Digital International Relations: Technology, Agency, and Order 9781032571324, 9781032571317, 9781003437963

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DIGITAL INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

This volume examines analyses how digital transformation disrupts established patterns of world politics, moving International Relations (IR) increasingly towards Digital International Relations. We examine technological, agential and ordering processes that explain this fundamental change. The contributors trace how digital disruption changes the international world we live in, ranging from security to economics, from human rights advocacy to deep fakes, and from diplomacy to international law. The book makes two sets of contributions. First, it shows that the ongoing digital revolution profoundly changes every major dimension of international politics. Second, focusing on the interplay of technology, agency and order, it provides a framework for explaining these changes. The book also provides a map for adjusting the study of international politics to studying International Relations, making a case for upgrading, augmenting and rewiring the discipline. Theory follows practice in International Relations, but if the discipline wants to be able to meaningfully analyse the present and come up with plausible scenarios for the future, it must not lag too far behind major transformations of the world that it studies. This book facilitates that theoretical journey. This book will be of much interest to students of cyber-politics, politics and technology, and International Relations. Corneliu Bjola is Associate Professor of Diplomatic Studies at the University of Oxford, UK. Markus Kornprobst is Professor of International Relations at the Vienna School of International Studies, Austria.

Routledge Studies in Conflict, Security and Technology Series Editors: Mark Lacy, Lancaster University, Dan Prince, Lancaster University, and Sean Lawson, University of Utah

The Routledge Studies in Conflict, Technology and Security series aims to publish challenging studies that map the terrain of technology and security from a range of disciplinary perspectives, offering critical perspectives on the issues that concern publics, business and policymakers in a time of rapid and disruptive technological change. Emerging Technologies and International Security Machines, the State and War Edited by Reuben Steff, Joe Burton and Simona R. Soare Militarising Artificial Intelligence Theory, Technology and Regulation Nik Hynek and Anzhelika Solovyeva Understanding the Military Design Movement War, Change and Innovation Ben Zweibelson Artificial Intelligence and International Conflict in Cyberspace Edited by Fabio Cristiano, Dennis Broeders, François Delerue, Frédérick Douzet, and Aude Géry Digital International Relations Technology, Agency, and Order Edited by Corneliu Bjola & Markus Kornprobst For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Conflict-Security-and-Technology/book-series/CST

DIGITAL INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Technology, Agency and Order

Edited by Corneliu Bjola and Markus Kornprobst

Cover image: Getty Images © Pobytov First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Corneliu Bjola & Markus Kornprobst; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Corneliu Bjola & Markus Kornprobst to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bjola, Corneliu, editor. | Kornprobst, Markus, editor. Title: Digital international relations : technology, agency, and order / edited by Corneliu Bjola & Markus Kornprobst. Description: New York : Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023026170 (print) | LCCN 2023026171 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032571324 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032571317 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003437963 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Technology and international relations. | International relations—Technological innovations. Classification: LCC JZ1254 .D54 2024 (print) | LCC JZ1254 (ebook) | DDC 327—dc23/eng/20230815 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023026170 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023026171 ISBN: 978-1-032-57132-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-57131-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-43796-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003437963 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations List of Contributors

Introducing Digital International Relations: Technology, Agency and Order Markus Kornprobst and Corneliu Bjola

PART I

Revisiting Core Concepts   1 The Distribution of Power, Security and Interconnectedness: The Structure of Digital International Relations Richard J. Harknett

vii viii

1

27

29

  2 The State in the Digital Era: Supreme or in Decline? Lucas Kello

51

  3 Rise of the Nerd: Knowledge, Power and International Relations in a Digital World Giampiero Giacomello and Johan Eriksson

73

vi  Contents

PART II

Agential Processes

97

  4 Can you Trust in Zoom? Bonds and Trust in Digital Spaces Marcus Holmes and Nicholas J. Wheeler

99

  5 Metrodiplomacy: How Digital Connectivity Can Expand the Power of Urban Influence Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook

121

  6 Sticking to the State? Transnational Advocacy Networks in the Digital Era Nina Hall

154

PART III

Ordering Processes

175

  7 Algorithmic Security and Conflict in a Datafied World Claudia Aradau

177

  8 The International Political Economy of the Digital (Revolution)198 Miguel Otero-Iglesias   9 The Social Media Revolution and Shifts in the Climate Change Discourse Alena Drieschova 10 Digital Technologies, Governance and International Law Victoria Baines

Conclusion: Upgrading, Augmenting and Rewiring the Discipline Corneliu Bjola and Markus Kornprobst

Index

227 258

283

300

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 0.1 Digital disruption map 5 6.1 Proportion of digital advocacy organisations’ campaigns relating to COVID 163 6.2 Overall proportion of campaigns that were COVID-19 related164 6.3 Digital advocacy organisations’ campaigns that dealt with a transnational issue 165 6.4 Number of digital advocacy organisations’ campaigns with an international target 166 6.5 Number of campaigns with an international partner 167 8.1 Labour productivity and real average and real median compensation206 8.2 Evolution of US concentration, profits, labour shares and investment 207 8.3 Tax revenue lost due to profit shifting 208 Images 4.1 G7 Meeting, March 2020

108

Tables 1.1 Adding the Digital to International Relations Theory 6.1 Examples of New Political Actors in the Digital Era

37 158

CONTRIBUTORS

Claudia Aradau is Professor of International Politics in the Department of War

Studies, King’s College London. She is the Principal Investigator of Security Flows, funded by the European Research Council and her latest book, entitled Algorithmic Reason (with Tobias Blanke), won the 2023 Best Book Award by the Science, Technology and Arts in International Relations section of the International Studies Association.

Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook is a German-American political scientist and Executive

Vice President/Senior Advisor at the Bertelsmann Stiftung. For 20 years she has served in progressively senior roles in international think tanks, beginning at the European Policy Centre and as founding director of the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School for over a decade, before becoming Director and CEO of the German Council on Foreign Relations. Victoria Baines is IT Livery Company Professor of Information Technology at

Gresham College, London’s oldest higher education institution. She is the author of Rhetoric of InSecurity: The Language of Danger, Fear and Safety in National and International Contexts (Routledge, 2022) and numerous articles on cybersecurity, the misuse of digital technologies, and their governance and regulation.

Corneliu Bjola is Associate Professor of Diplomatic Studies at the University of Oxford and the Head of the Oxford Digital Diplomacy Research Group. He is also a Faculty Fellow at the Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California and Professorial Lecturer at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. His latest (co-edited) publication is the Oxford Handbook of Digital Diplomacy (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Contributors  ix

Alena Drieschova is Assistant Professor at the Department of Politics and Interna-

tional Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on international orders, and how they are shaped by material culture, technology and practices. A new strand of research focuses on Central and Eastern Europe’s position in the world. Johan Eriksson is Vice Dean of Faculty and Professor of Political Science at

Södertörn University. His research focuses on international relations in general, and politics and technology in particular. Current projects address the politics of outer space, cyber and digitalisation of infrastructure. He is the author of International Relations and Security in the Digital Age (with Giampiero Giacomello) and numerous articles on digital international affairs and international security.

Giampiero Giacomello is Associate Professor at the Department of Political and

Social Sciences, University of Bologna. His research interests include strategic theory (mostly Clausewitz), cybersecurity and wargaming and simulation. He has extensively published on all of these topics. He is a founding member of the Center for Computational Social Science.

Nina Hall is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Johns Hopkins

School of Advanced International Studies. Her research explores the role of transnational advocacy and international organisations in international relations. Her most recent book is Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era, Think Global, Act Local (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Richard J. Harknett is Professor of Political Science and Director of the School of

Public and International Affairs and the Center for Cyber Strategy and Policy at the University of Cincinnati. He served as Scholar-in-Residence at US Cyber Command and National Security Agency and is co-author of Cyber Persistence Theory (Oxford University Press, 2022). He was Fulbright Scholar at Oxford University and the Diplomatic Academy, Austria.

Marcus Holmes is Professor of Government at William & Mary. He is Associate

Editor of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy and is co-editor of Palgrave’s Studies in Diplomacy and International Relations series. He is also co-director of the Social Science Research Methods Center and director of the Political Psychology and International Relations lab, both at William & Mary. Lucas Kello is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University. He is the author of The Virtual Weapon and International Order and Striking Back: The End of Peace in Cyberspace and How to Restore It (both published by Yale University Press), which in 2022 was selected by the Financial Times and Nature as one of the best new books.

x  Contributors

Markus Kornprobst is Professor of International Relations at the Vienna School

of International Studies. Having authored and edited a dozen books as well as publishing in leading journals of the discipline, he specialises on international security, diplomacy and international orders. His current research projects deal with processes of regional ordering, peaceful change, digital international relations and global health.

Miguel Otero-Iglesias is Senior Analyst at Elcano Royal Institute and Professor

and Research Director of International Political Economy at the School of Politics, Economics and Global Affairs and the Centre for the Governance of Change at IE University in Spain. In addition, he is Senior Research Fellow at the EU-Asia Institute at ESSCA School of Management in France.

Nicholas J. Wheeler is Professor of International Relations in the Department of

Political Science and International Studies and Institute for Conflict, Cooperation, and Security at the University of Birmingham. Having published numerous books, he is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the United Kingdom, a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, and has had an entry in Who’s Who since 2011.

INTRODUCING DIGITAL INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Technology, Agency and Order Markus Kornprobst and Corneliu Bjola

Introduction

What are digital international relations and how are we to study them? Paraphrasing Gramsci, we see the widespread perception of systemic crisis that digital technologies have induced in international politics in the past two decades as a potential moment of rejuvenation: the old international relations is dying, the new digital international relations is yet to be born, while the interregnum lacks the proper conceptual vocabulary to make itself understood. This book seeks to bridge this knowledge gap. Thus far, the discipline of International Relations has been slow to address digital international relations. The field, for the most part, continues its longstanding neglect of studying how technological aspects of international relations are interwoven with political ones (Fritsch, 2011; Ruggie, 1983). For sure, in recent years, highly insightful research on various aspects of digital international relations has been published, some within and much more outside the discipline. We find, for example, ever more detailed studies on cybersecurity (Eriksson & Giacomello, 2007; Gomez & Whyte, 2021; Harknett & Smeets, 2022; Kello, 2013, 2017; Valeriano & Maness, 2018) and digital economics (Bebia, 2022; Carmel & Paul Regine, 2022; Liu, 2022; Raskin & David, 2018; Welfens & Weske, 2007). A number of approaches explore how particular kinds of digital international communication are put to use, ranging from manipulation (Bantimaroudis, Sideri, Ballas, Panagiotidis, & Ziogas, 2020; Culloty & Suiter Jane, 2021; Gerrits, 2018; Karpf, 2017) via changes in diplomatic communication (Adler-Nissen & Drieschova, 2019; Barberá  & Zeitzoff, 2018; Bjola  & Holmes, 2015, Bjola  & Manor, 2023; Jackson, 2019) to transnational advocacy and emancipatory potentials (Baer, 2016; Keller, Mendes, & Ringrose, 2018; Yin & Sun Yu, 2021). What DOI: 10.4324/9781003437963-1

2  Markus Kornprobst and Corneliu Bjola

is missing, however, is a better grasp of the bigger picture. Our discipline is reluctant to study the transformation from analogue to digital international relations more comprehensively. Such a ‘bird’s eye view’ is highly warranted. While paralleling elements pertaining to past waves of technological development up to a point (Drezner, 2019), the current digital transformation raises a series of novel theoretical and empirical questions about global affairs that require a broader overview of how key processes hang together. Technological leaps can have tremendous implications for world politics, for better or for worse. Without the Industrial Revolution, for example, there could have been no colonisation at scale because there would have been no hard limit to a non-industrial economy’s appetite for raw materials, and no total war without cheap steel and precision manufacturing (Drum, 2018). Performing a similarly systemic evaluation for the digital revolution is an arduous exercise. This is partly because we still lack adequate conceptual tools and methods for benchmarking the scope and depth of digital transformation in international relations and partly because, in the grand scheme of things, the technological revolution may just have started. Yet, we do have already enough ‘digital crumbles’ to start articulating an ambitious and coherent theoretical frame for studying digital international relations. We define digital international relations as the disruptive interplay of digital technologies and power structures in global politics responsible for altering ontological foundations of agency, shaping hybrid patterns of conflict and cooperation, and streaming the formation of new international political orders. This definition moves beyond narrow interpretations of digital international relations as a form of ‘digitisation’, involving the technical conversion of analogous entities (e.g. states, IOs, NGOs) and mechanisms (e.g. diplomacy, balance of power) into a digital format. It instead suggests that something qualitatively different takes place in the digital age in which the ‘old’ international relations are thoroughly transformed by digital technologies and that new international phenomena (e.g. hybrid entities, relations and orders) emerge as a result of digital disruption. The introduction develops a digital disruption map that is meant to provide researchers, employing different angles, with guidance on how to put under scrutiny different processes contributing to the transformation of digital international affairs and how they hang together. Building upon research on digital transformations, mainly in disciplines other than International Relations (Hocking, Melissen & Hofmeister, 2016; Naimi-Sadigh, Tayebeh & Mohammad, 2022; Schmidt & Cohen, 2010; Vives, 2019), we view digital disruption as prompting a fundamental alteration of agential and ordering processes within global politics. The term ‘disrupt’ originates from the Latin words ‘dis’ meaning ‘doing away with’ and ‘rumpere’ meaning ‘break’ or ‘burst’. While it refers to replacing old systems with new ones, disruption ultimately depends on human agency. The new systems may bring about progress such as political emancipation and economic development,

Introducing Digital International Relations  3

but they may also result in exploitation and inequality. Figuratively speaking, ‘disrumpere’ means to pave the way. The digital disruption map we propose in this chapter is meant to help researchers study how the digital finds its way into international relations and how this transforms international relations. For heuristic purposes, the map distinguishes technological, agential and ordering processes. When it comes to identifying these processes, we cast our net widely in order to arrive at a ‘big picture’ that transcends the usual dividing lines among perspectives, approaches and research foci in International Relations and helps International Relations scholars to engage with debates in other disciplines. We study three major technological sources of digital disruption (datafication, speed and pervasiveness), examine three broad agential mechanisms (forcing, enticing and winning over) and investigate two ordering layers (foreground and background).1 The digital disruption map links these processes together, placing the agential ones at the centre. While technological processes exert pressure on agential processes to digitally disrupt the usual ways of doing things, there is no automatism. Agents succumb to these pressures to varying degrees and in different ways. Some of these more fluid digital doings come to ‘cut new digital lanes’ into the temporarily more fixed ordering processes. These agential and ordering processes, in turn, feed back to the technological ones, adding to the sources of digital disruption and so on. This introduction is organised into seven sections. First, we discuss our (meta-)theoretical building blocks. Second, we inquire into how technological processes digitally disrupt international relations as we have come to know them. Third, we discuss how these technological processes make it into agential processes. Fourth, we move on to examine how digitally disrupted agential processes leave a mark on ordering processes. Fifth, we address feedback mechanisms from agential and ordering processes to technological ones. Sixth, we preview the book chapters. Finally, our conclusion briefly summarises our argument. (Meta-)theoretical Building Blocks

This section discusses the meta-theoretical premises of our digital disruption map and identifies its key conceptual components: technological, agential and ordering processes. Deep ontological divides cut through much of the Social Sciences (Lohse, 2017; Schatzki, 2003; Sewell, 1992) in general and International Relations (Jackson, 2008; Smith, 2021) in particular. Most notably, while some authors assume that material forces are ontologically prior to intersubjective ones, others presume the reverse. Whereas some researchers put agency ahead of structure, others do the opposite. This risks, as Lohse (2017, p. 18) puts it, for overly narrow meta-theoretical assumptions to ‘determine’ theory. This is especially unwarranted in a, comparatively speaking, new field of study such as digital

