ABSTRACT
The material world is forcing itself anew, from all sides and in radically different ways, into the ‘social’ that forms the object of study of an international political sociology. If an international political sociology is concerned with entanglements of social, cultural, economic and political phenomena that stretch across the globe, these would seem to be, “more than at any time in the past, mediated via material objects” (Dant 2006: 290). Socio-technical phenomena such as container shipping, communication networks, data centres and gas pipelines are increasingly granted a more central role in research as the critical infrastructures of transnational economic and social life. They form the new empirical focus of a burgeoning literature emerging in international political sociology around the concept of ‘materiality’.
