A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #25 - The question of dual use (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

I start from my personal experience[...]. The university for which I 
work, the Polytechnic of Turin, deals with the issue of dual use on a 
daily basis. Consider, for example, that the technologies for launching 
satellites into Earth orbit and those relating to space exploration are 
no different from those used for the development of intercontinental 
ballistic missiles. A rocket is still a rocket. It is therefore not 
completely implausible to think that at this moment, holed up in her 
office a few steps away from me, there is a hypothetical colleague who 
is about to send her scientific treatise on the aerodynamics of rockets 
to a prestigious international magazine. After years of studies, team 
efforts and laboratory tests, the colleague will receive an evaluation 
of her work from the scientific journal, she will make the necessary 
changes and in a few months she will see her article published and 
scientifically validated. At that point, other subjectivities of the 
scientific community will relate to the same, and anyone will be able to 
draw on that form of knowledge, given its public nature. Those who read 
this book will be able to do so, scholars from all over the globe, but 
also the research unit of the MBDA consortium, the main European 
consortium for the production of missiles and defense technologies, 
which will take from my colleague's study what it it seems to him, to do 
what is convenient for him. Moral: every day you, myself and the entire 
Polytechnic are exposed to the issue of dual use. This is a first point. 
But there is a second.
This same Polytechnic has numerous direct collaborations in place with 
companies operating in the military universe. I am talking about real 
agreements that lead our researchers to work on shared projects with 
companies that produce armaments, collaborations that include the 
development of research topics and continuous exchanges of knowledge. 
One of these companies is Leonardo, formerly Finmeccanica, the European 
Union's "defense" company with the highest turnover. When, in a 
university assembly, I publicly asked the rector of the Polytechnic of 
Turin to problematize our relationship with Leonardo, the answer I got 
was enlightening: Leonardo, the rector told me, does not only produce 
weapons. Not only that: the projects that the Polytechnic has with 
Leonardo are not related to armaments but to "dual" technologies that 
have civil purposes, such as for example the production of photovoltaic 
panels that will power the next NASA-ESA missions to the Moon and Mars. 
To underline this point, the rector told me that the Polytechnic would 
never collaborate with companies that exclusively produce armaments such 
as - an example given by himself - Beretta.
With this type of reasoning, the agreements between the Polytechnic 
University of Turin and Leonardo become unassailable, because they 
discursively end up within the trap issue of dual use. What's wrong, 
after all, if we collaborate on the production of space robots with a 
leading company in the aerospace sector? The knowledge produced, here 
too as in the case of my colleague who researches rockets, can be 
appropriated by the military, but we are not the ones who directly give 
it into their hands. In essence, we - male and female scientists - 
cannot have responsibility for what is not our responsibility.
The two points illustrated starting from the case of the Polytechnic of 
Turin are brought back to a single common denominator. The operation, 
semantically speaking, is very effective: it allows us to avoid a series 
of issues which, despite being substantially different, are brought 
together under the dual use theme.[...]To understand something about it, 
we need to get out of this trap and look at the problem differently. The 
question to ask is the following: what does the institutional 
relationship between the Polytechnic of Turin and Leonardo entail, in a 
broad sense? As regards dual use, we have seen that the Polytechnic, 
although collaborating with Leonardo, does not produce weapons but 
shares knowledge for the production of intergalactic solar panels, and 
what can be done subsequently with this knowledge is not up to it.
But there are at least three other points that are not talked about. The 
first is cultural, linked to the scientific legitimacy that Leonardo 
obtains from working with the Polytechnic and the political prestige 
that the Polytechnic obtains from working with Leonardo. The second is 
social, linked to the logistical proximity of the knowledge that is 
circulated in the collaboration. The third is economic and is linked to 
the type of market value generated by the relationship between the 
parties, and the possibility of profit that it activates.

On a cultural level, the mutual interest of Leonardo and the Polytechnic 
in collaborating lies in the positivist roots of what is considered 
"science", especially in fields such as biosciences or engineering. In 
essence, we have two players on the field with great epistemic value, 
i.e. relative to what is considered "knowledge". On the one hand there 
is Leonardo: a highly successful technological company in international 
markets; on the other, the Polytechnic: one of the most renowned 
examples of academic excellence in Italy and Europe. The former 
benefits, culturally speaking, from the relationship with the latter 
because in doing so it gives its market operations a scientific aura; 
the second, for its part, can correctly state that the research carried 
out within its walls are not useless theoretical speculations but have 
direct applications. The roots of this mutual cultural affection are 
"positivist" because they are structured around the technical and 
functional value of knowledge: it is a reading of the world's problems 
as a set of causes and effects on which to act directly and precisely.
On this cultural conception, the social value of the relationship 
between the two is established: by building projects together, occupying 
the same laboratories, having access to the same databases, Leonardo and 
the Polytechnic can increase and speed up their respective capacity for 
action. To use a language dear to the management of the Polytechnic, 
this means "activating synergies", or optimizing the resources available 
to achieve the goals set.
The discussion that is never addressed, unfortunately, is related to how 
the optimization of resources is not just a technical process, but 
precisely a social issue, that is, a process through which both beliefs 
and objectives are explicitly and implicitly redefined. . It is 
precisely thanks to the continuous cultural and social rapprochement 
already underway for years between these realities that today a further 
distortion of the mandate of public research is taking place, which 
should be free and open, not functional to a partisan interest. Let's 
talk about a concrete fact. A few years ago it would have been 
unthinkable to use public money - in this case, coming from the National 
Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) - to invest in the development of 
aerospace and military technologies through a partnership between 
Leonardo (arms manufacturer), Polytechnic (in theory still a university) 
and NATO (a military alliance). Today, however, it is possible, with a 
non-existent public debate, and it will be achieved with the 
construction of the Aerospace Citadel in Corso Marche in Turin: a 
"synergistic" hub where the knowledge needed to make robots will be 
increasingly integrated with that to produce drones attack and fighter 
aircraft.
This is the point where the economic issue becomes glaring. A hub like 
the Citadel is not just a matter of large public investments - therefore 
made with citizens' taxes - but it is above all a great opportunity for 
the creation of more extensive chains of profit, made up of patents, 
projects, technologies and goods, which they will be generated 
synergistically in Corso Marche and will be sold on world markets to the 
highest bidder. Both Leonardo and the Polytechnic will benefit from it, 
depending on the agreements made from time to time on the individual 
contracts: the dual use, from this point of view, is a precious profit 
opportunity. Consider the fact that, to use patented civilian technology 
for military purposes, concessions and fees will have to be paid. In 
this mix of economic interests, the ethical question is not only related 
to who we sell the Eurofighter Typhoons built by Leonardo (spoiler 
alert: the Egyptian military regime is vying to buy twenty-four of them, 
for a cost of four billion euros). But it also becomes the following: 
how the technologies were generated within the Eurofighter, and who is 
responsible for what, in its construction, when the cultural, social and 
economic networks between research and "defence" are entangled in a 
spirit and in a common interest, and are therefore functional to each 
other - in a word, mutually militarized?

*Taken from: University and Militarization, ERIS Edizioni (2023)

https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en