4  Markus Kornprobst and Corneliu Bjola

international relations. Embracing a pragmatist epistemology, we seek to be ontologically more ‘flexible’ than that, aiming for ‘horizons of conceptual possibilities’ (Pratt, 2016, p. 523). Researching digital international relations raises all kinds of questions about materiality and intersubjectivity as well as structure and agency – and a range of related questions – that should be addressed through empirical research rather than meta-theoretical assumptions, and we should remain open to the possibility that even then it is often up to constellations of actors and their doings in a concrete encounter how ontological objects relate or do not relate to one another (Bryant, 2011, p. 265; DeLanda, 2013, p. 47). How do what kinds of digital technologies make actors depart from their established ways of doing things and what kinds of actors, embedded in what kinds of contexts, more so than others? How do new ways of doing things sediment into the repertoire of actors and how do they reach into the making of new digital technologies? The digital disruption map is meant not to make important questions disappear behind ontological blinders. At the same time, it is to provide a heuristic that facilitates research and debate about digital international relations. Thus, we identify three conceptual building blocks that transgress ontological divides: technological processes, agential processes and ordering processes. We perceive these building blocks as essential for understanding how the process of digital disruption is reconfiguring and remoulding power structures within global politics, as well as facilitating the transition to digital international relations. Technological processes are material, while agential and ordering processes may feature material and intersubjective forces. Furthermore, we cast our net widely when it comes to the range of agential and ordering processes we investigate into. In the spirit of ‘analytical eclecticism’ (Katzenstein & Sil, 2008), we investigate three broad conceptualisations of agential processes: forcing, enticing and winning over. Most research in International Relations converges on a variant of one of these mechanisms. To briefly illustrate, forcing features prominently in Realist accounts (Mearsheimer, 2021; Morgenthau, 1948; Schweller, 2006; Waltz, 1979) but also in others, for example, rhetoric-inspired research (Krebs & Jackson, 2007; Mattern, 2005). Liberals write a lot about incentives (Friedman & Rapp-Hooper, 2018; Keohane, 1986; Snidal, 1985) but so do others, for example, critical scholarship on how incentives drive exploitation (Le Billon & Spiegel, 2021; Mezzadri, 2016; Williams & Lee, 2009). Winning over may be the broadest category of them all, including research on advocacy (Carpenter, 2007; Finnemore & Sikkink, 1998), argumentation (Bjola  & Kornprobst, 2010; Risse, 2000), public justification (Abulof & Kornprobst, 2017; Wong, 2022) and performativity (Braun, Schindler, & Wille, 2019; Hedling & Bremberg, 2021). In the same spirit, we cast our net widely when it comes to ordering processes. Following Adler (2019), we distinguish foreground and background. Foreground ordering is about designed institutions, studied, for example, by neoliberal institutionalism (Colgan, Keohane, & Van de Graaf, 2012; Keohane, 2001) and regime theory (Green, 2022; Krasner, 1982). Background ordering is about doxic

Introducing Digital International Relations  5

FIGURE 0.1 

Digital disruption map.

(Authors’ creation)

(Adler-Nissen, 2016; Neumann, 2002; Pouliot, 2008), epistemic (Adler & Haas, 1992; Danso & Aning, 2022; Doty, 1993; Ruggie, 1993), ideological (Destradi & Plagemann, 2019; Huo & Parmar, 2020; Steger, 2008) or hand-on knowledge (Adler, 2019; Qin & Nordin, 2019; Sondarjee, 2021) and practices that enact these. The concept of ‘background’ was coined by Searle (1980), who referred to it as the usually invisible context that makes intelligible communication possible by implicitly filling in the blanks that explicit aspects of a communicative encounter do not articulate. Figure 0.1 previews the map for tracing the evolution of digital international relations, which we will develop in the remainder of this introduction. Sources of digital disruption do not automatically change international relations. Depending on the doings of agents, they find their way into their interaction in more fleeting ways (agential processes only) or more sustainable ones (also ordering processes), and all of this, in turn, has repercussions for technological processes. The following three sections provide a more detailed account of the technological, agential and ordering processes, respectively. Technological Processes

This section, drawing from contributions to the literature across the social science and natural science divide, identifies three major technological sources of digital disruption: datafication of social relations, speed of digital-technological progress and pervasiveness of digital technologies in our everyday lives. Big Data, the ‘bloodstream’ of the digital revolution, has become the most valuable commodity of our age, the ‘new oil’ to fuel the next stage of economic development (Nolin, 2019). According to recent statistics, 60% of the world’s

6  Markus Kornprobst and Corneliu Bjola

population has internet access and generates an average of 1.7 MB of data per second. In 2021, the total amount of data produced by digital users reached 74 zettabytes (one ZB is the equivalent of one trillion GBs). This number is projected to increase to 149 zettabytes by 2024 (Finances online, 2021). While data constitutes the digital disruption’s ‘raw material’, it is the companion process of ‘datafication’ (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013; Mejias & Couldry, 2019) that is responsible for value creation by tracking, aggregating and analysing the underlying information and data points that the ‘raw material’ offers (Lomborg, Dencik, & Moe, 2020). Through datafication, the informational aspect of a resource is ‘liquefied’ and separated from its use in the physical world, subjected to algorithmic treatment and machine-learning calibration by which relevant patterns, trends and relationships are identified, and then ‘re-bundled’ and mobilised via data visualisation methods to generate new analytical insights and representations of the world (Lycett, 2013). One important implication of this process is that information, and the datafication techniques developed for processing it, are increasingly treated as a strategic resource, which in turn facilitates the rise of a new era of information geopolitics (Rosenbach & Mansted, 2019). The ability of state and non-state actors to deploy datafication methods to understand, predict and generate events of strategic relevance thus becomes as valuable as their ‘hard’ material power. At the same time, the growing belief that datafication is a winner-takes-all environment could also see states and their domestic tech industry develop much closer relationships together, a situation which is already evident in China, but also emergent in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States. Digital protectionism is not inevitable (Fan  & Gupta, 2018), but efforts to establish and enforce different conceptions of ‘digital sovereignty’ are being already pursued by various international actors (Eldem, 2020; McKune & Ahmed, 2018). The second important source of disruption is the unprecedented speed at which new digital technologies enter the global market and are mass adopted. As a consequence, processes of data generation and datafication are increasingly expected to take place in real time, making it possible for knowledge to be accessed and experienced instantly. Virilio (2007) has long insisted that the ever-increasing speeds that mould and drive forward the modern society may eventually cause traditional political structures to implode. Given the current pace of technological innovation, his prediction may finally begin to sink in. Rosa (2016, p. 37) captures this temporal pathology through the concept of social de-synchronisation, which refers to the mismatch between (or within) social spheres that are ‘speedable’ (i.e. cope well with technological advances and social changes), and those that lack the economic, social and cultural resources necessary to keep up with technological and social acceleration. Therein lies both the attraction and the potential for disillusionment with digital technologies: on the one hand, digital technologies and data-driven analytics create incentives for institutions and actors to ‘speed up’ to gain and maintain a

Introducing Digital International Relations  7

competitive advantage; it also creates an incentive for those ‘left behind’ to try to catch up and make sure that technological acceleration does not place them in a situation of structural disadvantage. On the other hand, digital technologies come with the side effect of providing the means for speeding up social systems even further, thus triggering a ‘temporal rebound effect’: the attempt to re-synchronise leads to a new round of escalatory pressures to speed up; this generates, in turn, more de-synchronisation (Rosa, 2016, p. 40). Applied to international relations, the rapid rate of digital innovation introduces a powerful fault line of de-synchronisation between those global systems, actors and processes that can better adapt to the pace of technological disruption and close the temporal gap between opportunities as well as possibilities, and those that fall further behind. The third major source of digital disruption, digital pervasiveness, refers to the increasing ubiquity, embeddedness and dependence of digital technology in all aspects of life from communication and entertainment to economic investment and political decision-making (Gkeredakis, Lifshitz-Assaf, & Barrett, 2021; Lakhani & Iansiti, 2014; Park, Straubhaar, & Strover, 2019). Digital pervasiveness is driven by the rapid development of new technologies, such as social media, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and the metaverse, enabling new forms of human behaviour and generating new values, norms, interests and forms of knowledge structuring social interaction in the public and private spheres. Digital technologies can no longer be thus viewed as simple tools assisting humans with their tasks and can be discarded once the job is done. They instead weave themselves into human activities to such an extent that the resulting actions are the product of hybrid entities and doings, containing both human and digital elements, and featuring different degrees of machine autonomy.2 Whereas datafication and speed, as sources of digital disruption, primarily challenge international politics at the structural level by transforming information and digital acceleration into critical assets of political, economic and military power at a scale never seen before, pervasiveness has the potential to disrupt the microfoundations of international relations. As digital technologies gradually become more complex and sophisticated, posthuman agential configurations are bound to become not only more prevalent, but also more influential in shaping the context of social interactions (Lupton & Watson, 2020; Tastemirova, Schneider, Kruse, Heinzle, & vom Brocke, 2022). In digital international relations, traditional (anthropocentric) and posthuman forms of agency are thus expected to compete with one another for hybrid (online and offline) influence. One can depict the extent to which digital technologies are allowed to exercise posthuman agency on a spectrum, from synthesising data for human analysis via providing data-driven suggestions for human action (Brundage et al., 2018) to autonomously deciding and executing a decision without any human input (Haas & Fischer, 2017). Furthermore, algorithms may exert posthuman agency in subtler ways by warping the ways by which humans experience and perceive the world. In recent years, for instance, much ink has been spilled over the corrosive role of social

8  Markus Kornprobst and Corneliu Bjola

media algorithms in fomenting political polarisation, radicalisation and extremism which has translated into offline violence from Daesh-inspired ‘lone wolf’ terrorist attacks, to full-scale ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya minority in Myanmar in 2017 and to the US Capitol Riot on 6 January 2021. The three sources of digital disruption discussed earlier constitute the permissive conditions that enable and make disruption possible in international affairs. They are the ‘physical propensities’, as Karl Popper would argue, that ‘load the dice’ in a particular direction, and influence future situations without, however, determining them in a specific way (Popper, 1990, p. 18). What makes them have a stronger or weaker disruptive effect on the adjacent political space are the agential and ordering processes that inform and shape how these sources are projected, combined and deployed. From Technological to Agential Processes

No matter which of the agential perspectives is chosen by a scholar, datafication, speed and pervasiveness as identified in the previous section increasingly come to re-constitute agential processes. They profoundly shape and re-shape forcing, enticing and winning over. Digital disruption has important repercussions for processes through which actors come to (threaten to) use force. Superior datafication capabilities, able to sabotage vital civilian infrastructure and/or military capabilities of another actor, are means that can compel. It is no coincidence, therefore, that cyberwar, cyber conflict and cybersecurity have become very often used terms in recent decades (Liebetrau, 2022; Robinson, Jones, & Janicke, 2015). States – great powers, middle powers and small powers – invest heavily in digital analytical instruments that can identify and exploit vulnerabilities in the cyber defences of their opponents (Kostyuk & Wayne, 2021). Non-state actors such as terrorist networks can make use of digital capabilities, too (Gross, Canetti, & Vashdi, 2016; Venkatachary, Prasad, & Samikannu, 2018). Public-private partnerships are also to be taken seriously. Project Maven, also known as the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Function Team (AWCFT), was established, for instance, by the US Department of Defence (DoD) in partnership with Google and later with the Big Data analytics company Palantir, to ‘turn enormous volume of data available to DoD into actionable intelligence and insights at speed’ (Deputy Secretary of Defense, 2017). AWCFT is a good example of how digital infusions into agential processes may work. Big Data was recognised by DoD as a possible ‘game changer’ due to its potential ability to provide the US military with a competitive advantage on the battlefield in terms of real-time actionable data. Datafication was then experimentally used to build an AI-powered counterterrorism capability, which in turn advanced a novel conception of forcing as a data-driven mechanism of coercive power.

Introducing Digital International Relations  9

If forcing is about sticks, enticing is about carrots. In this reading, agential processes open up international relations more and more to digital interaction by reconfiguring disincentives and incentives for how to cooperate. This comes in many shapes and forms. Some authors expect ever stronger networks of tech cooperation among self-interested and like-minded states (Brands & Edel, 2021; Cohen & Richard, 2020). This kind of cooperation is likely to come at the expense of new barriers. Consider the case of Huawei which has achieved market dominance by outperforming American companies in investing in 5G technology. Its success has prompted the US government to embark on a strategy of ‘reverse enticing’, which, apart from targeting Huawei directly, also seeks to dis-incentivise US allies from purchasing and integrating Huawei equipment in their domestic telecom infrastructure (Lee, Han, & Zhu, 2022). After being outflanked by China’s active policy to build digital partnerships in the Global South, the EU has recently accelerated its technological outreach efforts. The EU’s 2030 Digital Compass emphasises opportunities for further cooperation in the European Union and much beyond, ranging from neighbouring states in Europe to Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America.3 Last but not least, a number of authors point out that wherever there are winners, there are also losers. Digitalised health promotion, for example, may serve tech companies and pharmaceutical companies more than patients (Lupton, 2014), transnational social media empires promise great profits for their owners but much less so for the prospects for pluralist media systems and democracy (Dahlberg, 2015; Hardy, 2017), and major tech companies create new ‘digital subjects’ (Chandler & Fuchs, 2019). Winning over is about making meaning for others. In our days, attempts to win over others are characterised by novel channels and networks of digital communication (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Roselle, Miskimmon, & O’Loughlin, 2014). These allow governments to pursue a broader yet tailored approach to conducting public diplomacy, international negotiations or crisis communication (Bjola & Manor, 2018; 2022; Duncombe, 2017). At the same time, algorithms can be put to use to distort communication for one’s own ends (Bucher, 2017; Zuboff, 2019) and even to ‘pierce, penetrate or perforate the political and information environments in the targeted countries’ (Walker & Ludwig, 2017). The rise of echo-chambers, ‘fake news’, ‘deep fakes’ and the deliberate weaponisation of information by state and non-state actors has actually reached a point where the ‘dark side’ of digital doings can no longer be overlooked (Bennett & Livingston, 2018; Pomerantsev, 2015). While research, about a decade ago, was rather upbeat about the democratic and transparent repercussions of digital communication, more recently, it focuses much more on manipulative techniques. To some extent, this tendency follows what has happened in the world we study. In the early 2010s, there was a considerable scholarly interest in social media and the onset of the Arab Spring

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(Frangonikolopoulos & Ioannis, 2012; Markham, 2014; Wolfsfeld, Segev, & Sheafer, 2013). In the late 2010s, students of political communication still tried to grapple with understanding the election of Donald Trump as US President and, more generally, the rise of populist governments worldwide (Boczkowski & Papacharissi, 2018; Enli, 2017; Gerbaudo, 2018; Karpf, 2017; Postill, 2018). Our map cautions against any kind of technological determinism. Agency matters. But the technological possibilities for distorting communication are likely to increase in manifold fashion. The 5G technology is likely to usher into a whole new level of technological disruption, which could introduce a new range of immersive tools of growing relevance for political engagement, such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) platforms. From Agential to Ordering Processes

