclear knowledge as a way of banalizing the exceptionalism

• f nuclear things by enrolling them into a technocratic regime. It is an attempt to depoliticize

some very political technologies, by rationalizing their threat and describing them in a particular technical register. In this way, the IAEA also plays a central role in managing nuclear fear across the globe and in shaping how the nuclear age has transformed our ways of being and knowing more generally. During my preliminary research, I was able to identify the sites at which I would like to investigate these processes. To be clear, research at the sites always depends on gaining permission to attend and research first. According to U.S. law and the research regulations of my home institution, I am required to follow a strict research protocol which ensures the ethical treatment of research subjects and my accountability to them. The proposed research sites include: Training workshops in “soft skills” for safeguards inspectors: to which I have access through a key informant.

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The IAEA General Conference which is the annual meeting where delegates from member states get together to vote on the budget and discuss issues and resolutions. Internships at the Public Information Office and others to be identified. Writing Courses on how to write in the Agency style And, NGO and policy events that address issues of nonproliferation and disarmament. At each of these sites I will pay attention to how people talk about effective language and legitimate forms of expertise. I will interview actors about what they consider contested practices, and finally, I will also delve into the lives of documents by following their construction from draft stages to final release. I will compare contemporary document genres with earlier iterations through research at the IAEA Archive: where I will focus on the moments around the founding and the establishment of bureaucratic process and procedure (1956-1958) as well as the years around the going into force

• f the NPT.

In addition to interviews with current staff members I will also interview former employees, and inspectors, many of whom live in and around Vienna and who can fill in the historical moments like the inspections in Iraq in the 90s, which have not yet been released in the archive. From this wide combination of sources and methods, I hope to be able to produce a complex picture of how people at the IAEA undertake the most politicized aspects of the Agency’s work. To summarize, my research project springs from the observation that the IAEA must always manage a tension between its technical competence and the political nature of much of its work.

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The IAEA’s special niche, which combines technical, administrative, legal, and diplomatic domains, is a fruitful terrain on which to consider the role of language in negotiating this tension. Furthermore, the IAEA’s tasks must be carried out within the highly sensitive nuclear field which extends not only into technical and political domains but also impacts our societies. My study will investigate how communication happens in moments of proliferation crisis and times

• f nuclear routine.