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This essay analyzes how the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is likely to address the new security environment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It investigates how factors internal and external to the alliance shape the possibilities and limits for its ambition to strengthen and develop its regional partnerships in order to enhance security and stability there. NATO's ambitions are likely to be hampered by competing priorities within the alliance, as the as the members are increasingly facing diverging interests and financial austerity as well as domestic political change and regional rivalries in the MENA region.

This article investigates the puzzling case of the unsolicited rocket: a Norwegian research establishment successfully developed a weapon system that no one wanted or had asked for that was later widely adopted. We argue that the 'Terne' weapon existed not because it was needed based on rational calculations about efficiency, but because of the narratives, coalitions, and competitive dynamics that surrounded it and made it useful. Conventionally, war and technology are often considered distinct 'things' with immutable essences, used as variables to explain other phenomena, rather than being examined on their own terms. In this case, we focus empirically on the configuration of sociotechnical imaginaries, and the capacities for action that arise out of it. In foregrounding sociotechnical systems, this is not a case of the 'militarization' of civilian society and research in peacetime. Rather, agency lay in competitive networks of narratives and coalitions between technologies, individuals, professions, technological communities, military organizations, and funding bodies, together shaping how ideas and technologies become authoritative and dominant. ; The unsolicited rocket: a story of science, technology, and future wars ; publishedVersion