This section contends that digital disruption does not stop at the level of agential processes. No matter what major IR perspective and approach to world order we employ, digital sources of disruption can sediment via transformations of agential processes into ordering processes. This applies to the foreground and background of the international order. Digitally infused agential processes of forcing can reconfigure the foreground4 of world order, that is, the institutions that actors design to regulate their relations with one another. This is implicit in research of scholars working on cybersecurity, no matter whether they are optimistic or pessimistic about the prospect of new foreground institutions to be built or not. Forsyth and Pope (2014) contend that the costs of an unregulated cyber arms race push great powers into converging on rules and norms about the possession and usage of cyber capabilities. In this reading, new institutions are likely to be designed. More pessimistic scenarios point to the inherent difficulties of arms control and apply these to cyberwarfare, without however denying the possibility of new rules and norms, tailored to cyber capabilities (Mazanec, 2015). Even Harknett and Nye’s caveat that cyberwarfare makes deterrence obsolete is, in between the lines, an argument about the digital disruption of ordering processes. A particular ordering element – the balance of power – is no longer viable because of cyberweapons (Harknett & Nye, 2017).5 On the one hand, Segal’s concept of the ‘hacked world order’ is also an account of how the doings of actors, especially great powers, break away from established patterns of behaviour when they put to use new digital technology in their interaction with one another. On the other hand, there are even hints about new background knowledge being put to use by actors when they try to force one another into a particular behaviour. Their taken-for-granted understandings of how to fight, trade, manoeuvre and manipulate come to increasingly make use of digital technology, thus transforming the patterns of their interaction (Segal, 2016). Kello (2021, pp. 9–10), too, writes about what we refer to as background when he describes something akin to an order of ‘unpeace’, a new pattern of ‘harmful action whose

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magnitude of physical harm does not rise to the level of war, and whose instruments therefore do not apply, even as it breaches the acceptable bounds of peacetime competition’. Digitally infused ways of pursuing incentives may also sediment into ordering processes. The United Nations, approaching what we referred to as digital disruption as an opportunity for more equality in the world, has launched many initiatives and fora, including the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, the Internet Governance Forum, the EQUALS partnership to counter the digital gender gap, the UN Innovation Network, the Task Force on Digital Financing of the SDGs and Tech Against Terrorism. There are also more ambitious documents, including the High-Level Panel Report on Digital Cooperation, entitled ‘The Age of Digital Interdependence’ and the corresponding Report of the Secretary-General ‘Road Map for Digital Cooperation’, although it remains to be seen to what extent these will end up ordering world politics. These initiatives seek to add foreground institutions, regulating digital transactions. Far from these kinds of assumptions of a digital positive sum game, critical scholarship chastises the digital divide. Usages of this concept come in two major variants. First, there is the argument about access to digital technology, underwritten by economic inequalities (Cullen, 2001; Rogers, 2001; Soomro, Kale, Curtis, Akcaoglu, & Bernstein, 2020; Van Dijk & Kenneth, 2003). Second, there are arguments that tie these economic and access inequalities in with social hierarchies (Atintande, 2020; Jandrić & Kuzmanić, 2015; Kamil, 2020). In this interpretation, there is a hierarchical background that structures opportunities arising from digital disruption highly unequally across the globe. There is a linkage between these kinds of argumentation and the reconfiguration of authority discussed later. Digitally winning over can also leave a mark on the foreground. Since the corona pandemic, digital platforms have become increasingly salient for preparing international negotiations and diplomatic summits. They shape communication that designs institutions (Bjola & Manor, 2022). Recent studies show, for instance, that virtual venues affect not only the format but also the substance of international negotiations (Bjola  & Coplen, 2022; Ashbrook  & Zalba, 2021). Yet digital processes of winning over can sediment further into the background. Digital processes of winning over generate new forms of knowledge, rationalities and representations of the world. Just as advances in geographically mapping the world in the 16th and 17th centuries made it possible to imagine something like a territorially demarcated state (Ruggie, 1993), today’s networks of actor groupings point towards an episteme that revolves around complex and multiple relations of digital interconnectedness (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Hayles, 2016). Some time ago, this prompted scholars such as Choucri (2000, p. 256) to write about the ‘global citizen’ as a possible trajectory of future world politics. More recent scholarly contributions are more sobering in nature (Hall, 2022; McKay & Tenove, 2021). There is not just overcoming intersubjective boundaries, there has also been plenty of building new ones and strengthening existing ones. Transnational right-wing populist networks, for example, are very much based on Self

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versus Other representations of relations, which digitally re-shape not only international but also domestic orders (Engesser, Ernst, Esser, & Büchel, 2017; Geva & Santos, 2021), ranging from Brazil to the United Kingdom and India to the United States, and the evolving domestic orders feeding back into international ordering processes. In extreme cases, digital channels of communication are abused to dehumanise the enemy, for example, the Rohingya in Myanmar (Cosentino, 2020, pp. 144–122). Processes of winning over, usually as a – unintended but very consequential – side product, generate background knowledge on who is entitled to speak online and who is not. Judging by the available evidence, there are two contradictory trends. Some voices do come to the fore that were previously silenced. Some feminist scholars show, for example, that recent advocacies such as the MeToo movement could not have gained momentum outside cyberspace, especially not in authoritarian states (Tan & Xu, 2022; Yin & Yu, 2021). Yet there is also research dubbing the Tim Berners-Lees, Steve Jobs and Mark Elliot Zuckerbergs of this world colonisers of cyberspace (Jandrić & Kuzmanić, 2020) and cautionary tales of small elites dominating online debates even in established democracies (Kelly, Hindman & Kazys Varnelis, 2009). In Bourdieu’s language, digital disruption gives rise to a new form of capital, labelled information capital or digital capital. Some actors possess the digital hardware and skills necessary to prevail (Ignatow & Robinson, 2017). Voice, overall, continues to be distributed very unequally, even though there are occasional windows of opportunity for a more inclusive debate. From Agential and Ordering Processes to Technological Ones (and So On)

Many authors listed earlier, most notably realist and liberal but also a fair share of constructivist and critical theories, assume linear causality. Studying digital international relations, however, necessitates taking feedback loops seriously. Whenever agential and ordering processes come to be infused by digital doings, these add to pressures to augment the sources of digital disruption. More digital disruption in the technological processes, in turn, puts again more pressure on agential processes, from there on to ordering processes, and so on. There are two pathways through which international relations comes to add to digital technological processes. First, agential processes feed back into the sources of digital disruption. To give a few examples, states using digital technology to coerce or prevent from being coerced look for ever more novel technological ways of doing so. Relations between Russia and Estonia, for example, are characterised by such a pattern, resulting in a small power punching much above its weight in the digital realm (Veebel & Ploom, 2016). Reaping benefits resulting from advances in digital technology, many state and non-state actors seek to digitally advance

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further. This ranges from agricultural production (Liu et al., 2021) via pandemic preparedness (Whitelaw et al., 2020) to global trade (Ahmed, 2019) and finance (Sibanda et al., 2020). Technologically sophisticated authoritarian governments, above all China’s, push for the invention of technological means to ever tighten the control of the internet, spread their messages, put new tools to use to increase the surveillance of their own population and strengthen their international digital competitiveness (Feldstein, 2019; Yu, 2020). Second, ordering processes channel agential processes over and over towards putting more pressure on technological processes. A balance of power system, for example, may appear stable for a while (Lee, 2018) but arms races, adding technological innovation after innovation to existing offensive and defensive military capabilities, are likely to lead to a situation in which one power gains the advantages over its rival(s) (Chin, 2019). This is, so to say, a digital reading of Mearsheimer’s tragedy of great power politics (2001). Ontological security, linked to digital practices, are prone to sustain patterns of moving back and forth between technological, agential and ordering process (Liebetrau & Christensen, 2021; Lupovici, 2022). Debates about the future of the liberal world order need to take the digital dimensions of international relations into account, too. There are different scenarios, but they all have a lot to do with how much ordering processes put pressure on technological ones. Given the global competition for innovative digital technology, Lund and Tyson (2018) see China as the power that gains the most. Due to its technological edge, they claim that the centre of gravity of the global order moves eastward and, therefore, away from the liberal order. An alternate scenario posits the emergence of a more limited liberal world order, comprised of tech-democracies engaged in a competitive dynamic with a digitally authoritarian order. They seize upon the opportunities to deepen cooperation by embarking on digital innovation together and excluding others (Cohen & Richard, 2020). Such a scenario points towards an ever-increasing global digital divide – among states but also within them (Chen & Wellman, 2004; Heeks, 2021). There are all kinds of plausible future scenarios involving ordering processes linked to agential processes of winning over as well. They, too, point towards adding to the sources of digital disruption. On the one hand, a more deliberately minded order could put pressure on digital innovation in order to make deliberation run more smoothly. Digital technology, opening up new communication channels, making communicative encounters more transparent, presenting arguments in clearer ways, can foster ‘augmented deliberation’ (Gordon & Manosevitch, 2011). On the other hand, ordering processes resting on manipulative communication exert pressures to introduce ever more sophisticated technologies to suppress some messages and diffuse others. In a ‘post-truth world order’ (Cosentino, 2020) or even a ‘hacked world order’ (Segal, 2016), state and non-state actors rely on technological innovation to outmanoeuvre one another.6

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Studies on digital performing point towards different scenarios for reconfiguring power, authority and even agency itself, thus pushing for more novelty in technological processes. When hand-on background knowledge comes to be increasingly digitalised, it may also become increasingly attuned to resort to new technological solutions (Smith, 2018). Over time, we may be headed towards algorithmic kinds of governance (Aradau & Blanke, 2017), where seeking technological solutions to governance problems becomes something akin to second nature to the actors. Hybrid or even digital agency would push this co-evolution of technological and ordering processes into directions that are yet to manifest for us today (Ågerfalk, 2020). A key feature of hybrid or posthuman agency is that agency will not be located with a singular specific agent. It will be rather rooted in an uneven topography of assemblages, associations and relationships by which humans and technologies combine and co-evolve to make sense of the world (Chandler, 2013). Chapter Preview

The first part of the book, entitled ‘Re-conceptualizing International Relations’, examines how we need to overhaul our usage of frequently employed concepts such as power, sovereignty and knowledge in order to explore the interplay of technological, agential and ordering processes. The second part zooms in on agential processes, putting under scrutiny how they are affected by technological processes, and vice versa. The third part focuses on ordering processes and explores their linkages to technological and agential processes.7 The first part of the book starts with a chapter by Richard Harknett, who rewrites realism for the purpose of studying digital international relations. The key concepts of power, security, structure and interests remain very much in place, but the author amends them in important ways. The fundamental organising principle of cyberspace is technological interconnectedness. This creates a core condition of constant contact among actors and leads to a dynamic of persistent action in the pursuit of security through sustaining initiative in anticipation of exploitation of vulnerabilities inherent in the system of network computing. Focusing on state sovereignty, Lucas Kello explores how the emergence of computer technology has challenged states’ customary dominance in core areas of national security. Yet challenges such as the rise of multinational technology firms and non-state threats to state security notwithstanding, he contends that states push back successfully, especially in the security realm. Giampiero Giacomello and Johann Eriksson conclude the first section of the book by analysing how knowledge and power hang together in digital international relations. They contend that technological shifts, the growing salience of the private sector and the rise of what they refer to as ‘super-individuals’ reconfigure international relations. They put particular emphasis on the latter. Navigating cyberspace requires increasingly specialised knowledge and expertise, and not many actors have these capacities.

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The second part of the book turns the spotlight on agential processes. Marcus Holmes and Nicholas Wheeler elaborate on the conditions under which social bonds can be expected to be formed between individuals, including diplomats and leaders. They argue that diplomats and leaders are not wrong to point out the limitations of video conferencing technologies, but they have not articulated the fundamental nature of the problem, which includes a lack of information richness, the preclusion of serendipitous encounters, and crucially, a reduced ability to exclude outsiders. Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook analyses networked urban diplomacy. Re-defining paradiplomacy, she submits that major cities networking with one another increasingly harness power around transnational issues in order to pursue shared interests. Studying three institutionalised networks, C40, Global Parliament of Mayors and Global Covenant of Mayors, she sketches scenarios for how networked cities and nation-state diplomacy could change patterns of competition and collaboration on an enlarged diplomatic stage and perhaps even contribute to resolving collective action problems. Nina Hall examines advocacy organisations during the COVID crisis, a time when most had to organise themselves digitally. She finds that digital advocacy organisations rarely campaign across borders. Most were focused on national concerns. Overall, this chapter suggests that the internet enables new tactics, strategies and organisational forms but it does not always lead to more transnational advocacy. The state remains a strong focus for activists even in the digital era. The third part focuses on ordering processes. Claudia Aradau discusses the evolution of the global security order. She contends that security professionals have added the language and methods of computing for the purposes of prediction to other forms of anticipatory knowledge such as pre-emption and prevention, that the dichotomy of individual/mass intersects more and more with self/other dichotomies, and that we are witnessing a shift from risk societies to targeted societies. These transformations reach deeply into the background of the global security order. Miguel Otero-Iglesias zooms in onto the global economic order. Adapting Susan Strange’s structural power framework to digital international relations, he argues that the interaction between the United States, China and the EU (and to a lesser extent Russia) will be crucial for shaping the structure of the international system and its geopolitical dynamics in the 21st century. Studying contestation in the global climate order, Alena Drieschova contends that social media change the opportunity structure for social movements. This applies to the climate strike movements as much as it does to climate sceptics. Yet the former were significantly more successful in making use of this newly evolving opportunity structure. Victoria Baines investigates attempts to build foreground institutions in the nascent global digital order. She contends that there are, on the one hand, significant barriers such as the transformative power of digital technologies that frustrate efforts towards their regulations. On the other hand, there are also promising new practices such as new multi-stakeholder models and new alliances, that may be able to overcome some of these hurdles.

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At the end of the book, the editors summarise the findings of the chapters, compare and assess the interplay of technological, agential and ordering processes, and formulate an agenda for further research. The latter makes us move from digital international relations to Digital International Relations (DIR). Digital international relations will re-shape international relations more and more. This means that International Relations (IR), that is, the discipline studying it, has to adapt as well. Conclusion

It is not that International Relations scholars overlook digital aspects of international relations. As reviewed earlier, there is important research on how digitalisation affects particular dimensions of international relations such as security and communication. What we as International Relations scholars are still missing, however, is the big picture. What is digital international relations? How does it evolve? How are we to study it? Defining digital international relations as the disruptive interplay of digital technologies and power structures in global politics leading to changes in agency, conflict patterns and ordering dynamics we proceeded to develop a map for studying digital international relations. The map links technological, agential and ordering processes. It is meant to help scholars study the transformations that sources of digital disruption, via agential or via agential and ordering processes, bring about in global politics. The contributors to this edited volume generate fascinating new insights into how digital international relations evolves, and how technological, agential and ordering processes are involved in this evolution. This will prompt us, towards the end of the book, to tackle the question of what digital international relations means for our discipline of International Relations. We will make a case for Digital International Relations (DIR), that is, upgrading, augmenting and rewiring our field of study. We conceive of this field as a pluri-discipline that is in constant exchange with other disciplines, including across the great divide of the social and natural sciences. If our field is to lay bare the sites, issues and forms of contestation that digital disruption has activated in global politics, it simply cannot continue business as usual. Notes 1 We borrow the differentiation of agential and ordering processes from Adler (2019) but cast our net much more widely when it comes to discussing them. We do not push for particular conceptualisations of these processes but rather seek to demonstrate that whatever major International Relations angle researchers put to use, digital international relations matter more and more. 2 Putting strong emphasis on how these processes transform agency, Fouad (2022) moves away from ‘anthropocentric’ concepts of agency, making a case for the ‘agency of syntactic information’. 3 See https://futurium.ec.europa.eu/en/digital-compass.

