Inspiring People
Sean Fleming
Investigating the growing backlash against modern technology and the political ideologies that motivate it
Dr Sean Fleming is a Nottingham Research Fellow in the School of Politics and International Relations. His current research aims to understand the ideas and ideologies that motivate terrorist attacks on scientists and sabotage attacks on infrastructure.
I hope my research on anti-tech radicalism will help people anticipate and understand new forms of political violence—the terrorism of the future
How would you explain your research?
My research has two very different strands. The first strand, which emerged from my PhD research, is about the theory and practice of holding states responsible. Does the UK owe reparations to its former colonies? Is the present-day United Kingdom even the same entity as the British Empire? Should treaties have expiry dates? How should sovereign debts be divided up when states break up? In my 2020 book, Leviathan on a Leash, I develop a theory of state responsibility that helps to answer questions like these.
The second strand of my research is about the growing backlash against modern technology and the political ideologies that motivate it. I’ve recently published an article about the Unabomber and ‘ecoterrorism’ in the American Political Science Review, and I’ve just finished writing a book about the Unabomber’s ideas and influence, which will be published by Cornell University Press next year.
What inspired you to pursue this area?
My interest in state responsibility is quite personal. My grandparents’ country, Newfoundland, gave up its sovereignty in 1934 to avoid defaulting on its sovereign debt. This got me thinking about the tension between state responsibility and popular sovereignty. Why should my grandparents have had to give up their country to satisfy creditors who lent money to politicians they did not elect, decades before they were born? Would Newfoundland have been within its right to repudiate its debt instead of giving up its independence? These questions led me down a long path that eventually resulted in Leviathan on a Leash.
I became interested in anti-tech ideologies in late 2018, when I stumbled across the Unabomber Manifesto on a reading list for a discussion group at Cambridge (of all places!). After searching for secondary literature, I was surprised to find that political theorists had written hardly anything about the most famous political manifesto of my lifetime. The few articles I could find were dated, and none used the vast collection of archival material about the Unabomber—his notes, drafts, letters, journals, etc. So I decided to write a short intellectual history of the Unabomber, as a small side-project. I took a trip to the archive, wrote an article about the Unabomber’s intellectual influences, and, at first, intended to leave it at that. But the project took on a life of its own, and I ended up writing a 120,000-word book about the origins of the Unabomber’s ideas and his far-reaching influence.
How will your research affect the average person?
I can’t honestly claim that my research on state responsibility will affect the average person, but I hope that it will, in some way, shape the actions of policymakers, diplomats, and lawyers. In particular, I hope this research will encourage them to think about the human beings behind this abstract entity they call ‘the state’, and to consider how the treaties they sign, the debts they incur, and the sanctions they impose affect the lives of real people. When I wrote Leviathan on a Leash, I was constantly thinking about the millions of innocent Iraqis who suffered greatly and the thousands (or more) who died because of the draconian sanctions imposed on their country in the 1990s.
I hope my research on anti-tech radicalism will help people anticipate and understand new forms of political violence—the terrorism of the future. Anti-tech radicals have sent bombs to scientists, plotted attacks on research facilities and electrical substations, and carried out a multitude of small-scale attacks on infrastructure. I fear that this is only the beginning. With growing concerns about the dark sides of artificial intelligence and biotechnology, the backlash against technology could be explosive.
What advice would you give to someone starting out?
My first piece of advice is to pursue a research topic that grips and compels you rather than one that seems strategic or expedient. Early in your academic career, you’ll probably be encouraged to stick to well-trodden areas and to avoid more adventurous research until you’ve landed a permanent job. But this ‘safe’ strategy is very risky, for three reasons. First, if you don’t pursue that out-there idea now, it’s likely that someone else will beat you to it. Second, maintaining motivation is half the battle in a big project like a PhD. If you choose a topic you feel lukewarm about, it will show in the finished product—if indeed you manage to find the motivation to finish it. Third, ‘safe’ research in well-trodden areas doesn’t stand out. In an extremely competitive academic job market, it’s advantageous to be daring. My work on Thomas Hobbes didn’t land me an academic job; my work on the Unabomber did.
My other piece of advice is to be relentless and stubborn. Early-career academics are often discouraged by early rejections—I was no exception. Though it’s easier said than done, you have to develop a thick skin and find a way to move past failures. My ‘alternative CV’ of rejections is very long, and it gets longer every year, if not every month. Always accept rejections gracefully and carefully consider the feedback you receive from your peers and mentors, but don’t buckle at the first sign of resistance. The most original research is often some of the most difficult to publish. Sometimes you have to be downright intransigent in the face of criticism.
What’s the biggest challenge in your field?
One of the big challenges for political theorists and intellectual historians is the ephemerality of digital information. In the past, political thinkers and actors left durable, paper records—drafts, correspondence, annotated books, etc.—that could be collected and preserved in physical archives. But nowadays, social media posts are buried within hours, blogs and websites often become defunct within a few years, and emails are frequently mass-deleted or wiped out by ‘upgrades’. (Imagine if all of Hannah Arendt’s correspondence and unpublished writings were stored on floppy disks, which had degraded before anyone had discovered them. Or imagine if they were stored on an encrypted hard drive, but no one had the password.) An important task for political theorists and intellectual historians today is to archive and preserve as much of this digital information as possible for posterity.