Conceptualizing technicization: the history of the medicalization of male circumcision

Alejandro, Audrey ORCID: 0000-0002-3675-8986 (2025) Conceptualizing technicization: the history of the medicalization of male circumcision. European Journal of International Relations. ISSN 1354-0661

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Abstract

How does social actors’ engagement with the technical dimensions of world politics—from material infrastructures to modeling, engineering, bureaucracy, and discourses of expertise—bring about specific social configurations and political effects? To answer this research problem, International Relations scholars have growingly mobilized the idea of technicization to investigate the relationship between knowledge, governance, socio-political reproduction, and social change. However, despite this interest, technicization has been neither conceptualized nor theorized. I argue that this absence limits our understanding of how technicality affects world politics and leads to the literature taking depoliticization as the default interpretation. To address this issue, this article develops three conceptualizations of technicization by distinguishing between the theoretical traditions underpinning this idea across social sciences. I introduce to International Relations the concept of technicization as desociologization based on the Habermassian concepts of technique and practice, which I distinguish from technicization as depoliticization (Weberian) and technicization as disciplinarization (Foucauldian) most commonly encountered in the literature. I illustrate the utility of disentangling these approaches through the case study of the history of the medicalization of male circumcision and its use as a global health anti-HIV policy since 2007. Overall, this article lays solid theoretical foundations for a more structured conversation about knowledge- and discourse-related processes dealing with the technical dimensions of world politics and beyond.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author
Divisions:	Methodology
Subjects:	R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine H Social Sciences
Date Deposited:	10 Feb 2025 10:48
Last Modified:	18 Apr 2025 16:21
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/127215

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