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4 We borrow this distinction between foreground and background again from Adler (2019) and, again, interpret these categories more broadly in order to use them as signposts to discuss the existing literature. 5 From this, according to some authors, follows a strategy of ‘persistent engagement’ (Fischerkeller & Harknett 2019). Those authors contending that building and maintaining a balance of power are still possible are vigorously opposed to such a strategy (Klimburg, 2020; Klimburg & Almeida, 2019). 6 Note that in our multifaceted world order, different kinds of pressures, such as ‘augmented deliberation’ and ‘post-truth’, can put pressure on technological processes simultaneously. 7 The chapters focus on functional fields of world order, including security, economics, environment and human rights as well as what happens in the interstices or liminal spaces through which they interconnect (Bátora & Hynek, 2014; Coleman, Kornprobst, & Seegers, 2019; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983).

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PART I

Revisiting Core Concepts

1 THE DISTRIBUTION OF POWER, SECURITY AND INTERCONNECTEDNESS The Structure of Digital International Relations Richard J. Harknett

Introduction

How can traditional realist variables of power, security and the structural constructs of anarchy and the distribution of power help us understand the conduct of international relations in the digital age? More specifically, how can realist analysis that has focused on the segmentation of state power through an emphasis on (securing) territoriality explain the dynamics that flow in and through cyberspace – an environment that rests on interconnectedness? It is this structural feature of interconnectedness, which creates a condition of constant contact (the opposite of territorial segmentation and episodic contact) that is critical to understanding cyberspace from an international security perspective. In the introductory chapter, Bjola and Kornprobst correctly see datafication as a source of disruption. It is the theoretical analysis of this chapter that what makes datafication pervasive, however, is the interconnected nature of network computing. It is the structural feature of interconnectedness that foundationally supports Bjola and Kornprobst’s three sources of digital disruption identified – datafication, speed and pervasiveness – and enables the agential process of forcing and the institutional foregrounding they discuss. To address the core question, of how realist assumptions can help illuminate global digital dynamics, the following analysis borrows, builds and broadens off realist logic to provide a new theoretical understanding of core global dynamics in the digital IR environ. This chapter argues that a structuralist approach to theorising rooted in the core realist concepts of the distribution of power and anarchy can be applied to understand global politics in its current digital context. However, the realist-based structuralism offered in this chapter differs significantly from the established theories DOI: 10.4324/9781003437963-3

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of offensive and defensive realism associated principally with John Mearsheimer (2001) and Kenneth Waltz (1979), respectively, and is anchored on the notion that international relations is primarily a struggle over autonomy, rather than power.1 The chapter then turns to understanding cyberspace2 through this structuralist lens and argues that cyberspace’s unique features function as an intervening layer – a lattice – that cannot be disentangled from the overall distribution of power and induces its own structural imperative in the way units must pursue their fundamental interest in relative autonomy. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how the overall distribution of power, which tends towards stability currently, maybe undermined by an intense digital-enabled competition, which the strategic environment of cyberspace is influencing and driving. In realist structuralist terms, cyberspace represents a distributed power environment in which tight margins of capability to impact other units’ sources of power induce states (among others) to compete intensely. Because this is structurally anchored, we should see this competition sustained. However, it is possible for this intensity to not cross over into conflict – an agreed competition is possible (Fischerkeller, Goldman, & Harknett, 2022). This conclusion is derived from a specific structural rendering of cyberspace that argues that the fundamental organising feature of cyberspace is technological interconnectedness, which creates a core condition of constant contact. In an interconnected environment, states are in constant contact with adversaries, allies, domestic and foreign citizens, and the private sector and business community (Fischerkeller & Harknett, 2020; Fischerkeller et al., 2022; Harknett & Goldman, 2016). From a structuralist perspective, interconnectedness and constant contact combined with the nature of the technology itself lead to an imperative of persistent action in the pursuit of relative autonomy. This autonomy is sought through sustaining initiative in the anticipation of exploitation of vulnerabilities inherent in the system of network computing that has become the backbone of 21st-century local, national and global interactions. The competition in this space, according to the theory developed here, should be intense for some time to come. On Interconnectedness and Segmentation

As the traditional contest over power and security continues within the terrestrial space, it is being influenced and affected, but importantly not replaced, by the strategic imperative that derives from cyberspace’s structural features. The global system is both anarchical and now interconnected. This recognition has implications not only for how power is distributed in the current international system, but for how we need to evaluate the distribution of power as a theoretical explanatory variable as well.3 If this proposition of interconnectedness and its interaction with anarchy holds, the challenge presented for both our understanding of digital international relations and the conduct of it is significant since so much of our pre-digital age

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understanding and conduct of international relations (and its theoretical explanation) assumes that segmentation, in the form of sovereignty, is fundamental to state behaviour. The basic notion of territoriality – the set of state policies and organisations meant to deny extension of direct political control or ameliorate indirect political influence over one’s territory from external forces (Herz, 1973; Hinsley, 1986) – rests on the proposition that the dirt underneath our feet can be segmented through drawn lines in the sand (we also segment the air and the sea similarly). Territoriality operationalises sovereignty, which is the construct that drives the international legal system and impacts how every state organises itself internally to protect and grow its sources of national power. What are we to make of territoriality and sovereignty in an environment of interconnectedness where securing sources of national power does not rest on resisting forcible violation of territorial boundaries because sources of national power are, through global networked computing, now structurally open to non-forcible exploitation every second of everyday? While the prospect of a re-imposition of segmentation exists, in part because cyberspace is human-constructed and can be reconstructed on a different organising feature, this chapter presumes the feature of interconnectedness holds for the next decades. We have plenty of theories that assume segmentation, but what if there truly is a distinct strategic environment of interconnectedness that now must be understood.4 Exploring that challenge through the logic of anarchy, the distribution of power, and security is the focus of this chapter. Implicit in asking this Rosenauian ‘what if’ theoretical question (Rosenau & Durfee, 2000) is acceptance of Bjola and Kornprobst’s concept of digital disruption as a starting point. On Structural Thinking

From a structuralist perspective, cyberspace is imposing a layer of strategic conditions to which states and non-state actors are aligning their security behaviours. They are doing so while still fundamentally reacting to the lack of centralised authority globally (anarchy) within the context of the specific distribution of power that exists. Bjola and Kornprobst have suggested that Digital IR theorising must take the feedback loops of structure and agential and ordering processes seriously given the disruptive context in which we find ourselves. This requires the addition to traditional realist focus on anarchy, power and security the construct of a cyber strategic environment – understood as an interconnected environment in which action can affect the relative distribution of sources of power through a distinctive logic and dynamic of persistent action as it relates to the core objective of securing those sources of power (Fischerkeller et al., 2022). From a structural perspective, how capabilities are distributed across an environment lacking centralised authority, but also now in constant contact with each other due to a technically interconnected system on which political, economic,

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social, military and organisational actions take place, should reveal why international relations flows as it does. Such a focus should provide us with an expectation about the key actors within the system and their behaviours. As Hans Morgenthau (1993, p. 7) himself suggested it is what is possible and not what is desirable that drives behaviour. If we accept the Bjola and Kornprobst notion of digital disruption as containing both creative and destructive dynamics that can simultaneously produce opportunity and vulnerability, realist structural concepts must effectively capture the simultaneity that exists when inherent vulnerability to exploitation creates a constant opportunity to exploit (a core consequence of cyberspace’s interconnectedness) and the pursuit of that opportunity reinforces and at times feeds further vulnerability.5 The point here is that the reinforcing nature of vulnerability and opportunity in cyberspace must be captured in IR theory. Companies continually introduce more technical vulnerabilities in pursuit of the opportunity of greater ease of access to data. The two outcomes cannot be separated but rather must be studied as a feedback loop of action. Similarly, states continually pursue zero-day exploits to advance opportunity even though the continued existence of such exploits can blow back on them, which, for example, occurred with the Eternal Blue exploit (Perlroth & Shane, 2019). And yet, states seeking zero-day exploitations spend significant time, talent and treasure on dealing with vulnerabilities directly and typically seat their cybersecurity policies on dealing with the vulnerability landscape essentially trying to solve the technical problems they are trying to exploit. In the end, the full range of Morgenthau’s ‘what is possible’ must be explored in the simple recognition that much is possible in cyberspace. The Structural Imperative of Autonomy and Interconnectedness

As argued previously (Harknett & Yalcin, 2012), a theory of structural autonomy rests on an understanding of the interplay between the distribution of power and anarchy. Units act in accordance with both anarchy and the distribution of power. They do not a priori favour one over the other. Since structure is composed of both an anarchical ordering principle and a shifting distribution of capabilities, structure both shapes agent behaviour and is iteratively modified by that behaviour as the distribution of capabilities changes (there is feedback). What vary are the strategies units will pursue in relation to the specific distribution of power they find themselves in. Cyberspace intervenes across this feedback to reinforce a particular way (cyber persistence) in which relative autonomy must be pursued if security is to be achieved. Structure as the overarching conditional environment, at both the anarchic and interconnected levels, reinforces the identities and orientations of the agents in it and re-shapes those orientations actively over time. Within the theoretical framework of structural autonomy, we can assume that reasoning and responsive actors

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form their identities, motivations and actions not from a desire that is independent from the structure but directly because of structural conditioning. They respond to the structural conditions with their available capabilities. We can assume units are not blind calculators with fixed strategies, but reasoning assessors of the structural context they find themselves within. We can assume that the units within the system of digital international relations hold complicated evaluations of the world in which they act and update their immediate interests according to where their capabilities place them on the distribution of power, globally. They reason and respond to the structural conditions, including the interconnected feature of global networked computing. They might have specific desires to attain but in cases where those desires do not fit into the power context in which they find themselves, we must assume they have the capacity to re-evaluate and re-describe their interests.6 We can assume that states, for example, can use code through cyber operations to achieve strategic ends (Harknett & Smeets, 2020), but those ends can differ significantly depending on their overall placement in the distribution of power. Theory should be able to capture the fact that North Korea, Russia, China and the United States all use the means of cyber operations in different ways. It is a versatility to achieve strategic gains that airpower, seapower and nuclear power lack in relative terms. Thus, in sum, structural autonomy theory suggests that international politics is characterised by units with organised power (the capacity for sustained action), who are reasoning and responsive to the international structure, which shapes not only behaviours but also motivations of units in an iterative and active realm of shifting distributions of power. The units to which we should focus our analytical attention are those that have the material capacity for sustained consequential action internationally. This means that our theories should not be bound to an assumption that units capable of consequential action relative to sources of modern power need exclusively or primarily remain states. Nor, due to the low entry costs of cyber capabilities, should we exclude from analysis states that in the terrestrial world would not be considered ‘great’ or ‘major’ powers. The condition of constant contact that flows from interconnectedness and the very nature of the technology itself (the ease at which it is modified through every new software and hardware and processing version) means that technology companies and smaller states understood as units can have consequential effects. Whether they can, overtime, achieve sustained capacity to act globally (what still distinguishes states over other units) remains an open question – but theory should not preclude the possible need to explain the behaviour and effects of such units. If the algorithm becomes a contested source of power, who leads in Artificial Intelligence (AI) development and application globally may matter significantly in explaining the flows of global relations. Alphabet (the parent company of Google) may have to be understood as a strategic actor, rather than merely an economic one, if it continues to rival and extend past the capabilities of some states to produce, deploy and control globally algorithmic decision-making

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capacity. In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin accepted this reality noting in a speech that ‘Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind . . . whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world’ (Vincent, 2017). While President Putin may have assumed that the leader will be a state, IR theory must be open to a possible non-state interloper from ‘big tech’ given the nature of the technology itself and the capacity held by such companies. Autonomy, Self-Reliance and Interconnectedness

What is the central dynamic that logically follows from the interaction of anarchy, the distribution of power and reasoning and responsive units? In contrast to defensive and offensive realism, structural autonomy argues that states are not inherently preoccupied with power maximisation or security, but rather more fundamentally with seeking autonomy. All that can be derived from a structural imperative about unit motivation is that it is not about accumulating a capacity, but rather being self-reliant in having the wherewithal to act on that capacity in a sustained and significant manner. The focus on a wherewithal to act (autonomy) or the inability to do so derives from the combined lack of a central authority and the variance of capabilities arrayed across several units (anarchy and the distribution of power). Thus, structurally derived, it can be assumed that units seek autonomy, which is defined as possession of the wherewithal for the organised capacity to act in a sustained fashion. Seeking autonomy should be understood not as a unit-based and generated motivation, but rather as a structurally generated necessity. Understanding autonomy as the basic motivation shifts our understanding of Waltz’s and Mearsheimer’s focus on security or power maximisation. Those pursuits are different strategies (among many others) for achieving the base structural necessity of being autonomous. Alone, the combination of anarchy and a distribution of power cannot a priori tell us whether states are under threat, and thus concerned about survival and fixed on how they will go about dealing with their condition. All anarchic structure and distributed capacity can reveal is that we are dealing with a system of relatively autonomous actors. If the system persists, we can derive the fact that at least some of the actors are successfully seeking and achieving autonomy relative to each other. Thus, structural autonomy offers a substantive modification to Morgenthau’s traditional supposition as noted earlier. Rather than a struggle over power, international politics is best understood, more purely, as a struggle for autonomy.7 The concept of autonomy differs from the concepts of power and security as motivations and does not have a link to any defensive or offensive presuppositions. It liberates our analytical ability to assess international politics more broadly. It does not tell us that states act defensively because of their defensive intentions or offensively because of their offensive intentions. Those intentions and the actions that ultimately follow from them are strategic responses to the structural conditions

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that units face, not pre-ordained defaults. This logic parallels the operational-level logic dominating the cyber strategic environment. According to cyber persistence theory, there is no offense dominance or offense-defence advantage in cyberspace, only offense-defence fluidity, which contributes to the necessity of finding security through initiative persistence (Fischerkeller et al., 2022). In a structural analysis of international politics, there can be no overarching unit motivation of survival or search for wealth and power independent of the distribution of power. Units that assess that the international environment presents opportunities will not feel threatened, while units who conclude that their position in the distribution of power is under threat may be compelled to take defensive measures.8 Opportunistic or threat-responsive behaviour flows from the structure of international politics and cannot be pre-assigned as a dominant motivation. At its root, we must assume that units simply want to possess the capacity to act in a sustained manner that preserves and enhances their capacity to act into the future – they merely want to remain autonomous. Whether that autonomy is threatened to the point at which survival is at stake is dependent upon principally where their capacity rests across the distribution of power. Not all units will find themselves assessing their policy choices set against a backdrop of surviving, which implies a threat to their existence. A default to a survival-first response follows only from a particularly threatening distribution of power and not all distributions of power will threaten every state’s existence to the point that it can be assumed that survival is a base motivation. If we are to offer an explanatory framework truly anchored on structure, then the distribution of power combined with anarchy must matter in an explanatory way; that is, we must assume that it will shape unit behaviour and units must define themselves against those particular and distinctive distributions; otherwise, the distribution of power is either static (which it is not) or meaningless (which, in a structural realist theory, it cannot be). As we shall see adding the intervening layer of interconnectedness leads to a very particular behaviour that all units must address. A structural theory salient to digital disruption must be alive to all these structurally driven conditions and the behaviours that will flow from them. What we can observe and deduce is that there exists both a reinforcement of the imperative of autonomy due to anarchy and a restriction on pure freedom of action imposed by the conditional opportunities and threats embedded in the distribution of power and interconnectedness. Idealised, autonomous actors would prefer pure freedom of action and have direct control over their individual destinies, but the everpresent and shifting distribution of power to which they must react is a fundamental feature that while constraining that pure freedom also enables its never-ending pursuit. At a base level, units’ standing in the international distribution of power plays a significant role in defining the strategies of autonomy they will adopt. Structural autonomy also assumes it is more accurate to understand the anarchic order as a self-reliance system. Units try to promote their autonomy in such a system by relying on their capabilities to act by adjusting their desires and behaviours

