Framing and interpreting space–time

Recently, IR scholars have done much to explicate how and why temporality, time, and timing are important in world politics. This literature and that of related fields, generally approaches the topic with a social lens in contrast to physicists and some philosophers who study time as having real properties and thus a nature to be uncovered (e.g. Bardon Reference Bardon2013). Relative to a metaphysics of time, a social lens is more attentive to how interpretations and understandings of time matter. The point is to investigate how perceptions and arrangements of time and timing are key heuristics for thinking the world and acting (Solomon Reference Solomon2014; Hom Reference Hom2018a), narrating events and history (Barder and McCourt Reference Barder and McCourt2010; Lundborg Reference Lundborg2012; McIntosh Reference McIntosh2015; Agathangelou and Killian Reference Agathangelou and Killian2016; Hom Reference Hom2016; Fazendeiro Reference Fazendeiro2018), and conceptualizing accounts of ethics and change (Connolly Reference Connolly2002; Hutchings Reference Hutchings2008; Hom and Steele Reference Hom and Steele2010; Fazendeiro Reference Fazendeiro2018) including the use of calendar time (as duration) for structuring the distribution of democratic participation (Cohen Reference Cohen2018) and for managing everyday activities and subjectivities of populations (Bastian Reference Bastian2012).

Time, in other words, is a key feature of politics and ethics, but it is also a versatile concept with multiple meanings and uses. While much of the time-related IR literature has turned a critical eye to challenging dominant temporalities – such as chronos and kairos and their interaction (Hutchings Reference Hutchings2008), ‘clock time’ (McIntosh Reference McIntosh2015), and closed (e.g. linear and cyclical) relative to open temporalities (Hom and Steele Reference Hom and Steele2010) – fine-grained typologies are also being elaborated. For example, one study identifies four additional notions of time in intellectual history beyond linear time – cosmological, eschatological, instantaneity, and the flow of becoming (Holmqvist and Lundborg Reference Holmqvist, Lundborg, Hom, McIntosh, McKay and Stockdale2016) – and another details various ‘chronopolitical logics’ (or ‘tendencies’) in cyber security narratives (Stevens Reference Stevens2015). This article seeks to contribute to this literature in part by explicating how several framings of time are formulated and available to a wide range of actors (not just IR theorists) to interpret what is possible and desirable. Yet, this effort is inadequate without also attending to the social and political construction of space.

The persuasive case for time in IR as a ‘stand-alone issue’ (McIntosh Reference McIntosh2015, 466) has been made, in part, on an assessment of the field as ‘overly spatial’ (Hutchings Reference Hutchings2008, 11; Hom Reference Hom2018a, 69) and unable to extricate itself from a view of time as fundamentally ‘linear, neutral, and unitary’ (McIntosh Reference McIntosh2015, 466). This is a crucial task, for world politics is not just about territory, geopolitics, and geography, and time is conceived in a variety of ways. Yet, the view of this article is that we ought to avoid embracing the study of time at the exclusion of space for they are posed in relation to one another, as seen in the work of Valverde (Reference Valverde2015) and Shapiro (Reference Shapiro2010) on urban cities, Blaney and Inayatullah (Reference Blaney and Inayatullah2010) on the reproduction of capitalism by associating ‘savage’ spaces with temporal lags, Aradau and van Munster (Reference Aradau and van Munster2012) on how time and space are co-constituted by terrorist preparedness exercises, and in the study of geography (May and Thrift Reference May and Thrift2001; Anderson Reference Anderson2010). As Mikhail Bakhtin puts it, ‘Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history’ (quoted in Valverde Reference Valverde2015, 10). Instances abound, from the ‘official court time’ of the space of the court room (Valverde Reference Valverde2015, 17) to controversies about how space/place and timing matter for justifying violence in the just war tradition. In this article, we also see how the legitimacy of the speed of strategic action is spatialized. Another way to elaborate this ‘thickening’ is that spatial and temporal markers discursively anchor one another. While notions of time can indicate pace and direction, for example, spatial markers add site and scope, as will be elaborated in the frames considered here (see Table 1). In a familiar example, neorealism features the temporal notion of cycles of violence but also a world spatially organized as sovereign states. Only when time and space are joined do we get cycles of interstate violence. The analysis of this article makes the case that focusing on time or space alone misses out on key parts of ontological stories about world politics.

Table 1: Dimensions of Four Space-Time Frames

Moreover, while space–time frames refer to arrangements of meaning that differently situate space relative to time, these meanings are not strictly explanatory or normative, and they are present in many types of texts. Diagnosis and prescription, histories and historical lessons, practices and pragmatic approaches, and genealogies and their revaluations all blur the explanatory/normative binary. In these textual performances, framing organizes several meanings (Goffman Reference Goffman1974) and powerfully so when their political and ethical messages resonate in multiple dimensions (e.g. theoretical, political, and cultural). This resonance enables ‘decoders’ (readers) to more easily identify with and accommodate its meanings, whether they be political actors, cultural producers, or IR scholars, building on the IR literature that traces the social embeddedness of scholarship and the role of the IR expert (Der Derian Reference Der Derian2001; Edkins Reference Edkins2005; Ish-Shalom Reference Ish-Shalom2013). Some also suggest that ambiguous phrases are especially relatable because of their ‘repeatability’, ‘iterability’, and ‘instantaneity’ (Oren and Solomon Reference Oren and Solomon2015). Uttering phrases such as WMD (Oren and Solomon Reference Oren and Solomon2015), globalization, ‘real-time’, or ‘dark’ spaces (in this article) over and over again give them their social effects, along with how they connect to other relatable metaphors including those that masculinize and domesticate, as in the ‘technostrategic language’ of nuclear weapons (Cohn Reference Cohn1987). Regardless of how the frames' effects unfold, the analysis here allows for space–time language to bring social objects into being, such as identity, subjectivity, nationalism, racism, and so on (Bhabha Reference Bhabha1990; Butler Reference Butler1990; Bastian Reference Bastian2012; Solomon Reference Solomon2014; Oren and Solomon Reference Oren and Solomon2015), and play an important role in how these concepts take on meaning in narratives that make empirical and ethical claims. To extend Hutchings’ (Reference Hutchings2008, 4) characterization of time, this article is interested in ‘inter-subjective, public constructions’ of space and time, particularly those found in multiple dimensions of public discourse – theoretical, political, and cultural.

