Modelling the Imaginary: A Review of Mamun's Critical Review of Neil Renic's "A Civilizational Imaginary of Western Military Technology"

This review examines Dr. Syed Muntasir Mamun’s paper “A Critical Review of Neil Renic’s ‘A Civilizational Imaginary of Western Military Technology’: Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Historical Continuities, and Contemporary Implications with Extensive Mathematical Approximations” (KSCCN, 2026). Mamun’s paper reviews Renic’s 2026 article in Contemporary Security Policy, which argues that discourses of “civilization” have shaped Western military technology in two ways at once: as a signifier of restrained, humane warfare and as a safeguard that licenses unrestrained violence against those cast as “uncivilized”. Mamun situates this argument within the wider literature on sociotechnical imaginaries and adds a set of algebraic and geometric models of the tension between restraint and unrestraint. This review identifies three strengths of Mamun’s paper: its placement of Renic’s argument within an interdisciplinary body of research; its use of formal models as heuristic devices that make conceptual tensions and scenarios explicit; and its attention to present-day developments in military artificial intelligence. It then raises four points for further discussion: how the models’ variables might be operationalised and measured; the internal consistency of the notation and of one dynamic equation; the presentation of the equations; and whether formalising a civilizational hierarchy risks reproducing the very imaginary under critique. It closes with implications for research on technology and security.