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in accordance with their capabilities relative to others. No specific orientation rules unit power, but rather the distribution of unit power rules unit orientation. Systems with no central authority force the units to rely on their own capabilities to take control of their own affairs, which might include both threats and opportunities, which due to the interconnectedness of cyberspace are fluidly everpresent at least minimally in the form of simultaneous vulnerability and opportunity to exploitation through cyber operations and campaigns. There might be different distributions of power imposing different specific ranges of responses on units. By relying on their power, units may act offensively or defensively depending on the specific conditions they face as they struggle to sustain autonomy. Due to the nature of cyberspace, the condition of constant contact drives, at least states presently, to persistently anticipate exploitation. In a self-reliance system, threat to survival is not ever-present, but rather it is both the overall specific distribution of power in which units find themselves plus the interconnected strategic environment of cyberspace that will structure the choices units must make relying on what they can achieve. A self-reliance system follows from, but also reinforces, the anarchical nature of the system. This reinforcing dynamic of structure (which is not static) is critical to recognise. If anarchy is the organising principle of international politics, then the most primitive state motivation should properly follow its explicit description. In the literature, there is a traditional common ground in the definition of this ­central concept. It is commonly defined and adopted by realists and non-realists too, as ‘the lack of a central authority’ (Milner, 1991). An anarchic system should be defined as a mechanistic society in which units perform the same set of tasks.9 States in the anarchic system of international politics do not delegate fully their authority to legislate, execute and judge to any higher or equal authority because they hold some share of the distribution of power. This is the structural connection between anarchy and the distribution. Defining the international system as anarchic and characterised by the distribution of power requires recognising the existence of units who are motivated by the structure to promote their autonomy rather than delegating all or some parts of it to some other authority. This is the minimum condition for a system to be anarchic. This is also the maximum limit for deriving a unit motivation from the equation provided by the definition of an international system as a combination of anarchy and a distribution of power. Any other unit motivation like seeking survival or maximising power requires some additional properties beyond either the concept of anarchy or the distribution of units populating it. For instance, if anarchy was defined as an environment full of opportunities, then one could assume states as opportunity-seeking agents or if it was defined as an environment with no opportunity but full of threats then one could assume a survival motivation. But if it is defined merely as the lack of a central authority then logically the only available inference for unit motivation is the denial of central authority or, more precisely, the denial of a delegation of the

The Distribution of Power, Security and Interconnectedness  37 TABLE 1.1  Adding the Digital to International Relations Theory10

Theory

Ordering Principle (Structure)

System Fundamental Unit Orientation Dynamic Motivation (The default behaviour following from the fundamental motivation)

Defensive Realism Offensive Realism Neoliberal Institutionalism Digital Structural autonomy

Anarchic Anarchic Anarchic

Self-help Survival Self-help Survival Self-help Absolute well-being SelfAutonomy reliance

Anarchic + distributed capacity + interconnectedness

Security-maximisation Power-maximisation Wealth-maximisation Status quo or change which depends on the concentrated or diffused distribution of power

autonomy that sustains the anarchic structure. If we assume an anarchic organising principle then we must assume that the units capable of relying on their own capabilities, who are sustaining that anarchic order are doing so because they want it and can sustain it via their individual self-reliance (and thus even if a unit pursued transformation to hierarchy the self-reliance of others would constrain the attempt). Therefore, logically, the only available inference that can be made from the definition of international structure as anarchic is the existence of units structurally driven to promote their autonomy by the presence of a distribution of power in which self-reliance is possible. There is a reason for the reinforcement and maintenance of anarchy, and it is the unit fundamental motivation to remain autonomous. If any unit in the system was powerful enough to turn it into hierarchy or all units were helplessly in need of survival, there would be no anarchic system. The maintenance of autonomy, not its delegation, is the structurally derived rule of international politics.11 There is a central cause of anarchy and that is the presence of a distribution of power in which self-reliance is possible.12 While absolute autonomy is an elusive goal, relative autonomy is the defining characteristic of international politics.13 The Shaping Effect of the Power Environment

Assuming self-reliance in the pursuit of autonomy, structural autonomy theory orients its explanatory focus around two archetypes of power environments that allow for shifts and, in combination with the fundamental motivation of seeking autonomy, produces different incentives, behaviours and systemic outcomes. The framework identifies two base-level forms of systemic power: a distributed power environment and a concentrated power environment. While the base motivation is to seek autonomy, how units go about doing that will depend on whether they find

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themselves within one of these two environments and where individually they find themselves in the relative distribution of power spread across either environment. The next section describes these two base power environments first and then turns to adding to the explanatory framework the intervening lattice of cyberspace. The Diffused Power Environment

In a diffused power environment, relative power is spread across several units with marginal differences among some set of core actors. For a diffused power environment to exist, a small gap in power must subsist between a minimum of two units and can encompass many more. What have traditionally been called bipolar and multipolar systems have more in common than offensive and defensive realists have considered and are better explained under the single category of a diffused power structure. Within such a diffused power environment, there is an incentive to seek change in relative power positions and in the overall distribution of power itself. Since gaps are small, advances in material capacity will affect autonomy more directly (and potentially more immediately). Opportunities and potential threats will be scrutinised to see if positive change can be advanced, or negative change can be avoided. One characteristic of such diffused power environments is that this behavioural orientation towards change will tend to lean the overall system towards conflict – the propensity for major war is higher in diffused power environments. This outcome tendency holds even if states within the distributed power environment frame their behaviour and intentions as being primarily defensive. Because of tighter gaps in relative power in a diffused power environment more and more units can act in accordance with their individual goals and strategies. Importantly, the increased capability of each actor does not mean that they become more autonomous; if in a diffused power environment, others are increasing their power as well. Under such conditions, units become more and more concerned with structural constraints. It becomes an undesirable environment because of the decreased level of autonomy for all. Additionally, since small changes in gaps in power may impact the position of a unit in the diffused environment, units will not favour the status quo and if the possibility arises, their default orientation is to transform the system, or minimally to somehow shift where they sit within a tight or tightening distribution of power. The combination of a macro-level orientation to get out from under a tight diffused power environment and gain more autonomy and actual change-oriented decision-making will structurally orient overall global politics towards the potential for intensified competition or conflict. It is not the polarity of the system as structural construct, nor the defensive or offensive unit proclivity (a unit-level assumption) that offers us the best explanatory basis. Rather, it is the recognition that power is diffused across two or more units and that the distribution of power creates both opportunities and constraints to autonomy. The structural potential for major war exists in distributed power environments and we can hypothesise that the more immediate cause of when such major conflict

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occurs relates to the tightening of the shares of power held by units across that distributed environment, whether the distribution is between 2, 3, 4, or a dozen units.14 Concentrated Power Environments

The alternative to a diffused power environment is present when there are large gaps in power between units, creating a concentrated power structure around a single unit.15 Globally, this would exist when one unit achieved a power differential with all other units in the system. Historically, this power environment has emerged regionally, rather than globally, although much attention has been directed to the notion of unipolarity in the post-Cold War. In concentrated power environments, units in search of an increased level of autonomy tend to prioritise retention of the power structure (and their place in it) over change.16 This holds for both sorts of actors that exist in concentrated power environment. Intuitively, the most powerful actor who has concentrated most of the material capabilities across the system would favour retaining such a power environment and thus their place in that distribution as the leading unit. However, this orientation towards retaining the environment holds for secondary units as well. Such actors, because of their inability to challenge directly the status quo must content themselves with maintaining their autonomy within what is possible, rather than desiring an unmanageable pursuit of systemic transformation, which could risk their autonomy due to the concentrated nature of the power structure. Here, it is the gap in power that prioritises retaining the status quo over seeking change. It is also the gap in power that structurally orients the overall system to limited conflicts (‘limited’ here means non-systemic, while war itself might be intense among its protagonists it does not threaten the stability of the overall system). Importantly, this tendency towards minor conflict holds even if states engage in behaviours that are framed as offensive. The leading state’s uses of force in a concentrated power system will, by structural definition, tend to be limited in scope and directed to specific instances in which such use is necessary (or perceived to be necessary) to retain the status quo overall. The leading state will have a limited preventive orientation or limited power adjusting objective behind their use of force that will not tend to push the overall system towards global war. This offers a better explanatory frame for examining US policy since the 1990s, for example. Secondary states may also act offensively or opportunistically to increase their level of autonomy. They do not defensively balance the would-be hegemon because of the possible risks of doing so but they also do not jump on its bandwagon because that would harm their level of autonomy. Instead, structural autonomy expects that such units will employ clever and nuanced policies of increasing their level of autonomy without directly challenging the overall concentrated nature of the power distribution. Intriguingly, the emergence of cyberspace has created within a relative concentrated global power environment a strategic (sub-)environment that aligns to the logic of a tight diffused power system.

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The Lattice of Cyberspace

Over the course of human history, technological shifts have served as intervening variables in the overall arrangement of distributions of power. Those units that could anticipate and harness the emergent technology found their relative position change positively. For most of human history, these technological moments have reset strategic environments ranging from those that are defensively advantaged (think, the First World War) to offensively advantaged (think, 1990–91 Gulf War). Only recently in human history, however, have we faced a technological disruption that fundamentally altered the way one had to think about security strategically (for purposes of analysis, ‘strategic’ is understood to mean an environment in which sources of national power can be altered through adversarial action). In 1945, the destructive capability leap achieved in the atomic bomb enabling one plane with one bomb to destroy one city challenged millennia-long thinking about security. Whether armed with spear, moat, horse or tank, the conventional strategic environment was one defined by the capacity to secure oneself through one’s own actions and capabilities. At any given time, the conventional strategic environment might be technologically shaped towards advantages of one type of technical, tactical and operational combination (offense vs. defence), but security primarily rested in one’s own hands – autonomy necessitated some rudimentary capacity to secure and success in security essentially went to those that adapted to the advantages of the environment more effectively (in terms of applied scale, scope and speed). The same held on the opportunity side of increasing material power through the same means. The advent of the atomic bomb reset the core security question to a fundamentally different equation: how do I secure when I cannot defend? The nuclear strategic environment shifted to one of offense dominance, and thus security rested on convincing the other side not to attack in the first place. Deterrence became the response to this strategic environment and possession of or pursuit of nuclear weapons became a significant factor in how the distribution of power overall played out and continues to play out internationally since 1945 (Fischerkeller et al., 2022). For the development of theory purposes, this chapter assumes that cyberspace represents another deep technological disruption (not simply a shift) and aligns with Bjola and Kornprobst’s notion that this digital disruption is both immensely creative and potentially destructive, simultaneously. Its impact on securing sources of power is so profound that we must consider the existence of a third strategic environment of contemporary international relations with its own primary logic. It does not displace the nuclear or conventional environments, but rather forms a lattice structure that supports inclusive activity (in cyberspace) and cross-domain activity (through cyberspace) that is distinct in its structurally induced dynamics. Specifically, cyberspace at its technological core has created an interconnected environment in which the sources of national power – economic, military, politicalcultural, informational and natural are exposed to direct and indirect interaction

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and exploitation. This interconnectedness can lead to benign and positive outcomes as well as malignant and negative outcomes. In this sense, it can be understood as an organising feature of a sub-structure within international relations that creates its own conditionality – specifically the condition of constant contact. This is different than in the terrestrial world in which contact with someone else’s sources of national power (and their contact with yours) might be understood as episodic, latent or potential. The most direct instance of contact is during times of war when cross-border incursion can destroy, disrupt and dislocate sources of national power. When the condition of war subsides, the contact does as well, back, primarily, to a condition of latent or potential contact. To be interconnected, however, is to be in constant contact, which translates into an expectation that somewhere someone globally has access to some aspect of your national power to a degree that direct alteration is possible – and given the nature of the technology itself, such alteration may not be noticed immediately. This interconnectedness means that strategic behaviour of states cannot be segmented from economic actors, allies and individuals, but must anticipate all of these interactions. This is due to the technology itself in combination with the structure of interconnectedness and constant contact (Fischerkeller et al., 2022). Part of the nature of networked computing technology and the digital interfaces used to access it is that core computer code serves simultaneously as the terrain of the space and the means by which one traverses the terrain. So, a change in the one changes the other. A change in software to achieve a new function creates a new digital space for that function, which then typically compounds further change in processing that links to hardware and thus requires change in the hardware itself overtime, which iteratively requires software updates to occur. Assessed in terms of seeking autonomy, it means that you can protect or advance your national sources of power (this is not an offense-dominant environment), but you can only confidently protect or advance in the moment of a specific configuration of software-hardware and the processing that links them; and that moment is relatively fleeting. It means that you must assume that someone has the opportunity to change conditions such that they advance further opportunities to enhance their capacity to act – their autonomy. This global technological space is ever evolving and importantly, the means to move and construct can be refined, re-purposed and reused at a scale, scope and speed that is strategically significant. In line with Bjola and Kornprobst’s expectations, the sources of digital disruption are generating a fluidity in opportunity and vulnerability that is sustained and globally salient. So, what does the combination of interconnectedness, constant contact and an ever-evolving means and terrain amount to strategically? In a phrase, relative initiative matters. A unit will be relatively more autonomous if it can anticipate the exploitation of its systems’ vulnerability before they are exploited, while simultaneously leveraging the opportunity to exploit others’ systems. The combination of these two factors provides the unit capacity for initiative, which in the most

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fundamental way asserts and reinforces the unit’s fundamental orientation to seek and struggle over autonomy. The only way to seize and retain initiative in such a dynamic environment is to persist in the pursuit of it. To do otherwise is to cede the capacity to define the conditions of security and insecurity to others and to miss the opportunity to change the relative distribution of power, which the digital environment can directly impact. The cyber strategic environment’s structural imperative of initiative persistence aligns with the fundamental and overall structural imperative to seek autonomy. Interconnectedness does not supplant the structural feature of anarchy understood as the absence of centralised authority but rather reinforces it. The original technical objective of the ARPANET was to create a communication structure without a centre (no centralised authority) and, thus, the network structure in fact aligns with the organising nature of anarchy conceptually. Without a hierarchy of control, what interconnectedness induces – persistence in the pursuit of initiative – logically reinforces the self-reliance imperative of all units within the global distribution of power. Cyberspace, in this conceptualisation, represents a tightly knitted diffused power environment in which slight margins separate units making them intensely focused on ways in which they can gain or lose relative autonomy. The core structural features of cyberspace thus induce a propensity that becomes imperative – one must persist in seeking initiative to advance autonomy; otherwise, autonomy might be overwhelmed due to the scale, scope and speed of activity that one cedes to others. One’s place in the overall distribution of power might not shift due to direct attack or war, but more complexly and subtly through not keeping apace and retaining some initiative that allows the wherewithal to act – to have autonomy. Bjola and Kornprobst are correct when they surmise that what may serve as a default line of success or failure is whether units can adapt to the pace of this environment. What is occurring at the individual user level is instructive of this adaptation variable. Individual human users of digital applications and networked computing are losing initiative as more and more decision-making is ceded to algorithm calculations of how one should get to the place to purchase what has already been imperceptibly chosen for oneself based on the behavioural data profile one has agreed to provide in return for the ‘free’ use of an app. When one contemplates that dynamic of loss of decision control at the international actor level (states and big technology companies), it becomes easy to see that the competition over relative power to retain autonomy is intense and intensifying. It is important to note, however, that the intensity of competition over initiative does not necessarily portend an increase in coercion and direct armed conflict (Fischerkeller & Harknett, 2019). There is little doubt that cyber means will enable warfare in different ways. A reasonable assumption is that states will not fight war without some cyberspace component moving forward, either in how it directly impacts the use of conventional weapons or through networked computing operations as stand alone. The empirical record of the past 30  years since networked