Spatio-temporal textual performances, however, have another kind of multiplicity – they are in competition and tension even in the same policy-action realm and can themselves be more monologic or dialogic (Valverde Reference Valverde2015, 7–8). Furthermore, texts can be read differently than intended or ‘encoded’ by their authors (Barthes Reference Barthes1970; Hall Reference Hall and During1993), and ‘decoders’ can offer subversive/playful readings that manipulate the ‘encoder's’ preferred meaning (Lisle Reference Lisle, Edkins and Zehfuss2014, 167–69; Valverde Reference Valverde2015, 4–5). Thus, we need to be attentive to agency in how frames are navigated. In rhetorical communities with their political and cultural relations of power some actors can also more readily be speakers, lending weight to their intertextual moves – the specific texts (words, images, and symbols) referenced to construct meanings in a particular situation (Hansen Reference Hansen2006). For example, that Clinton administration officials and the media in the 1990s moved from texts that constructed the Balkans as tribal and backward to part of Europe and white facilitated humanitarian intervention (HI) (Hansen Reference Hansen2006).

Methodologically, this study references several texts (and their speakers) prominent in fleshing out and reproducing the four frames that are the focus of this article over the next several sections, but the frames themselves represent both dominant and minority narratives about space and time evident in US foreign policy discourse. While these frames cover a wide variety of views that circulate in theoretical, political, and cultural texts primarily in the United States and the US/Western academy, I do not contend that they exhaust all possible interpretations of space and time in world politics, especially when we consider postcolonial and decolonial perspectives (Blaney and Inayatullah Reference Blaney and Inayatullah2010; Agathangelou and Killian Reference Agathangelou and Killian2016). Still, examples drawn from global governance indicate that the frames are not particular to the United States. Analytically, the temporal dimensions of the frames are explored via the guiding terms ‘pace’ and ‘direction’ and spatial dimensions are summarized by ‘site’ and ‘scope’, as indicated in Table 1. These terms are meant to be useful for comparing and differentiating how constructions of time and space interact in these frames, but the dimensions should not be reified for conceptualizing time and space themselves. In this vein, two specific notes are worth making. First, the term ‘pace’ is not often used in the time literature, but is beneficial here for discussing the rate of movement of actions/processes without assuming they are slow/fast or accelerating/decelerating. Second, while the term ‘direction’ may be considered a spatialization of time via metaphor, this typology reflects how time and space are socially articulated with fluidity and in reference to the other, indicating just how ubiquitously they ‘thicken’ one another in particular narratives.

Space–time liberations: advancing humanity through a cosmopolitan globalization

In 1964 Marshall McLuhan published his widely cited book Understanding Media in which he argued that space and time had become so compressed in an age of ‘electric technology’ that ‘our central nervous system’ extended ‘in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned’ (Reference McLuhan1964, 3). The picture that McLuhan depicted – of a global corporeal extension of the senses so that we can see, hear, and experience what was previously difficult to access – influenced much of the globalization discourse. Advances in communication, travel, and economic production and transactions were said to have extended the agency of individual and collective action, ideas, and ideologies as never before across vast spatial expanses (Held et al. Reference Held, McGrew, Gloldblatt and Perraton1999; Friedman Reference Friedman2005). In this frame, linear clock time decoupled from space as technologies created social capacities and flows less inhibited by physical distance. The result was a ‘global village’ (McLuhan Reference McLuhan1964) or flattened world (Friedman Reference Friedman2005) that transcended corporal/communal separations and therefore challenged traditional groupings of identity, economy, and borders.

In optimistic renditions of globalization, enhanced agency and desire meld seamlessly. The greater the ease of communication and travel, the greater potential to realize wealth, peace, and human connection. A cultural representation is seen in a long-running series of AT&T commercials depicting a spokesperson questioning children along with their comedic responses, prompting the truism, ‘It's not complicated. Faster is better’ (Fallon Reference Fallon2013). And, even though it has become commonplace to hypothesize that globalization provides both purpose and means for those labeled terrorists to carry out violent attacks (Cronin Reference Cronin2002/2003), globalization is still often positively appraised. Speaking just 10 days after the events of 11 September 2001 as Director of the Policy Planning Staff under President George W. Bush, Richard Haass (Reference Haass2001) lauded globalization's ‘mostly positive’ benefits. In total, several intellectual, cultural, and political narratives commonly assume that the enhancement of various capabilities better satisfy need and desire, in defiance of geography and in the form of social cooperation and exchange of goods, services, and solutions.

Beyond globalization's functionalism, this space–time framing also implies a globalization of responsibility. McLuhan (Reference McLuhan1964) believed that an ‘electric’ corporeal extension would change how we think about community and responsibility. Implied is that a political body's borders have become more porous and dynamic, transforming the scope of moral concern. On this logic, liberal cosmopolitan theorists (Singer Reference Singer1972; O'Neill Reference O'Neill1975; Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum1994) have urged wealthy nations (collectively and individually) to give and do more (including projects of ‘development’) to alleviate hunger and disease among one's fellow global citizens. Indicating just how much such theorists deem distance irrelevant, Singer (Reference Singer1972, 232) confidently stated, ‘Expert observers and supervisors, sent out by famine relief organizations or permanently stationed in famine-prone areas, can direct our aid to a refugee in Bengal almost as effectively as we could get it to someone in our own block’. Indeed, there is now an elaborate system of multilateral, bilateral, and grassroots aid provision, claiming the ability to arrive ‘at the scene’ in a matter of days, if not hours, wherever disaster or disease may strike.

