Dittmer, J; (2015) Everyday Diplomacy: UKUSA Intelligence Cooperation and Geopolitical Assemblages. Annals of the Association of American Geographers , 105 (3) pp. 604-619. 10.1080/00045608.2015.1015098.

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Abstract

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.

Type:	Article
Title:	Everyday Diplomacy: UKUSA Intelligence Cooperation and Geopolitical Assemblages
Open access status:	An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI:	10.1080/00045608.2015.1015098
Publisher version:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2015.1015098
Language:	English
Additional information:	© 2015 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & FrancisCopyright © J. Dittmer This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.
UCL classification:	UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography
URI:	https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1458020

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• Everyday Diplomacies: UKUSA intelligence cooperation and geopolitical assemblages. (deposited 01 Oct 2014 19:33)
  • Everyday Diplomacy: UKUSA Intelligence Cooperation and Geopolitical Assemblages. (deposited 19 Aug 2015 11:34) [Currently Displayed]

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