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computing has become ubiquitous suggests another reasonable assumption: that intense cyber and cyber-enabled competition may not lead to armed conflict or armed attack equivalence in cyberspace. Much of the literature in cyber security studies and in policy documents have focused on the potential for cyber war, but we should concentrate more on what has been and is happening daily in cyber strategic competition (Harknett & Smeets, 2020). States have been incredibly active in seeking to change the conditions of their own security and potential to advance their interests through cyber operations that fall well below the threshold of war. Traditionally, realists have focused on war because it was the primary means through which to shift relative power directly. Coercion – leveraging the prospective threat of imposed costs through deterrence and compellence – has been a major focus of security studies (Greenhill & Krause, 2018). But the intense competition in cyberspace is not primarily coercive in nature. It is not directed at shifting the other side’s decision calculus. Rather the primary activity is exploitation of vulnerability to set and reset the digital space in one’s favour. This can be both protective and additive in orientation, but it is continuous and persistent in application (Fischerkeller & Harknett, 2020). Contemporary Digital IR and Beyond

The complexity of contemporary international relations becomes apparent when relying on the most parsimonious of theories that, in part, strive to reduce such complexity. An application of structural autonomy theory to current global politics reveals a complex interplay between the systemic wide global distribution of power and the distinct seam that cyberspace has opened up for unit-level action of significance within a definable new cyber strategic environment. Set historically, 2023 still represents an overall distribution of power that is concentrated in nature around the United States. The presence or absence, engagement, or retreat of American involvement across the full spectrum of international issues, from public health during a pandemic, climate change, trade, regional conflicts and even domestic turns towards populism and authoritarianism matters globally more than the positions and decisions of other states. It is not simply the direct application of American economic power in the 2012 global great recession that mattered in buffeting the international economy. The recognition that no other state sought to take advantage of US economic decline during that period reinforces the notion of American centrality or pervasiveness globally (Kovac, 2021). When the United States withdraws from international treaties, such as the Paris Accords, it has a profound effect on global climate policy efforts; its reengagement with such international arrangement will set international action on a different course as well. In the military sphere, while non-state actors have engaged US forces for decades, no significant military seeks directly to challenge the United States at a core national security level via military action. The concentrated nature of the power distribution should drive most states towards stabilising the concentration,

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seeking if not cooperation, then some levels of accommodation even among rivals, basically an advancing of autonomy within the current system. States are consistently managing their relative autonomy, but none of the most capable major powers are willing to confront the United States in traditional realist expectations through military engagement to change the distribution of power. The last 30 years since the collapse of the bifurcated diffused power environment anchored around the United States and the Soviet Union have tracked along the expectations of structural autonomy hypotheses. There has been more systemic clever buy-in to manage and gain autonomy (e.g. consider China’s approach to the global free market system) than direct challenge through traditional power means. But as noted earlier, while the macro-level distribution is a system-wide relative concentration, the emergence of cyberspace has created a sub-strata or lattice that reflects an intensifying and tightening diffused power environment in which, through digital means, very tight margins exist on whether one is advancing or ceding autonomy.17 We, therefore, appear to be witnessing a two-level game in which through traditional means no one of significance is challenging the centrality of American overall capacity directly. No major state wants to go to war with the United States to change the distribution of power. And yet many are intensely challenging American power in and through cyberspace, in part because the conditionalities of cyberspace drive the imperative to do so (the idea of persistence), but also because the opportunity to achieve advancement of autonomy exists through the cyber strategic environment in ways that are not available in the conventional and nuclear strategic spaces. Cyberspace has opened the seam up for strategic competition with significant potential to affect the distribution of power without the need for conventional or nuclear warfare. Some of what is being witnessed in terms of state cyber activity is narrow strategic behaviour through leveraging a new means. North Korea seeks to sustain its autonomy through nuclear capability but is under immense pressure through economic sanctions to relinquish those means. North Korean manipulation of digital financial transactions through sophisticated strategic cyber campaigns is a direct attempt to undermine the international sanctions regime and pressure policy of the United States and its allies (Fischerkeller et al., 2022). Success in securing resources through cyber theft is not crime. It is a strategic response to the distribution of power and an attempt to build and retain the capacity for fundamental autonomy that nuclear possession provides, which without cyber-enabled undermining of sanctions might not be sustainable. Russia appears to have taken seriously the notion that cyberspace could undermine domestic confidence in institutional authority. Its management of its internal legal system seeks to limit such propensity by its own citizens aligned with outside supporters and in complete alignment with initiative expectations has, since the Panama Papers release, sought to put western states on the defensive over contesting institutional legitimacy (with a particular focus on experimenting with information manipulation during electoral cycles). Seen through this frame, Russia is

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persistently undermining institutional authority elsewhere to distract and deflect any attempts to undermine its own institutional authority at home. While Soviet propaganda efforts were renowned, Russian (and Iranian) cyber-enabled information manipulation as a means to support an overall delegitimisation campaign against US democratic authority is at a scale, scope and speed that makes it a direct threat to institutional national power in the United States (as witnessed in part with the storming of its Capitol to contest an election process on 6 January 2021). China appears to have a grander strategic sense of how its overall priorities can be advanced leveraging cyberspace. Behind in many research and development areas, China has used alignment of economic development policies, industrial policies, and where necessary illicit cyber campaigns to both close the gap in core technological R&D and begin to deploy an infrastructure globally that rests on a construct of information control as opposed to the information dissemination model upon which the western internet was anchored. The initiative is full spectrum across hardware, software, commercial and military uses all directed towards advancing a more autonomous China. While Russia might be trying to level the playing field, China is seeking to change core international policies and power dynamics as well as the overall distribution of power itself as structural autonomy expects in tight diffused power environment. The United States seems to be catching up to the duality of a macro-level concentrated power structure it (hesitantly and currently) leads and an intense substratum of a diffused cyber strategic environment. The US national security ­strategy documents acknowledge that great power competition is back and note importantly that rivals are seeking strategic gains below the threshold of war through cyberspace.18 The United States’ adoption of the doctrine of persistent engagement (Nakasone, 2020) portends a more active operational approach that seeks initiative in setting the conditions of cyber and national security. The United States’ reframing of issues like 5G adoption not as a technical vulnerability concern, which was its original framing, but as a competing model of internet governance and infrastructure structure suggests a shift towards a strategic competition modus operandi, specifically regarding the People’s Republic of China. Will the dynamics of this persistently competitive space cumulate to put at risk units’ relative position such that we could see shifts of power without traditional war? We must think through the study of such possibilities because structural incentives are there to produce such outcomes. We must also consider the potential for cross over, where the sustained loss of initiative in cyberspace induces resort to traditional means of conflict to wrest a macro-level slide in the distribution of power. While states currently appear to see it in their strategic advantage to compete below the threshold of war through cyberspace, it will take prudent statecraft to manage competition so that competitive success does not push a major power (or the United States) into a corner, where war comes under serious consideration as a last resort option. This is at least one explanation for Russian aggression against Ukraine in February of 2022.

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Finally, as scholars, we need to look beyond the tips of our shoes. Trend analysis would reveal at least two important considerations: algorithmic decision-making is going to advance in which the human will be taken out of the loop on many mundane repeatable tasks and eventually on tasks, such as driving, that while complex can be conditionalised and thus anticipated by the algorithm. The advantages of speed, scale and scope will only increase the pressure to hand more core functions that cumulate to national power over to the algorithm. As wealth generation, for example, requires the human to minimally move ‘on-the-loop’ if not out of it, contest over the algorithm itself may follow the pattern of previous core sources of power such as arable land or energy (oil), but with a twist. Do the companies that deploy the algorithms need the state as an intervening factor in their pursuit of profit or will the sophistication of the platform itself and the reliance the state has on it shift power to the point that some of the largest private sector owners and developers become strategic actors in their own right? Can they develop the wherewithal to have the capacity to act – relative strategic autonomy? In 2022, in the case of the Russian-Ukrainian war, we witnessed private sector companies such as Starlink and Microsoft have direct battlefield impact. These were individual private sector digital players affecting conduct of war through their independent decisions to support Ukraine. Armed conflict had always been the high-end province of states, but the interconnectedness of cyberspace meant what these companies independently decided to do early on in the war had direct impact (Smith, 2022; Vinion, 2022). While we must be open to unit diversification theoretically, the more immediate challenge is to understand how the dynamics of cyberspace that flow from its structure will impact the overall distribution of power. This analysis suggests that the persistence that follows from interconnectedness has minimally opened a seam in power competition and the imperative of self-reliance and the struggling over autonomy will intensify given the condition that small margins of initiative can impact sources of national power. Illuminating the conditions under which such competition remains short of armed conflict or its digital equivalent is a prescriptive necessity if the expectations of structural autonomy concerning tightly knitted diffuse power environments are accurate (that they tend to produce conflict). Persistent action by itself does not necessitate conflict, but it should focus the mind when thinking theoretically about digital IR if we wish to avoid such a negative outcome. At a minimum seen through cyber persistence theory and structural autonomy, Bjola and Kornprobst’s digital disruption feedback loop suggests a period of intense strategic competition is upon us internationally. Notes 1 For a full development of structural autonomy, see Harknett and Yalcin (2012). That 2012 argument did not consider the emergence of cyberspace from a structuralist perspective and, in particular, the sub-structure or ‘lattice’ of interconnectedness, introduced here as a new theoretical construct. The cyber-related application of the theory of structural autonomy is therefore the sole responsibility of this individual author, although where

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appropriate, direct sections of the previous Harknett and Yalcin work are re-presented, adapted and revised here so as to properly credit that original argument. 2 The US Government definition of cyberspace is a reasonable starting point: ‘A global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent network of information systems infrastructures including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers’ (National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2012). The terms cyberspace and cybersecurity remain contested, and this chapter introduces a structuralist notion of cyberspace as a lattice that lays across the overall distribution of power globally with a recognition of Betz and Stevens (2013) caution from eight years ago that conceptual clarity is critical if our study of cyber phenomena is to improve. 3 Interconnectedness should be understood as distinct from the notion of interdependence (Keohane & Nye, 1977). It fundamentally rests on the nature of networked computing. For the purposes of this chapter, cyberspace is defined as the ‘global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent network of information systems infrastructures including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers’ (NIST, Computer Security Resource Center). 4 For the alternative view on cyber interconnectedness and that reimposition is occurring in cyberspace, see Demchak and Dombrowski (2011). 5 In essence, defensive realism anchors explanation on the presence of vulnerability while offensive realism focuses on opportunity (Waltz, 2000). The realist-informed structural theory offered here assumes a dynamic and fluid environment in which the orientation must be focused on seizing initiative, not playing offense or defence. 6 This assumption might provoke criticism from a domestic-level perspective. Even if states might form their own preferences because of domestic reasons, they should be ignored in a structural analysis because structuralism is based on the belief of the removal of domestic concerns due to the overruling character of structural factors. For an example of domestic preference formation, see Moravcsik (1997). 7 This is a reference to Morgenthau’s famous frame about international politics as a struggle for power and its dominant role in the field. Also see Mearsheimer (2001). Rather than making a base assumption independently, a theory of structural autonomy derives the dynamic of struggle for autonomy from the structure which is composed of anarchy as a self-reliance system and distribution of power. This is the only unit level motivation that can be derived structurally and covers all units with its primitive and comprehensive nature. 8 For a similar but underdeveloped argument about the existence of both opportunities and constraints, see Mastanduno (1997). 9 Against most of the critics, Waltz was certainly right in claiming that states are functionally similar units. This is the most distinctive and only characteristic of the concept of anarchy. If state functions are differentiated, then there would be no conceptual meaning of the term anarchy. For the most prominent examples of these critics, see Buzan et al. (1993), Ruggie (1986). 10 In the real world of international affairs, there is no Rawls (1971) ‘veil of ignorance’. States are aware of the limitations of their power. They roughly know their position in the distribution of power. In making their decisions they take their relative power positions into consideration. They are individually unable to bring about a structural change, but in theory if every member of the system delegated their autonomy the system would change – this is the regional system lesson of the US former colonies moving from the articles of confederation to a ‘United’ States of America. But as long as one unit remained self-reliant and possessive of its autonomy, by definition the system overall would lack a central authority. The American change regionally did not affect the structure of the international system. The integration of the European Union can be thought

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of similarly. The other theoretical path to hierarchy is the successful coercion of the most powerful state in overwhelming all others’ capacity to remain self-reliant; that is the establishment of a global empire. Thus, autonomy could disappear through a path premised on the promise of greater reward via a buy-in to consolidate into a larger unit or through forcible aggregation. 11 A similar conceptualisation of hierarchy in anarchic orders might be found in David Lake’s writings. But Lake uses a legalist concept of hierarchy which deemphasises the significance of state autonomy at the expense of a higher authority, see Lake (2007). 12 The concept of autonomy which depends on capabilities should not be confused with sovereignty, which is a legal concept. Despite the legal claim for the sovereignty of all states since Westphalia, there can be no absolutely autonomous agent in the system. Autonomy requires the full freedom of an agent, which dominates the entire structure with its capabilities. If this was the case, then the international structure would not be an anarchic order but it would be defined as a hierarchic one. Autonomy is essentially an elusive goal. The struggle for it reproduces the anarchic order rather than collapsing it in favour of a specific unit. 13 Initial development without reference to cyberspace of this table is found in Harknett and Yalcin (2012). 14 Here structural autonomy departs from Waltz’s Man, the State and War in suggesting that explanation remains at the structural level, rather than as Waltz argued shifting to the unit or state level to explain the immediate causes of war (1959). Additionally, structure matters so much that it affects the type of war that is likely to be fought. In concentrated structures, war will be limited in objective and application, for example. 15 Concentrated power environment in this study refers to a high level of power concentration. It can be viewed as hegemonic position gained by one unit over others in terms of power. But that concept of hegemony should not be confused with hierarchy, when discussing the organising principle of the overall system itself. 16 Depending on specific power environments, states hold second-level motivations (orientation) for change or retention. Therefore, a state is defined as motivated for change if it wants to break down the distributed international power environment. In contrast, a state is defined as motivated for retention, if it views the status quo as a favourable international structure and pursues actions that do not challenge the overall concentrated nature of the system. 17 Some may argue that a high percentage of core cyber infrastructure of routers and internet service providers still remain in US territory and or under US influence, but the essential elements necessary to exercise cyber power directly are not inaccessible to others. The ability to act in cyberspace is diffused across many units. While it is primarily American aircraft carriers, which few nations have, that patrol the oceans, cyberspace capabilities to operate and exploit vulnerabilities to advance cumulative strategic gains are held, and most important to note, employed, regularly against American interests by many states. 18 This assertion is found coherently through official documents including the 2017 National Security Strategy, the 2018 National Defense Strategy, 2018 Department of Defense Cyber Strategy and the 2018 US Cyber Command Vision document. It was also captured in the March 2023 Biden Administration National Cybersecurity Strategy.