This space–time framing is linear-progressive because it implies the steady march of progress. Technologies promise to make space less relevant for liberatory improvements now and in the future (see Table 1). A variety of liberal moral–philosophical discourses including deontological (i.e. it is right to alleviate suffering) and utilitarian (i.e. alleviating suffering maximizes good/well-being) logics (featured above), but also social-constructivist theorizing (Bellamy Reference Bellamy2009; Wheeler Reference Wheeler2000), support far-reaching normative (or norms-based) projects premised on the ongoing spread of such capacities and their ideologies. They include humanitarianism, HI, democracy promotion, responsibility to protect, and peacebuilding. Also, to the extent that neoliberal theorizing has moral lessons – despite efforts to shed its normativity (Moravcsik Reference Moravcsik1997) – these scholars extol and seek to extend the ‘benefits’ of democracy and capitalism via global technocratic governance (Keohane et al. Reference Keohane, Macedo and Moravcsik2009) and administrative cooperation via globalization's capacities (Slaughter Reference Slaughter2004, 8–18).

International organizations, NGOs, and liberal states perceive themselves as playing a key role. Haass (Reference Haass2001) asserted that to take full advantage of globalization's opportunities, governments and international institutions would need to facilitate by offering ‘global solutions’.Footnote ¹ ‘American leadership’ would be key, with its advantages in economics, the military, and ideas. A liberal US hegemonic order has also recognized the importance of surveillance for the spread of Western (capitalist) human rights (Steele and Amoureux Reference Steele and Amoureux2006, 410–18). Thus, efforts to widen the coincidental goals of humanity, security, and prosperity are tied to globalization's technologies that promise to increase the rate and spread of information. Vast surveillance capacities deploy several information-gathering mechanisms, including NGO and media recordings and reports, but also satellites and drones. Exemplary is the recent United Nations initiative to enhance humanitarian missions' effectiveness by using drones to gather information about conflicts (Katombe Reference Katombe2013), with NGOs also showing interest in drones to better monitor and deliver aid in war, genocide, famine, or natural disaster. Such projects seek to advance liberal values but may also help legitimate the technology itself (including its violent uses). Drones, for example, bring the (liberal) benefit of aiding earthquake relief in Haiti and make the violence of war just through the claim that precision minimizes death of the ‘innocent’ (Zehfuss Reference Zehfuss2011).

Globalization, in sum, has altered our relationship to space and time to enable but also demand the present and future spread of a beneficial and humane global community, especially on the part of those most empowered by such a world (Mathews Reference Mathews1997). This includes intergovernmental, transgovernmental, and non-governmental authorities and technocrats, but also states and individuals (Table 1). Ethical agency, then, is the individual, organization, or humanity that can and will see and do more things (aid and intervene) as space and time compress.

Space–time oppressions: penetrating, regulating, and producing life

In this space–time frame, political and economic technologies are criticized because the monitoring and governance they enable are thought to penetrate, regulate, and produce life, making us less free. In genealogical studies of prison reform, madness, and sexuality, Michel Foucault (Reference Foucault1977), for example, argued that disciplinary techniques of power historically proliferated in a paradigm of governmentality wherein the individual and the body became sites of knowledge and normalization. This kind of panoptic power that produces life, Foucault thought, is more pervasive and insidious than other techniques of power that regulate death. Not only is discipline evident in unprecedented surveillance that affects our everyday behavior (e.g. street cameras, body cameras, monitoring online activities, credit reports, and so on), subjectivities follow suit as we seek to become responsible consumers, productive workers, and good or law-abiding citizens. The effectiveness and efficiency of power are thus magnified at the site of subjectivation. The body and the individual life cycle (with its rhythms), respectively, are situated as the space and time dimensions of modernity (Table 1). This framing of a technological age and its subtle oppressions is prolific in political activism and entertainment. This includes the 2011 Wall Street protests, cyberpunk/dystopic films such as Blade Runner and The Ghost in the Shell, protest art and street graffiti, and the (often playful) appropriation of technological enhancements in ‘hacktivism’ and fashion (Walker-Emig Reference Walker-Emig2018).

If power relations have been intensified by modernity, as Foucault (Reference Foucault and Rabinow1984, 48) elaborated in his widely influential scholarship, including for IR (e.g. Steele and Amoureux Reference Steele and Amoureux2006; Debrix and Barder Reference Debrix and Barder2009; Death Reference Death2010; Steele Reference Steele2010; Walters Reference Walters2012; Zanotti Reference Zanotti2013), it may be fruitful to further excavate modernity's space–time assumptions. For example, that a humanist–modernist agenda not only reforms the body toward normality and treats it more humanely but also maximizes individuals' ability to perform tasks by institutionalizing time itself as a regulative mechanism, exemplified by the individualized schedules of the military and factory (Foucault Reference Foucault1977). According to Foucault (Reference Foucault and Rabinow1984), the costs of this agenda include a subjectivity that is more the product of others' experimentations than our own, and thus a loss of freedom.

Similarly, for Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Reference Hardt and Negri2000), communication and other globalized flows produce, organize, and legitimate both commodities and subjectivities.Footnote ² Globalization might thus be shorthand for a diffuse and vast ‘empire’ in which ‘life is made to work for production and production is made to work for life’ (Hardt and Negri Reference Hardt and Negri2000, 32). The life cycle is defined by cycles of production and productivity. Yet, flows of globalization can facilitate historical anxieties at the site of the body (corporeal and political) when surveillance efforts fail. Colonial tropes portrayed rampant disease as correlated with a lack of hygiene and thus further impetus for a civilizing mission, but also an ever-present danger of contagion (Hardt and Negri Reference Hardt and Negri2000, 134–36), finding echo in worried contemporary discourse framing the global spread of HIV/AIDS, SARS, and Ebola as threatening to spread across bodies and borders. Anxiety is magnified precisely because such threats appear to have been delivered by globalized flows such as travel, providing other reasons to be suspicious of modernity.Footnote ³ In the United States, not just those on ‘the left’ may find globalization's technologies oppressive.

