Infrastructuring public-private relations: Big Tech,the Ukraine War and implications to security governance

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how an infrastructural lens offers novel ways of interrogating public-private relations in International Relations (IR). Advancing the idea that infrastructures mediate public-private relations, the paper argues that an infrastructural approach is well positioned to capture both the productivity and ambiguity of public-private boundary drawing in international politics. It deploys the infrastructural approach to examine Big Tech and state relations in the war in Ukraine. The article shows how infrastructural mediation of public-private relations enables analysis of how Big Tech companies matter to international politics, moving beyond debates about state decline or corporate dominance on the one hand, and infrastructure as an external driver of change that allows for a neat separation of states and Big Tech and politics and technology on the other. The analysis demonstrates how sovereignty, geopolitical decision-making and national security knowledge are contingent upon infrastructurally mediated Big Tech company and state relations. The article thereby points to how infrastructures are at the core of expressing and realizing what makes both states and Big Tech companies, offering new avenues for understanding and examining public-private relations in international politics.