References Betz, D., & Stevens, T. (2013). Analogical reasoning and cyber security. Security Dialogue, 44(2), 147–164. Buzan, B., Jones, C., & Little, R. (1993). The Logic of Anarchy: Neorealism to Structural Realism. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Demchak, C., & Dombrowski, P. (2011). Rise of a cybered Westphalian age. Strategic Studies Quarterly, 5(1), 32–61. Fischerkeller, M., & Harknett, R. (2019, December). Persistent engagement, agreed competition, cyberspace interaction and escalation. Cyber Defense Review, 267–287. Fischerkeller, M., & Harknett, R. (2020, February 6). Persistent engagement and cost imposition: Distinguishing between cause and effect. Lawfare. URL: https://www.lawfareblog.com/ persistent-engagement-and-cost-imposition-distinguishing-between-cause-and-effect. Fischerkeller, M., Goldman, E., & Harknett, R. (2022). Cyber Persistence: Redefining National Security in Cyberspace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenhill, K., & Krause, P. (2018). Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harknett, R., & Goldman, E. (2016). The search for cyber fundamentals. Journal of Information Warfare, 15(2), 81–88. Harknett, R., & Smeets, M. (2020). Cyber campaigns and strategic outcomes: The other means. Journal of Strategic Studies, 1–34. Harknett, R., & Yalcin, H. (2012). The struggle for autonomy: A realist structural theory of international relations. International Studies Review, 14, 499–521. Herz, J. (1973). The Nation-State and the Crisis of World Politics. New York: David McKay Co. Hinsley, F. H. (1986). Sovereignty (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keohane, R., & Nye, J. (1977). Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition. Boston: Little Brown. Kovac, I. (2021). Pervasive Hegemony. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Cincinnati. Lake, D. (2007). Escape from the state of nature: Authority and hierarchy in world politics. International Security, 32(1), 47–79. Mastanduno, M. (1997). Preserving the unipolar moment: Realist theories and U.S. grand strategy after the cold war. International Security, 21(4), 49–88. Mearsheimer, J. (2001). The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: W. W. Norton. Milner, H. (1991). The assumption of anarchy in international relations. Review of International Studies, 17(1), 67–85. Moravcsik, A. (1997). Taking preferences seriously: A liberal theory of international politics. International Organization, 51(4), 513–553. Morgenthau, H. (1993). Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York: Knopf. Nakasone, P., & Sulmeyer, M. (2020, August 25). How to compete in cyberspace. Foreign Affairs. URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-08-25/ cybersecurity. National Institute of Standards and Technology. (2021). Definition of cyberspace. Computer Security Resource Center. URL: https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/cyberspace. Perlroth, N., & Shane, S. (2019, May 25). In Baltimore and beyond, a stolen NSA tool wreaks Havoc. New York Times. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/us/nsahacking-tool-baltimore.html. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rosenau, J., & Durfee, M. (2000). Thinking Theory Thoroughly: Coherent Approaches to an Incoherent World. Boulder: Westview Press. Ruggie, J. G. (1998). What makes the world hang together? International Organization, 52(4), 855–885.

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Smith, B. (2022, February 28). Digital Technology and the War in Ukraine. Microsoft Blog. URL: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/02/28/ukraine-russia-digital-warcyberattacks/ Vincent, J. (2017, September 4). Putin says the nation that leads AI. The Verge. URL: https:// www.theverge.com/2017/9/4/16251226/russia-ai-putin-rule-the-world. Vinion, K. (2022, October 20). How Elon Musk’s starlink became invaluable to Ukraine’s war effort. Radio Free Europe. URL: https://www.rferl.org/a/starlink-elon-musk-ukrainewar-russia-funding/32091045.html Waltz, K. (1959). Man, the State and War. New York: Columbia University Press. Waltz, K. (1979). Theory of International Politics. Boston: Addison-Wesley. Waltz, K. (2000). Structural realism after the cold war. International Security, 25(1), 5–41.

2 THE STATE IN THE DIGITAL ERA Supreme or in Decline? Lucas Kello

Introduction: A Model World

Confronted with a potentially revolutionary technology, international relations specialists can ask a number of important questions. They involve different kinds of balances. Thinkers interested in the confluence of ideology and technology can explore its effects on the strivings of revolutionary states on the world scene (Adamsky, 2008). Another question that will matter especially to strategic studies analysts is how new technology influences the balance of offensive and defensive forces on the battlefield – possibly with decisive consequences for conflict stability (Glaser & Kaufmann, 1998; Lieber, 2000; Slayton, 2017). Theorists with a mind for grander questions about great power competitions can ask how it affects the balance of power, especially military power, among large states (Horowitz, 2018). But perhaps the most important question of all concerns a different kind of balance, the balance of players: In what ways does the new technology alter the hierarchy, not among states, but among states and other actors?1 The most fundamental form of technological revolution in the international system occurs when players alien to it challenge the dominance of its main unit, the state. Though potentially important for international order, lesser forms of change do not supersede the system’s organisational structure. They unfold within a given international system; they may even help to preserve the hierarchy of actors if new technology enhances the dominant players’ relative power and interests. The rapid expansion of cyberspace during the last three decades presents such a fundamental question (Kello, 2017). This chapter explores it. Through their influence on cyberspace, actors other than states challenge their customary dominance in core areas of national security and international affairs. This trend represents a major aspect of change in what this book calls ‘agential’ processes, whereby DOI: 10.4324/9781003437963-4

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interstate dealings are increasingly influenced by nontraditional actors (such as large technology firms) that must be forced, enticed or won over in efforts by states to impose order upon a complex technological world that they neither own nor (in many instances) dominate. Agential change has given rise to a situation of state absence: the state has partly receded in its traditionally preponderant role in protecting the infrastructure that underpins vital societal and economic functions as well as in ensuring the integrity of basic political institutions. Private players have begun to fill the statist void both as threat actors and as security providers, with important implications for theory and statecraft. Cyberspace has not made governments irrelevant, as some naïve utopians have desired. The ‘cyber libertarian’ movement seems trapped within a contradiction: adherents seek or predict the liquefaction of the state by the Internet’s centrifugal forces even as they advocate assiduously for the minimisation of government regulation of those same forces (which implies that the government’s role is in fact significant). Consider the political activist John Perry Barlow who in 1996 proclaimed a vision of technological statelessness: ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I  come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind’, after which ensued the prediction: ‘On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather’ (Barlow, 2016). In 2013, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen echoed Barlow’s assertion: ‘The internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history’ – a benevolent anarchy, that is, not the perilous jungle of Thomas Hobbes’ ‘natural man’ that Leviathan supplanted. ‘The most significant impact of the spread of communication technologies will be the way that they help reallocate the concentration of power away from states and institutions and transfer it to individuals’ (Schmidt & Cohen, 2014). And yet both Barlow and Schmidt have warned about growing government encroachment upon the unfettered Internet, Schmidt going as far as predicting the emergence by 2028 of dystopian Internets quashed by the authoritarian (especially Chinese) state (Shaban, 2018; Silverman, 2015). Such visions of techno-anarchism manifest the two dualisms that often characterise revolutionary movements (technological or not): the prophets who foresee change also serve as its chief agents; and to them the final stage of revolution appears inevitable (because it is foreordained by material or historical forces) even as its realisation requires a managed intervention to resist countervailing forces. What else but a combination of the inevitability of statelessness and the intransigence of the state could motivate the cyber libertarians at one and the same time to proclaim its inevitable demise even while working – at times precariously – against its regulatory intrusions? The utopians’ vision remains remote. Far likelier to materialise (we can already see it) is Schmidt’s vision of a bifurcated Internet in which the state suppresses large swaths of online human activity. Yet the utopian perspective is not entirely groundless. The expansion of cyberspace has given rise to early and partial forms

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of state absence in important aspects – notably, the provision of national security in areas such as energy security, financial system security and information security in election contexts. States have not lost their traditional supremacy over private actors; international relations is still mainly interstate relations. But in important security domains, other actors are rapidly growing in relevance and even primacy. The reasons for this development are partly technological. They concern the increasing use of computers to support the life of the state. As more and more governmental functions are captured, stored and transmitted in the form of computer code – that is, ‘datafication’ and ‘pervasiveness’2 – coupled with the speed and ease of transmission of code, the opportunities for adversaries to access information about those functions and to use it to disrupt them grow. That computer code governs the behaviour of the very machines that underpin governmental functions, rather than merely storing information about them, means that datafication and pervasiveness enable not just new forms of espionage but also political disruption and machine destruction. More than just a source of power, information has become force itself (Kello, 2017, p. 5). Cybersecurity problems inhere also in the technical features of the global Internet, the vastest and most diverse realm of cyberspace comprising billions of users and devices. The TCP/IP protocol that governs Internet communications was designed in the 1980s to prioritise the successful delivery of data packets rather than the authentication of their contents or their senders’ identity and location (Clark, 2018) – salient details for security analysis and authorities seeking to impose control over them. These design choices are the technical underpinnings of the current pervasiveness and sheer speed of the modern Internet, which act as forces of disruption in international relations. A different ordering of priorities – that is, the elevation of packet authentication over packet delivery – would likely have decelerated the speed of communication over the Internet and thereby stunted its expansion. Instead of complaints about the murkiness and dizzying speed of data transmission, today we might hear more gripes about the inaccessibility of the Internet (if we would even call it that) from untrusted devices and locations and its slowness.3 The Internet is not completely borderless, however. Its physical layer of routers and services resides in defined territory that is subject to the direct intervention of sovereigns. But the ease and speed with which code travels across the global information skin mean that national frontiers are eminently porous. Even machines in the ‘cyber archipelago’ (Kello, 2013, p. 17) comprising computer systems that are not joined to the Internet are penetrable by code, sometimes with serious results, as illustrated by the Stuxnet worm’s destruction of almost one-thousand uranium enrichment centrifuges at the nuclear facility in Natanz, Iran. Another driver of state absence is legal and political: the unwillingness or inability of the government to constrain the growth and regulate the activities of the large technology companies that built and developed digital products and services. This is largely an American story. Although the US government has

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sought to impose pro-competition measures against the early digital technology giants – for example, suing and compelling Microsoft in 1998 to share its source code with market competitors – the companies and their services emerged mostly free from regulation. Two main reasons explain this development. For one, companies such as Google and Facebook that emerged later than Microsoft have heeded the lessons of its brushes with the authorities. They have adeptly engaged legislators and regulators on questions of data privacy and ethics, for example. More than important and controversial, these questions are also new and not easily answered, for they involve largely untested trade-offs (e.g. between the companies’ revenue models, which often involve the use of targeted adverts, and the privacy rights of users who might not want their personal information collected or shared with advertisers). Having inserted themselves into the regulatory process in its formative stage, the technology giants can influence its direction and outcome. The data behemoths have repeatedly called for tighter government regulation of their own services;4 what they really want is not regulation but a seat at the regulatory table. For another, more fundamentally, the necessity for regulation sometimes becomes clear only after the technologies have become diffused, at which point the cost of imposing it is possibly prohibitively high; or else by the time regulation comes into force, the technologies and their use have rendered it less relevant or effective. And then there is the problem of outmoded legacy laws: for example, the blanket restrictions on data and system access in Britain’s Computer Misuse Act (1990) that precedes the social Internet by several years and which impedes threat analysis, placing defensively minded security researchers in potential legal peril.5 Inasmuch as governments are unwilling rather than unable to exercise their regulatory powers to reel in the enormous influence of the digital behemoths (possibly because their unbridled influence confers economic benefits), then state absence represents a kind of state delegation – a recession of the state that unfolds with its tacit understanding and condonement in a realm where it once had authority (e.g. financial sector security). That is different to a situation where the state decides not to regulate activity over which it did not previously exercise authority – possibly because the activity in question did not exist before, as in the case of the development of artificially intelligent algorithms (which Claudia Aradau explores in Chapter 7). If the state were to impose its regulatory powers within these two broad scenarios, then we would have to distinguish two forms of state ‘pushback’: rollback and encroachment (more on state pushback below). The chapter contains four sections. The first section briefly presents concepts to categorise the degree and scope of change in relative unit agency: supremacy, primacy and relevance. The second section applies them to analyse the growing importance of non-state actors – especially multinational technology firms – as key players in traditional realms of state activity. The third section examines state absence and the growing relevance of non-state actors in empirical contexts of cybersecurity and information security. The fourth section analyses the

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phenomenon of state pushback, that is, attempts by states to reassert their dominance in national security provision. Balance of Player Concepts: Actor Supremacy, Primacy and Relevance

We begin with a conceptual journey. Imagine a foreign visitor exploring the theoretical realm of international relations. He would discover a tragic world of citizenstates bound together more by inexpiable competition and rivalry than by comity and cooperation. In many places, he might be struck by the scene’s apparent uniformity. Despite the inhabitants’ extreme variety of domestic styles and homes (some majestic palaces, others tiny huts), they display similar habits in pursuit of universal objectives in security and welfare. But the more striking feature of homogeneity concerns the other creatures of the realm – private corporations, civil society groups, transnational networks, individuals, etc. They are often absent or hidden from view (sometimes completely). The citizen-states rule the land, and sometimes each other, almost as if the other beings did not exist. Of course, the traveller would know that they do exist. Along the central roads he can spot occasional international organisations with their impressive buildings – some operating like emergency field hospitals, others like science labs – and their diverse functionaries (who often pledged allegiance to or are emissaries of a citizen-state). But this bevy of other actors remains largely out of sight and mostly ignored; theorists have crammed them all inside the homes of the citizenstates, to whose whims and instructions they respond. The lesser players emerge when summoned by the master citizens amid their internecine battles or cooperative efforts, only to be sent back indoors after performing the supporting role; or else they are banished entirely from the realm. Everywhere one finds evidence of the other actors’ existence, yet sightings are few and their roles seem rarely consequential next to the dominant actors. Not all model worlds, to be sure, share the theoretical prejudice of state centrism. Some alternative models eschew the unitary actor mania; they afford a more prominent and sometimes decisive role for the other actors. More fundamentally, they deconstruct the state, refusing to treat it is a coherent (some would say ‘anthropomorphised’) player (Franke & Roos, 2010; Klose, 2020; Lerner, 2020; Wendt, 2004). The real actors that matter, these scholars hold, reside within and beyond the state. The state itself, in fact, comprises the other actors to which it cannot be reduced but from which also it cannot be separated. So if one were to ask, What is it like to be a state?, the traditional theorist’s answer – it is like being John Stuart Mill’s rational and unitary homo economicus writ large – is misguided. Although states might exhibit an emergent and rudimentary ‘stream of consciousness’ arising from a complex integration of information systems among component entities, they lack the singular personhood that characterises their human subjects (Lerner, 2020).