Reorganizations of space and time through knowledge practices, in other words, can be read negatively. Another prominent example is Anthony Giddens' account of modernity as marking a widespread transition from ‘traditional’ to ‘post-traditional’ societies. Tradition is defined as chronological repetition of the past in the form of rituals, ‘formulaic truths’, and knowledge ‘guardians’ who interpret them (Giddens Reference Giddens1996, 8, 15–17, 51). One benefit of tradition is the control of anxiety through emotional investments in collective memories that at least seem continuous because knowledge, thought and action have stable temporal carriers, namely generational transmission. ‘Post-traditional’ societies that mark ‘modernity’, in contrast, reject the authority of tradition and instead make social practices provisional so that they are ‘constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices’ (Giddens Reference Giddens1990, 38). While presenting the possibility of improvement (e.g. the scientific method), unfettering knowledge from tradition can create ‘ontological anxiety’. When routines provide stability their disruption can be insecuritizing, as explored by IR scholars (Steele Reference Steele2005). This prospect illuminates the occurrence of counterproductive routines, like the security dilemma in which actors become affectively attached to behaviors that foster inter-state enmity (Mitzen Reference Mitzen2006).

It may appear, then, that societies are at the mercy of modernity. Having thrown off authority and tradition as guiding lights (Giddens Reference Giddens1996, 10–11), knowledge is produced for the sake of knowledge, rendering us beholden to the unwieldy and unforeseen consequences of technological advancements. As Giddens (Reference Giddens2014) later explored, from climate change of industrialism to biotechnology and nanotechnology of postmodernity, ‘indefinite time–space extensions’ have ensured that such hazards are globally existential, or threatening to life itself. One might suspect that this way of organizing knowledge has started us down a path that will propel us ‘off the edge of history’ (Giddens Reference Giddens2014). In sum, modernity's reorganization of time and space may obliterate our (corporeal) worlds, existentially (with Giddens) or in terms of freedom and autonomy (with Foucault and Hardt and Negri). Indeed, a variety of anxieties about social control and surveillance and the unintended consequences of technological innovation animate imaginaries of foreign policy and popular culture.

Yet, this framing holds out the possibility that oppression can be challenged (Table 1). The camera of the onlooker to police activities, the protestor's hand-held drone, the whistleblower's thumb drive are all tools of technology that add up to a system of ‘malveillance’ (power and counter-power) (Foucault Reference Foucault1977; Death Reference Death2010; Steele Reference Steele2010). Those feeling oppressed may be interested in Foucault's (Reference Foucault and Rabinow1984, 48) question, ‘How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?’ For Foucault, experimentations and emergent possibilities can question the normativity of the present in which ‘not all is bad’ but everything is ‘dangerous’ (Foucault Reference Foucault and Rabinow1997, 256). Attentive to the many ways in which time and space can be organized to inscribe power relations on life and the body, one may seek as a form of freedom to rupture these inscriptions that continuously and locally resurface (Table 1). As Foucault (Reference Foucault and Rabinow1984, 47) puts it, ‘we are always in the position of beginning again’. This is not to erase power relations, but to take advantage of their ‘instability’, ‘ambiguity’, and ‘reversibility’, as one IR scholar has discussed (Zanotti Reference Zanotti2013, 295).

In one possible example of oppression and counter-power, several Pakistanis, Americans, and the French street artist JR installed a large image of a child – whose family was killed in a drone strike – in a Pakistani field (Mackey Reference Mackey2014). This image was intended to appeal to the conscience of drone operators and communicate that the persons they killed are more than ‘bugsplats’ (referring to the name given to aerial images of drone strike damage). Oppression was represented by replacing one view (the perspective of the drone) with another (the perspective of those killed or left behind to grieve). This perspectival shift could possibly work on the pilot and the US public (when the image was reproduced by the media) to challenge assumptions of a symbiotic relationship between the time and space of modernity and may result in seeing how rather ordinary uses of living space (buildings, agricultural fields) and the bodies they house are rendered uniformly dangerous from the aerial perspective and recording of the drone's camera.

Space–time strategics: the demands of war and ethics

In the frame ‘space–time strategics’, space is represented as dangerous. In this understanding there is an imperative to strategically reach all space as quickly as possible, even in ‘real-time’. Temporally, the inability to immediately act and react in all places of the globe (including outer- and cyber-space) is strategic failure. This view is exemplified by the military doctrine of Carl von Clausewitz (Reference von Clausewitz1949) in which strategic terrain is altered by, among other factors, technology. One has a strategic advantage only as long as it takes others to ‘catch up’ in response. Wielding an advantage of speed, however, was more of an art than a science for Clausewitz because terrain is unwieldy. The battlefield and the battle are complex and unpredictable, requiring the intelligence and creativity of the commander (Lynn Reference Lynn2003, 196). Battle is a conflict of wills in the context of the ‘friction’ of war – all that could go wrong and was not predicted.

If the battlefield is ‘global’ as in the US War on Terror, in the Clausewitzian view any space that escapes the swift wit of military intelligence and action is dangerous because it is there and then that the enemy may gain the upper hand. One must respond as, or even before, others act. Technological deficiency is diagnosed as not being able to secure all realms through mobile and efficient means (Huysmans Reference Huysmans, Neumann and Waever1997, 350), whether that space is physical/geographical/real or informational/virtual/‘hyper-real’Footnote ⁴ (Der Derian Reference Der Derian1990, Reference Der Derian2001, Reference Der Derian2003). Geopolitics and history are sidelined, even subsumed, by an obsession with speed. Virilio (Reference Virilio2000) noted that we are talking about ‘operation at a distance, or, the possibility to act instantaneously’ which ‘means that history is now rushing headlong into the wall of time’, and ‘geostrategy’ becomes ‘chronostrategy’. There need not be, then, special areas of geo-strategic concern.

