Everyday Diplomacy: UKUSA Intelligence Cooperation and Geopolitical Assemblages

• Published in: Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 105; no. 3; pp. 604 - 619
• Main Author: Dittmer, Jason
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington Routledge 04.05.2015; Taylor & Francis Group; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: afecto, angloesfera, relaciones internacionales, materialidad, inteligencia de señales; affect; Anglosphere; Cooperation; Diplomacy; Foreign policy; Genealogy; Geography; Geopolitics; Intelligence; International relations; materiality; People, Place, and Region; Policy making; Political geography; signals intelligence; Transnationalism; 情感，英语圈，国际关係，物质性，通信情报; New Zealand; Canada; United Kingdom > UK; Australia; United States > US
• ISSN: 0004-5608; 2469-4452; 1467-8306; 2469-4460
• DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2015.1015098

This article offers an alternative to civilizational thinking in geopolitics and international relations predicated on assemblage theory. Building on literature in political geography and elsewhere about everyday practices that produce state effects, this article theorizes the existence of transnational geopolitical assemblages that incorporate foreign policy apparatuses of multiple states. Everyday material and discursive circulations make up these assemblages, serving as conduits of affect that produce an emergent agency. To demonstrate this claim, I outline a genealogy of the UKUSA alliance, an assemblage of intelligence communities in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. I then trace the circulation of materialities and affects-at the scales of individual subjects, technological systems of mediation, and transnational processes of foreign policy formation. In doing so, I offer a bottom-up process of assemblage that produces the emergent phenomena that proponents of civilizational thinking mistakenly attribute to macroscaled factors, such as culture.