Mark Duffield presents this Department of Social & Policy Sciences lunchtime seminar on the impact of automatic smart technologies on human behaviour and its implications for the future of democracy.

With reference to the changing parameters of global governance, the talk explores the broad technological and epistemological implications of the shift from 'circulation' to 'connectivity'. Especially, its relation to what Chantal Mouffe has called ‘the neoliberal post-political consensus’.

Important to this consensus is an emerging social-robotics. That is, the acceptance of the control and direction of human behaviour by automatic smart technologies. The recourse to robotics as a means of addressing the ecological-social crisis is used to explore the implications of these developments for the future of democracy.

Mark will also discuss his most recent book entitled Post-Humanitarianism: Governing Precarity in the Digital World.

Speaker profiles

Mark Duffield is Professor Emeritus at Bristol University and an honorary professor in the School of Government and Society, University of Birmingham. Outside of academia, he was Oxfam’s Country Representative in Sudan during the 1980s and since then has advised numerous government departments, NGOs and UN bodies.

His books include:

• Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security
• Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of People
• Post-Humanitarianism: Governing Precarity in the Digital World

His recent research is focused on the critique of liberal interventionism and global governance. This has included critical work on the relationship between development and security, and the rise to dominance of resilience-thinking.