Der Derian (Reference Der Derian1990, Reference Der Derian2001) especially has drawn on Virilio (also, Stevens Reference Stevens2015) to investigate violence and simulation (in a chronology of ‘pace over space’), but it's not difficult to see this frame elsewhere. Just as the aspiring global hegemon of neorealism seeks to pre-empt threats and hegemonic competitors in all areas of the world (Mearsheimer Reference Mearsheimer2001), so too could emergent threats of several kinds be confronted with the swift extension of power. The ‘tragic’ element in the imperative to reach multiplying dimensions of space is that almost any state can feel pulled into new arms races and forms of warfare, such as a drones race, space race, or cyber race, and states live in fear of not developing offensive/defensive capabilities before their multiplying enemies. The imperative is not just to be fast or faster, but faster than enemies and thus accelerating ahead of them (Table 1). In Clausewitzian fashion, the United States may find itself entrenched in the pace of strategic action/reaction (Aron Reference Aron1985).

Alternatively, one could point to the emergence of a ‘global risk society’ that identifies several mobile and unbounded threats as ‘geographically universal’ (Mythen and Walklate Reference Mythen and Walklate2008, 223–24). Risk assessments and probabilities locate these varied threats in many locations regardless of borders and before they materialize, as in at-risk-terrorists (Amoore and de Goede Reference Amoore and de Goede2008; Obama Reference Obama2012), so that the unknown future is nevertheless always ‘present’ and surprise foreclosed (Anderson Reference Anderson2010, 783). Similarly, military studies on the emergence of ‘network-centric warfare’ (Cebrowski and Gartska Reference Cebrowski and Gartska1998) underscore how incorporating virtual threats infinitely expands the space–time terrain on which the enemy can emerge, making the Clausewitzian task more demanding (Der Derian Reference Der Derian2001; Dillon and Reid Reference Dillon and Reid2009).

This ‘space–time strategics’ narrative is readily available in US foreign policy discourse. The Obama administration was excoriated by the Republican Party for ‘Benghazi’ (the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya) for its failure to identify the attack as ‘terrorism’. During a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Representative Mike Kelly expressed disbelief that the administration did not immediately recognize another ‘9/11 event’ since they had, in Kelly's words, been watching in ‘real-time’ (Preston Reference Preston2012). This failure was described as misleading the public, but we should consider whether Republicans were instead recoiling from or at least politically mobilizing the suggestion that sound intelligence analysis could be anything other than immediately identifying, neutralizing, and eradicating emergent threats on a global battlefield. While ‘real-time’ became the ‘gold standard of media’ (Der Derian Reference Der Derian2003, 444), it's also used to measure how well decision-makers wield technologies of speed and expanse thought to have near-instant access to space. The terrorism diagnosis, Kelly argued, should have been as obvious as witnessing the events of 9/11 in-person. Tellingly, though the administration ‘should have known’, Republicans also subsequently called for more embassy security funding to more immediately identify threats (Preston Reference Preston2012).

The Obama administration also invoked this accelerationist frame but interpreted the threat as viral/virtual. If information and ideology can be deployed against powerful states via virtual space and pace, such states must be attune to the threats of this asymmetric digital warfare and the fluidity of virtual and physical space; hence, the administration's quick recognition and response to the inflammatory content of a YouTube film ‘gone viral’Footnote ⁵ that denigrated the prophet Muhammad. In the first hours after the attack, both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the attackers but also noted Libyan and US news reports that tied the attack to rallies protesting the US-made film. Furthermore, the US embassy in Cairo, Egypt, where there were also protests, appeared to anticipate in a public statement possible repercussions and reactions to the film before they were underway (Kirkpatrick Reference Kirkpatrick2012). Virtual and physical space were treated as undifferentiated and threatening, to be controlled via speed (Table 1). When prevention of the imminent was unsuccessful, the administration turned to obtaining justice in similar Clausewitzian space–time terms. Dismissing Libya's protest of sovereign violation, James Comey, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, declared, ‘We will shrink the world to find you. We will shrink the world to bring you to justice’ (Al Jazeera 2014). Indicating how thoroughly space is blurred/eradicated by speed, the United States deemed their action criminal law enforcement and national self-defense (Power Reference Power2014; Savage Reference Savage2014), joining pre-emptive action to immediate reaction as crucial strategies for arriving to the (battle)field of action.

That information could be obtained ‘in time’ also informed ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques, drone targeting, and domestic surveillance, and haunted US efforts to locate Osama Bin Laden. One media headline made clear just how slim the temporal margin of error for strategic action: ‘American Strike in January Missed Al Qaeda's No. 2 by a Few Hours’ (Gall and Khan Reference Gall and Khan2006). ‘Enhanced interrogation’ and drone technology have been so attractive, in part, because of what they promised not to do – take time. Thus, they are evaluated, as in the headline above, against the metric of what Hom (Reference Hom2016) refers to as timing. Strategic technology, in other words, has staked its success on the timeliness of action, and politically and culturally there is an obsession with the possibility that some areas have not been mapped and subdued. Efforts to be timely take into account risk factors; hence, the United States engages many tactics that survey space for suspicious activity and behavior, as in ‘pattern of life’ analysis of drone targeting (Stanford 2012). This knowledge is thought to aid preemptive action, portrayed in the 2002 film Minority Report, so that terrorism, genocide, and other ‘atrocity crimes’ (United Nations 2014) can be anticipated. Even if enemies are regenerated, the wager is that one will arrive to more places first and thereby gain a strategic advantage in keeping others ‘on their heels’. To not vigorously pursue speed and expanse through technological innovation is to be in a position of vulnerability to emerging threats, multiplying threats, and the threat of ‘blowback’. Indeed, the popular television series Man in the High Castle portrays the imperative to ensure victory to be multiversal and thus dependent on the timing of new modes of travel (even if non-linear).

In sum, speed is so important relative to space in this framing that the importance of spatial differentiations and concepts are de-emphasized including territorial borders, geopolitical priorities, and actual/virtual distinctions, and all contingency must be confronted (see Table 1).Footnote ⁶ The worry that insecurity increases absent instantaneous presence and feedback is ubiquitous in how the United States understands its agency. Relative to ethics, this space–time frame could be interpreted as either amoral or requiring immoral stratagems that serve security interests via the raison d'etat logic of ‘ends justify the means’. It could even be a resignation to human nature that is selfish, violent and prone to a ‘will to power’ realized as domination. However, the end could still have moral significance, such as a community's survival (Morgenthau Reference Morgenthau1978; Gray Reference Gray1999) or enabling second-order moral pursuits once first-order security interests are preserved (Hyde-Price Reference Hyde-Price2009).

