International Cyborgs: Bureaucracies, Infrastructures, and Big Tech

Information technologies (ITs) are essential to the functioning and legitimation of international organizations (IOs) in global governance. A lot of the infrastructures and expertise that are necessary for the use of ITs, however, are controlled by so-called Big Tech companies. IOs’ increasing reliance on Big Tech raises the question of their independence vis-à-vis these companies. Yet, in IR, IOs have been conceptualized as rules-based bureaucracies whose authority stems from their automatic control of technical expertise and knowledge production (Barnett and Finnemore, 2012). Thus, IO theory does not leave sufficient room to question the influence of Big Tech on IOs. In this paper, I argue that cyborg theory provides the appropriate framework to reconceptualize IOs as socio-technical bureaucracies that constantly adapt to changing environments. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and document-based research, I show that the technical resources of the United Nations (UN) agencies are not de facto features of their bureaucracies, but active sites of political struggles that reshape who IOs are and how they change. I focus on the adoption of cloud computing by the UN system as a whole, with a specific attention paid to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the oft-neglected UN International Computing Centre (UNICC). Theorizing IOs not only legally – through their bureaucratic rules – but technologically is important because it opens the possibility to both study the role of Big Tech in constituting IOs and raise the question of their capture by these companies.