Thread by @ProfPaulPoast

UFOs, eh?

Pentagon released what @SenatorReid called "just the surface" of UFO evidence.

Though the reaction to such news in 2020 is 🤷‍♂️, some international relations scholars have thought about what UFOs mean for world politics

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https://mobile.twitter.com/SenatorReid/status/1254836730546384897

For background, yesterday's news follows from an initial release of such info last year of the initial footage...

nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/…

...acknowledgement in 2017 of DOD program to track UFOs...

nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/…

...and acknowledgement by the British government of a similar program (going back to the 1950s)

bbc.com/news/av/uk-108…

For context, Outer Space in general has been explored quite extensively (see what I did there 😉) by IR scholars.

Barb Koremenos discussed the Moon Treaty in her book on the design of international treaties

google.com/books/edition/…

And there is a body of literature on the militarization of space (think "Star Wars" weapons system), as well covered in the book "Securing Outer Space" by Natalie Bormann & M. Sheehan

books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr…

And there is an entire journal dedicated to the politics of space governance: Astropolitics (as opposed to Geopolitics):

tandfonline.com/toc/fast20/18/…

But that is space in general.

What about UFOs?

Alex Wendt famously (infamously?) touched on this topic in his @IntOrgJournal piece "Anarchy is what states make of it.

cambridge.org/core/journals/…

In this piece, he used Aliens as an illustrative device.

We don't know if these UFOs = Aliens and we don't know if "Aliens" = "hostile Aliens".

But how would we respond if we did see Aliens?

Wendt, with Raymond Duvall, more directly addressed Aliens (specifically, UFOs) in Political Theory

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

The main point of this paper is to raise and challenge a base assumption of international relations (and, really, political science): "sovereignty is the province of humans alone."

But how does that change if it turns out that humans aren't alone? 🤔

Wendt and Duvall draw on Foucault's "Birth of Biopolitics"

google.com/books/edition/…

They argue "power flows primarily from the deployment of specialized knowledges for the regularization of populations, rather than from the ability to kill."

If something arises that raises questions about that specialized knowledge, well, government legitimacy is questioned!

Last May, @dandrezner reflected on their point in light of the recent revelations about US tracking UFOs

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/0…

Wendt and Duvall aren't the international relations scholars to write on this topic...but it's not a huge literature.

For instance, in Astropolitics itself, only five articles have (and these, like the work of Wendt and Duvall, are largely focused on the implications for sovereignty)

tandfonline.com/action/doSearc…

So IR scholars do have something to say about UFOs and Aliens, but more work is needed. Perhaps the Pentagon's declassification will be the impetus?

In the meantime, we'll need to rely largely on Wendt...and #ID4

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