Space–time reflexivities: slowing down to think

The fourth space–time frame can be termed ‘space–time reflexivities’. This framing features a conscious effort to slow down the pace of events or decisions, perhaps even to stretch, pause, or opt out of time (and even space), either literally or figuratively. Calendrically, it may also be to take time even when others insist on exigency and the imperative to decide. We see the latter most clearly in IR scholarship that evaluates the quality of foreign policy decision-making (Jervis Reference Jervis1976; Allison and Zelikow Reference Allison and Zelikow1999) and in Political Theory that attends to the marks of good deliberation, pluralism, and democracy within political communities (Aristotle Reference Aristotle1984; Habermas Reference Habermas1984; Gutmann and Thompson Reference Gutmann and Thompson1996; Macedo Reference Macedo1999). Slowness is also sometimes valued in academia and invoked to orient its self-reflexive interventions as seen in calls to reverse an emphasis on the productivity of publication (Berg and Seeber Reference Berg and Seeber2016), in critiques of the university as belonging to neoliberal institutions that emphasize speed, specialization, and profit (Caraccioli and Hozic Reference Caraccioli, Hozic, Amoureux and Steele2016), and in an academic ethos that posits slowness as a precondition for critical distance/engagement with politics.

The deliberative democracy literature (Gutmann and Thompson Reference Gutmann and Thompson1996; Macedo Reference Macedo1999) tends to emphasize the depth and breadth of deliberative participation as crucial ingredients of democracy. This implies taking more time in the spatial context of a political community to offer arguments, deliberate, and make decisions together. While speed may be double-edged in that it offers valuable benefits that exceed a threat framework (Connolly Reference Connolly2002; Glezos Reference Glezos2011),Footnote ⁷ what has been termed ‘social acceleration’ challenges democratic institutions that have been built to take time (Scheuerman Reference Scheuerman2004). Relatedly, Cohen (Reference Cohen2018) argues that temporal processes are central to politics and legitimacy. Deliberation and reflection are often measured in terms of duration (calendrical time) and this quantitative measurement can serve as proxy for good governance as in the ‘countdown deadline’ of a campaign and the ‘recurring deadlines’ of voting (Cohen Reference Cohen2018).

Turning more toward ethical judgment, slowing down can mean taking time to attend to the particulars of politics and ethics in view of complexity, contingency and the difficulty of making good decisions, and cultivating competence in drawing on reason and affect together as in discussions of Aristotle and world politics (Lang Reference Lang2002; Brown Reference Brown2012; Amoureux and Steele Reference Amoureux and Steele2014; Amoureux Reference Amoureux2016). Hannah Arendt's view of thinking and its temporality is especially intriguing as it more explicitly adds space to time in figuring reflexive devices. Contrary to the literature in economics, psychology, and foreign policy studies, Arendt's metric of sound judgment is not objective interests (self-interest or national interest) and avoiding errors in arriving at them. ‘Thinking’ is instead a figurative slowing or opting out of the time and space that normally compose the pluralism of politics in order to have an internal dialogue between ‘me and myself’. To emphasize the point, Arendt referred to the ‘non-time’ and ‘non-space’ of ‘thinking’. This form of reflexivity is a ‘two-in-one’ dialogue of talking to oneself as though two selves (eme emautô):

This internal dialogue is made possible and enhanced by an ‘enlarged mentality’ (borrowing from Kant) that refers to our ability to summarize for ourselves the views and experiences of others. In other words, we are potentially in difference and conversation with others and within our-selves (Arendt Reference Arendt1978, 398). Difference within the self enables us to treat conclusions about how the world appears to us as provisional and is thus a hallmark of reflexivity.

This thinking is not seamless but its very seamlessness brings ethical benefits, as seen in the three similes of Socrates. Socrates, Arendt noted, did not leave a body of doctrine because he continuously sought to make thought and action problematic and unstable, both within himself and in conversation with others, giving reflexivity its political value. As an ‘electric ray’ that ‘remains steadfast in his own perplexities’, he paralyzed others by being paralyzed himself; he knew how to ‘sting’ and ‘arouse’ citizens to this continuous questioning and answering process as a ‘gadfly’; and, like a ‘midwife’, Socrates judged and purged sterile and unexamined opinions (as ‘wind eggs’) (Arendt Reference Arendt1978, 172–73). The point of thinking, then, is to generate perplexities and contradictions; not to resolve them or reach consensus, but to grasp them and potentially change what we have been thinking and doing. When in paralysis we ‘stop and think’, and may also experience a ‘dazing after-effect’ in which we feel ‘unsure of what seemed… beyond doubt’ (Arendt Reference Arendt1978, 175). Yet, thinking is not just deconstructive – strengthening the ability to ‘say no’ and standing out in refusal. Thinking on a wide basis can also assist societies or individuals in avoiding regrettable outcomes such as ‘political evil’ (Arendt Reference Arendt1964), cope with the contingency of plural life, and initiate the new beginnings of political projects. Reflexive thinking, in other words, is slow, disruptive and disorienting when time and space are viewed as figural orientations rather than literal/material sequencing and space, but still fundamentally connected to political action.

Politically and culturally, the idea of slowness has a mixed record in US foreign policy. One might say that as the events of ‘Benghazi’ unfolded the Obama administration did seek to take the time to get it right, hesitant to call the event an ‘act of terrorism’ without first gathering and assessing information. They sought a measured and thoughtful response. In addition, the administration opted for taking time to decide US policy on US involvement in Syria. When questioned, senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer explained: ‘There's no time table for solving these problems that's going to meet the cable news cycle speed…We'd much rather do this right than do it quickly. We tried the opposite [during the Bush years] and it worked out very poorly’ (DeYoung and Balz Reference DeYoung and Balz2014). Likewise, the Obama administration sought to deflect criticism of their drone practices by emphasizing the care and consideration that each strike received by the president himself, including the claim that he waited to strike until there were no children present.

