The three levels of Technological Dominance: hardware, software and cognition in global south defense architectures

Resumo

This article develops a critical literature review on technological dominance in defense, structured around three levels: hardware, software, and cognition. It advances a synthetic framework that harmonizes Classical Elite Theory and Marxist political economy through Hardt and Negri’s concept of Empire (2001), treating technological power not as a neutral outcome of innovation or efficiency, but as a historically situated mode of domination. Methodologically, the article mobilizes Hardt and Negri’s formulation of Empire alongside Rael’s (2022) eleven dimensions of power (scope, domain, weight, costs, means, mode of application, incidence, agency versus structure, degree of dominance, geographic reach, and degree of transience) to examine how material capabilities (hardware), digital infrastructures and code (software), and cognitive structures (narratives, symbolic authority, and expert knowledge) are integrated into a stacked architecture of imperial dominance -  compromising Global South defense architectures. This framework allows technological dependence to be analyzed as a systemic configuration rather than as a series of isolated technical gaps as, by organizing the literature through these three levels, the article offers an analytical framework to assess strategic autonomy beyond armaments or industrial capacity alone, arguing that without confronting imperial-mediated cognitive alignment, software dependency and the development of foreign tech infrastructure solutions in national soil, defense modernization efforts undermine, rather than reinforce, Global South Defense Architectures.