To summarize, the space–time frame of ‘reflexivities’ underscores taking more time to deliberate/debate in public-political spaces, or creating critical distance from public-political spaces and times in favor of slow time, ‘non-time’, or ‘non-space’ to consider the complexities of situations and to re-think what we are doing (see Table 1). Perhaps the Obama administration did not fully subject thought and its consequences-in-action to the far-reaching criticism and internal dialogue Arendt imagined, but its discourse evoked taking/making time and space as constitutive elements of legitimate politics, meaningful citizenship, and ethical judgment. While the space–time framing of reflexivity as ethics might aim at avoiding error in the pursuit of ‘rational’ foreign-policy, a more searching reflexivity closer to Arendt's ‘thinking’ has been elaborated as responsive to the difference and epistemological uncertainty of world politics noted by some international political theorists (Steele Reference Steele2010; Zanotti Reference Zanotti2014; Inayatullah Reference Inayatullah, Edkins and Zehfuss2014; Amoureux Reference Amoureux2016).

Interpreting time and space in US foreign policy

Given these space–time framings in and on US foreign policy, what can be concluded? For all four frames, recent examples were provided from scholarship, politics, and popular culture and media. In this section, the article's claims are further refined – arguing that these interpretations can be in tension but may also concatenate or combine in unique ways. Most prominent is a strained merger between ‘space–time liberations’ and ‘space–time strategics’ that spatially differentiates the speed and acceleration of action. Exemplary is ambiguity about whether the fight against terrorism need be regulated by international law and just war principles. On the one hand, George W. Bush and his officials distinguished between legitimate combatants and fighters not covered by the Geneva Conventions, implying that the latter were outside the states system and could be treated more aggressively. On the other hand, officials regularly referenced liberal values during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and backpedaled some following criticism of their interpretation of the Geneva Conventions and leaked pictures depicting abuse at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq. Underscoring the tension, President Bush (Reference Bush2006) in a single speech lauded the successes of ‘enhanced interrogation’ and also declared, ‘I want to be absolutely clear… The United States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values’.

The Obama administration pledged to end what they judged problematic about the previous administration's foreign policy including indefinite detention and interrogation that amounted to torture, and they sought to promote respect for international law more broadly (Obama Reference Obama2009). Nevertheless, they also struggled with just how universal liberal values would be, overseeing a secretive drone program that killed many civilians and some American citizens but also seemed a potent tool for acting quickly in a variety of ‘dangerous’ theatres without the likely failure of ‘boots on the ground’. Officials addressed this issue by referencing the ‘law of war’, implying that battle's humane laws purified drone practices (Brennan Reference Brennan2012; Obama Reference Obama2013).

While the intertextuality of Obama administration discourse insinuated a lack of law in the previous administration and thus moral improvement, Obama, like Bush, made crucial spatial and temporal distinctions. Seeking moral comfort in the technological capability to illuminate and reach dangerous spaces, the administration claimed they responded to threats consistent with jus in bello because drones as ‘precise precision weapons’ that make ‘pinpoint strikes’ (Obama Reference Obama2012, Reference Obama2013) by definition minimize civilian casualties.Footnote ⁸ What this confidence in the efficacy of weaponized technology belies and the Bush administration's spatialized concepts make more apparent (e.g. ‘black sites’, Guantanamo), is that not all spaces and times are treated uniformly. US drone practices (with Hellfire missiles added to surveillance drones) have also been justified with reference to Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas as remote, wild, and dangerous (Filkins Reference Filkins2008; Mazzetti and Rohde Reference Mazzetti and Rohde2008). Such areas are considered ‘ungoverned’, aligning with the administration's justification of drones as warranted where and when states do not, will not, or cannot act against terrorists (Brennan Reference Brennan2012; Obama Reference Obama2012), where there is ‘unrest’ (in the ‘Arab world’), and in an era of ‘failed states’ (Obama Reference Obama2013).

These distinctions that make violent interventions and their (regrettable) ‘accidents’ more acceptable are grounded in enduring notions of the borderland/frontier, Europe, and ‘the rest’ (Cha Reference Cha2015), and the not-yet of the postcolonial subject who experiences a perpetual temporal lag in partaking of independence, rights, and development (Jabri Reference Jabri2012, 65). While the United States may find violence attractive for various reasons, it is telling that under both administrations its agents felt compelled to engage such violent practices outside both the homeland and ‘civilized’Footnote ⁹ areas (marked by liberal norms enshrined in laws, constitutions, and cultural practices). These figurations support efforts to remake spaces deemed obscure, unruly, threatening, distant, and behind, through timely action and in ‘a battle of wills’ (Obama Reference Obama2013), but they also gather ‘dangerous’ bodies (terrorists) in spaces ascribed with liminality and as behind-the-times (e.g. Cuba).

Bifurcations of space–time are further put into relief by the media firestorm that accompanied Senator Rand Paul's criticism of the Obama administration for allowing the possibility that a drone could be used against a US citizen on US soil (garnering extensive media coverage and culminating in Paul's time-occupying filibuster of John Brennan's appointment as director of the Central Intelligence Agency). Resistance in the United States by those who considered (consciously or not) their (domestic) space to be governed/civilized was perhaps one of the few firewalls checking the near-total expansion of the battlefield by the speed of military response,Footnote ¹⁰ though one could interpret US domestic space as a different kind of battlefield where strategy and tactics must remain more surreptitious (semi-covert ‘homeland security’) and civil rights balanced with security (Obama Reference Obama2012, Reference Obama2013).Footnote ¹¹ In ‘domestic’ space, threats are mostly ‘foreign’ but specific (e.g. ‘the terrorist’, ‘the Muslim’, and ‘the extremist’), whereas non-domestic and non-European spaces can be uniformly designated uncivilized, lawless, and not-yet-governed (well) so that even US citizens could be killed there. Tellingly, one survey found US residents largely approved of drone strikes abroad (65%) including against US citizens (41%), but fewer approved of drone strikes within the United States, whether against suspected foreign terrorists (25%) or US citizens suspected to be terrorists (13%) (Brown and Newport Reference Brown and Newport2013). Obama (Reference Obama2013) himself made clear after the Rand Paul provocation that US citizenship would only protect citizens within US borders and could not ‘serve as a shield’ elsewhere. Furthermore, Rand Paul's developing position, though stricter, still featured a spatial distinction – the due process standard in targeting decisions could be relaxed outside ‘American soil’ (Bump Reference Bump2015). Together, these positions qualify action/reaction spatially and temporally so that a more permissive global ‘commons’ includes ungoverned/misgoverned land in addition to sea, space, and air.Footnote ¹² US capabilities can be swiftly brought to this terra nullius.

The ‘liberations’ view of time and space as more compressed may also facilitate the belief that threats from dangerous areas are becoming closer and more imminent. In this threat imaginary, we witness the proverbial ‘ticking-bomb’ scenario posed in cultural and political texts (like the television show 24) in which the passage of every second in a globalized world seems to make a terrorist attack on the ‘homeland’ more and more likely. This point was underscored for first-year President Obama on Christmas Day 2009 when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate explosives packed in his underwear on a plane from Amsterdam to the United States (Finn Reference Finn2012). This appears to have been a key moment for Obama's decision to step up the drone campaign against mid-level and not just ‘high-value’ insurgents/terrorists (Scahill Reference Scahill2013). In addition to those on a ‘list’ or ‘baseball cards’, dangerous space was surveyed for emergent threats as or before they formed, as seen in ‘pattern of life’ analysis and ‘signature strikes’ (Stanford 2012). In this regard, ‘space–time strategics’ was necessary for ‘space–time liberations’. Relying on this logic, drone targeting has been extended beyond al Qaeda and the Taliban to the leadership of a variety of groups/individuals that help to define and are defined by dangerous and unforgiving space, including the ‘Haqqani network’ and al Shabaab. In the name of providing safe and prosperous spaces and times (now for well-ordered spaces and in the future for those behind), certain spaces are rendered acutely threatening and several spaces on the verge of becoming threatening. The promise of liberal goods does not yet extend to all, despite liberalism's universalism. The spatio-temporal assumptions of these frames thus assist in identifying threat and facilitating and distributing violent action. Even better, technology promises to humanize that violence for virtuous ends.

We also see these space–time framings in US discourse that ties together disease, underdevelopment, and violence. As a key official in the George W. Bush administration, Haass (Reference Haass2001) noted:

US reaction to the events of 11 September 2001 contextualized terrorism as one of several threatening flows that elicit fear and anxiety and thus need to be controlled. In ‘ungoverned’ areas terrorists may seek ‘enclaves’, as Bush (US Government 2011, 406) put it in 2006, but there is also a long-standing pattern of tying other threats like disease to immigration and foreigners (Bouie Reference Bouie2014). Recent media events such as the Ebola outbreak of 2014 and the Central American ‘caravan’ of 2018 featured politicians and media commentators identifying the risk of disease and crime traveling toward the US homeland as a reason for sealing borders (land and air) from specific places (West Africa and Mexico).

These place-based threats, it is said, must be confronted in timely fashion to preclude future disaster. In the media, congressional hearings, and popular criticism that followed ‘Benghazi’, the language of ‘real-time’ was prominent but so too was preventive language of diplomacy directed at a cornucopia of region-specific threats. When Clinton (Reference Clinton2013) testified before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, she insisted that there were ‘no delays in decision making’ or ‘denials of support’, and she cited the Accountability Review Board's conclusion that ‘our response saved American lives in real time’, yet Clinton (Reference Clinton2013) also explicated the incident as having an ongoing spatial (regional) challenge requiring other time-based strategies. Stating that ‘Benghazi did not happen in a vacuum’, Clinton cited the ‘Arab revolutions’ as instigating regional instability and insecurity in how they ‘scrambled power dynamics’ and decimated ‘security forces’. Such a place as Mali could then become ‘an expanding safe haven for terrorists who look to extend their influence and plot further attacks’. In this context, Clinton (Reference Clinton2013) urged that we ‘accelerate a diplomatic campaign’ on ‘terrorist groups in the region’.

Haass (Reference Haass2001) also used pre-emptive language in characterizing terrorism as ‘analogous to a terrible, lethal virus’ that required ‘prophylactic measures’ to shore up borders and ‘drain the swamps where terrorism flourishes with long-term programs to promote development and good governance’. Domestic, semi-sovereign (e.g. consular), well-governed, and ‘civilized’ spaces must be secured against spatially-specific threats that are multiple and analogous to one another. It is notable, then, that discourse about foreign aid to promote good governance, democracy, humanitarianism, development, and peace feature spatial and temporal guides for designating both threat and vulnerability, enabling a variety of actions. These actions are tied to strategic considerations to prevent certain areas from being and becoming soil for instability and extremism that may (otherwise) require military intervention, but are also tied to liberal values in that these areas can be ‘caught up’ (Obama Reference Obama2012, Reference Obama2013).

Yet, there may be some critical purchase in cultural performances that prompt publics to examine such renderings of space and time. The photo art journalist Tomas van Houtryve's (Reference van Houtryve2015) installation, ‘Blue Sky Days’, used a drone to film the spaces of everyday activities in the United States that might elsewhere be considered drone targets (e.g. homes, weddings, public gatherings). In one poignant scene, what may appear to a US imaginary as a group engaged in prayer is instead several individuals practicing yoga in a US park. By placing US territorial space in a drone's eye view, one might thus re-imagine how the surveillance camera of the drone and the superimposed target frame of the missile system affectively produce imminent danger.Footnote ¹³ Such political art installations, alongside testimonies of everyday experiences of time and space under the specter and application of the drone (Stanford/NYU 2012), and the spatial and temporal reversal of drones' victims and would-be-victims when they arrive in the capitals of military power (e.g. Washington, D.C., London) to protest in the time of politics (Rucker Reference Rucker2013; Sims Reference Sims2016), can be considered tactics of counter-power given meaning by the frame ‘space–time oppressions’.