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But if we focus on what is traditionally meant by the ‘international system’, if we examine the more established models that defined the discipline (especially the conventional neorealist model refined by Richard Harknett in Chapter 1) and to which the main security paradigms remain wedded, the orthodoxy of the state’s dominance atop the hierarchy of players becomes plainer. Even the most reactionary theorist cannot deny it: other actors exist and may even be important in interstate affairs.6 Rather, the point behind state centrism is that theoretical construction in international relations requires, as David Lake put it, a ‘methodological bet’ that a focus on states and their interactions will yield the most potent explanations of international affairs even if it glosses out lesser players’ influence (Lake, 2015). Even classical liberals whose worldview centres on a ‘harmony of interests’ among the peoples of the world emphasise the importance of the relations among the sovereigns, not the peoples they rule (think of the ‘democratic peace theory’: it refers to relations among liberal democratic states, not people).7 By extension, any demonstrable effect of technological empowerment of actors alien to the system – that is, the emergence of new agential processes – represents a potentially major challenge to the discipline’s central tenets. A change in the balance of power among the large states – a common concern of realists – or the emergence of new institutions that facilitate cooperation among them – the liberals’ interest – signifies important changes within an existing international system. But a realignment of power among different kinds of actors can bring forth a transition from one system to another. Possibly it may even signal an exit from the states system to a system exhibiting a different organising tenet altogether, such as in Hedley Bull’s notion of ‘neo-medievalism’, a conception of system in which no particular actor reigned supreme over others; instead, states, religious bodies, cities, principalities, private military companies and even individuals (by way of a growing consciousness of the ‘world common good’) shared and competed for the terrestrial spoils of sovereignty (Bull, 1977). Especially important in this regard is the influence of other actors in the state’s core security affairs. International relations thinkers contest the meaning of security, varyingly referring to physical survival and territorial integrity, economic stability and growth, the ‘human security’ of citizens, and so on. But they almost universally agree that states pursue it as the ultimate end of statecraft owing to the uncertainties and insecurities of the international system’s anarchic nature. Therefrom stems Kenneth Waltz’s maxim about actor autonomy: states abhor a loss of independence to other actors in the pursuit of national security goals – unless dependence on others provides a net security gain (e.g. a state might want to invite an ally’s military forces into its territory to avoid occupation and annexation by a larger common enemy), but even then the tying of fates among allies represents a sub-optimal outcome to security independence. Confronted with the state-centric theoretical model, practitioners will ask a question that some theorists eschew: what relevance does it have to the affairs of the citizen-states? The answer is clear: the abstractions of the system model (any model) are useful only insofar as they help to identify the possibilities and limits

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of action in the complex world of policymaking. The usefulness might involve (and is perhaps strongest when it does so) explanations and predictions about general trends in international affairs that can orient action in different historical or geographic settings. But even a model that does no more than impose conceptual coherence among an empirical reality that is infinitely more complex than the ability of policymakers to comprehend might perform an important service outside of the academy. Thus, from the backdrop of the state’s theoretical supremacy arises the question of its empirical supremacy: does theoretical prejudice accord with reality in the study of technological revolution? In other words, does modern technology empower actors other than states such that the conventional units have lost the dominance that they so jealously guard in the model world? This ‘meta’ question calls forth not just hypotheses and empirical discussion but also debate about the starting axioms of theory. To begin to answer it – even if just provisionally because we are still in the early stage of the cyber r­ evolution – we require two sets of distinctions. One concerns the relative degree of unit agency, that is, some conceptual benchmark on which to evaluate relative influence among actors within the system. Three degrees of influence are possible: relevance, primacy and supremacy. Relevance is the lowest kind of relative influence. It denotes influence that is sufficient for theorists to take note of the secondary players, because without them the models would suffer from incompleteness and explanatory shortcomings. Next up is primacy: the alien players are no longer secondary; they are the foremost agents in the system and thus deserve a special place in the abstract model, but not to the point of excluding other actors from the scene. Supremacy denotes the highest degree of relative influence: so high, in fact, that all other actors are irrelevant to theory construction, even if their presence is sometimes felt in the dealings of the master units (which indeed are ‘units’ rather than being merely ‘actors’). Private firms we will see play a significant role in the current technological revolution. Thus, it is worth illustrating, briefly, where different theories place them along the agency spectrum. Neorealism posits the total supremacy of states (sometimes as an analytical assumption, other times seemingly as a moral objective). Private firms are almost completely absent from this theoretical universe, except insofar as they contribute resources that strengthen the military and industrial power of the state to which they are subordinate (Lobell, Ripsman, & Taliaferro, 2009). Classical liberalism illustrates the difference between relevance and primacy. In this perspective, private firms play an important role in fostering interstate commerce – a central concern of liberal thinkers who posit that free trade sustains the harmony of interests among nations which in turn helps to pacify their relations (permanently, in the case of liberal democracies) (Doyle, 1983; Gat, 2005; Rosecrance, 2013; Russett, Layne, Spiro, & Doyle, 1995). This point, however, does not mean that the private actors have usurped states’ primacy, much less their supremacy. Governments retain their dominant role even in the most intense areas

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of private economic activity, such as global finance, because of their domestic regulatory powers, their ability to shape macroeconomic and monetary policy, and their influence over international institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund) that provide decisive levers of state control in core aspects of the world economy.8 We can summarise the spectrum of possible change in the balance of players as follows. It begins on the low end with the preservation of the state’s traditional supremacy over all other actors, who are neither units nor players in any meaningful sense of those terms and who thus are rightly banished from the theoretical realm. At the middle of the spectrum, the state vies for relevance and even primacy with other rising actors, whom thinkers can thus no longer wish out of existence by conceptual fiat. In some areas of traditional state affairs, the usurping actors might be more important than the states themselves, but not necessarily to the point where the state itself has lost relevance. That would be the high end of the spectrum of change in the balance of players. It is a world that few political thinkers imagine possible (although the stateless society of late-stage Marxism comes to mind) wherein the state has been relegated to a position of irrelevance next to the sub-state usurpers. How closely, then, does the model of the dominant citizen-states map onto the landscape of technological revolution? The state-centric optic serves well in the historical study of technological revolution in the international system. For instance, it sharpens the analysis of the transforming effects of nuclear arms. States have reigned supreme in three key respects: in assembling and harnessing the weapons’ awesome power, in protecting against their attendant threats, and in regulating the chaos and instability that can arise from the disruptive influence of their acquisition by other actors. Nuclear arms emerged and proliferated among states and for state purposes. And yet private actors also played a pivotal role in the weapons’ creation. Civilian ingenuity provided the knowledge base for the manipulation of atomic nuclei. Without civilian ingenuity the weapons would have been inconceivable; but only states with their vast collective resources could have built and operated them. The first steps to purify uranium occurred in 1942 at the nuclear facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The secrecy of the site’s location and the clandestine – even deceptive – nature of its activities are reminiscent of the ‘closed cities’ that dotted Siberia in the Soviet Union. Only the immense rallying powers of the state – initially only the most powerful state – could have constructed the multiple production sites, or marshalled the 130,000 scientists and laborers, or footed the $2 billion bill to produce the nuclear devices that ushered in the ‘balance of terror’ in international affairs over the skies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. States have dominated nuclear weapons’ subsequent development. In the seven decades since their invention, only nine states have constructed them (ten, if we include South Africa, the only country to have assembled, but not deployed, and later relinquished nuclear warheads). At the height of the Cold War, the two superpowers possessed varyingly between

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20,000 and 70,000 warheads. At its maximum size, in 1962, the US nuclear arsenal comprised more than 30,000 warheads. The Soviet arsenal numbered more than 5,000 warheads, rising to 40,000 at its height in the 1980s. Among themselves, the nuclear giants could explode the earth (including their own societies) hundreds of times over. Even if their arsenals could not drive humans fully to extinction (many miserable souls would likely survive under post-apocalyptic conditions of depravity) (Starr, 2015), the lesser nuclear powers could nevertheless devastate the societies of their main geopolitical opponents. Other kinds of actors have tried to acquire nuclear weapons, notably the AlQaida terrorist group (Allison, 2004). Much of the effort to contain the destabilising effects of the nuclear revolution has centred on the essential goal of denying the bomb to aspiring non-state proliferants. For whatever the instability caused by the bomb’s acquisition by states – even the revolutionary state of North Korea (the only nuclear nation that threatens to unleash atomic terror for subversive political ends rather than to prevent it) – the proliferation of arms to terrorists and other non-traditional actors would cause a far more profound revolution in strategic affairs. The legal and normative devices that have succeeded in restraining the bomb’s use among states would not suffice to contain the disruption wrought by its proliferation beyond them. The regulatory instruments are themselves wedded to state structures: test ban treaties are signed by and bind states, intergovernmental organisations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency that monitor compliance are largely run by states, and the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons emerged in a long process of normative discovery among the nuclear powers. All of these restraining devices would dissolve upon contact with the nuclear terrorist or nuclear anarchist whose very aims are subversive of the international order that states and statist institutions seek to uphold. Even while competing with each other in a pledge of mutual annihilation, nuclear powers have worked closely together to preserve their monopoly over the atom’s awesome power, even to the point of Soviet and American intelligence agencies (mortal enemies in other security domains) cooperating with each other in pursuit of this common interest (Potter & Bidgood, 2018). State Absence in Cyberspace: Infrastructure Protection and Information Security

Armed with basic concepts of actor hierarchies we can now analyse the growing importance of non-state actors in the provision of cybersecurity, its implications for larger national interests, and what it means for the balance of players in the international system. Increasingly, the realities of cybersecurity violate – sometimes decisively – Waltz’s central organisational tenet of state autonomy. They fuel the phenomenon of state absence: government authorities are less able to provide for security in cyberspace than in physical space; they increasingly rely on the

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participation, resources and goodwill of private actors whose motives and interests might not align with the states. The problem has two sides. The first involves private infrastructure and other private interests: the state’s ability to protect them is waning to the point that the state is at least partly absent in important respects; consequently, the private sector is left increasingly to its own devices. The second problem concerns the core interests and activities of the state itself: it is increasingly less able to protect them without meaningful private sector involvement, in part, as we saw, because the state effectively delegated to private companies a growing competence by virtue of not wielding its regulatory powers against them. To analyse and illustrate the phenomenon of state absence it helps to distinguish two kinds of cybersecurity activity: active defence and passive defence. Active defence involves proactive measures, such as network interruptions and the destruction of hardware, that the system defender carries out beyond the home network to prevent or mitigate harmful action (but see below the British conception). Passive measures involve attempts to mitigate harm from threats that have already reached or breached the home network perimeter. They are far more common and involve measures of resiliency (e.g. network firewalls) and redundancy (e.g. backup data and systems servers). The relative influence of states and private actors varies in the two areas of defence. Governments are supreme in active defence because domestic law normally prohibits private actors from carrying out ‘offense as defence’ in other networks. Although defensively oriented, proactive measures such as ‘hacking back’ into an attacker’s systems are reserved exclusively for police and other state authorities (Kello, 2019). Conversely, the private sector – especially the multinational companies that own, design and operate vital infrastructures and widely used Internet technologies such as social media – enjoy primacy and possibly even supremacy in the realm of passive defence. State Absence in Private Infrastructure Protection

Threats against privately owned infrastructure illustrate the problem of partial state absence by way of delegation. Private companies hold the greatest capacity for passive defence within their own computer terrain. Cooperation between them and government authorities is common, hence why state absence is not total; it is also commonly insufficient to identify and thwart sophisticated threats against vital infrastructure. Private companies are ordinarily reluctant to invite governments into their computer systems because this could expose privileged client information that the owners wish to withhold from the state for legal, commercial or reputational reasons. Thus, the source of the problem is not a lack of capability: governments, at least the large and technologically savvy ones, have ample resources and security tools that they could use to shore up private network defence if the network owners allowed them to do so or if governments chose to impose their will upon them.

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Consider for example the security of infrastructure that supports energy provision. The relationship between energy security and national security has grown in prominence in recent years, especially in the aftermath of Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. A number of incidents involving disruptions in Russian gas supplies to Europe, oil theft by Somali pirates, terrorist attacks on pipelines in Iraq, nuclear reactor shutdowns and extreme fuel price volatility have garnered much media attention (Cornell, 2009). The Obama Administration put energy security at the centre of its security agenda. NATO has entered the energy security space, affirming the Alliance’s role at the Bucharest Summit in 2008 and launching a ‘Green Defence’ initiative in 2014 – a more than symbolic expansion of interests and competences for an intergovernmental alliance created to thwart Soviet tanks and missiles (NATO, 2020). Conventional energy security threats exist in physical space; accordingly, governments have direct means to exercise their jurisdictional controls on them. Authorities can inflict financial penalties on the Russian government, deploy naval assets to combat Somali pirates or assign security details to protect pipeline installations. Whatever the source of the threats – other states, unaffiliated culprits or unbridled market forces – governments by and large retain supremacy in their ability to provide energy security relative to other actors (which is not to say that states are able to do so absolutely; the argument here is relative). The security of private infrastructure against cyber threats presents a different picture, however. Utility companies such as electric power and gas providers are especially vulnerable to them, for three reasons. One involves the threat actors: they are varied, numerous and growing – cybercriminals seeking economic spoils, states wanting to disrupt an adversary’s society or economic activity by disrupting its power supplies, political hacktivists interested in expressing dissent through the disruption of public works, etc. Second is the infrastructure’s expanding network surface. Private utility companies increasingly connect the industrial controllers that govern component parts of energy facilities to the Internet, notably via the introduction of ‘smart meters’ to build ‘smart grids’. The data connections transmit data on energy consumption, deliver updates on contractual services and monitor supply connectivity (Energy Digital, 2020). They also, however, multiply the vectors of entry into and attack against those systems by nefarious external actors – as occurred, for example, in the penetration of the control system of a water treatment facility in Florida in 2021, an episode whose provenance and method of action the FBI and Secret Service have struggled to identify (Greenberg, 2021; Line, Tøndel,  & Jaatun, 2011; Otuoze, Mustafa, & Larik, 2018). And third, whether or not the systems are connected to the Internet, they are also growing in technical intricacy. It would be misguided to claim that growing systems complexity aids security on the basis that it increases the work factor of aspiring attackers (Singer & Friedman, 2014), who must map out more interconnecting parts (e.g. mobile engineering stations to reprogram industrial controllers) which are governed by labyrinthine and customised (rather than generic) operating software. For

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the same reason, the costs to defenders also go up and relatively more, because they have more vulnerabilities to identify, interpret and mitigate as well as more intricacies to analyse (whereas attackers need to master only their chosen methods). To illustrate, the Stuxnet worm’s 15,000 lines of code exploited six major technical and design flaws in the industrial control environment of the nuclear facility in Natanz, Iran – whereas the attackers (reportedly US and Israeli government hackers) had only to grasp the vulnerabilities they wished to exploit and design the computer code to exploit them. At least against the most sophisticated adversaries, then, modern infrastructure protection is a realm that strongly favours attackers over defenders (Kello, 2013). In many national jurisdictions, the major energy companies are investor owned. In the United States, for example, about 75% of utility companies are private. Problems of cybersecurity are therefore compounded: national security planners must contend not only with attackers who enjoy the advantages of an operational environment skewed in favour of the offence, but also with the obstacles of a defence landscape that is fragmented between the private sector and the public sector. Recent security breaches illustrate these defensive woes. In the first known cyberattack against the US power grid in September 2019, attackers exploited weaknesses in the web interface of a vendor’s firewall to create a blind spot in the grid control centre and its associated power generation sites, resulting in a denial of service in multiple remote sites. The incident exposed the complexities of supply chain vulnerabilities. Authorities must contend not just with infrastructure operators who are customarily reluctant to invite external players into their networks, but also with the diffused networks of private vendors whose lax security practices exist beyond the ability of the government to monitor. The financial sector provides another example of partial state absence in private sector cybersecurity. Here, again, we can distinguish conventional security from cybersecurity. Governments wield enormous powers of regulatory oversight in the management of ordinary financial affairs. They control the issuance and exchange of securities, they clear the listing of company stocks whose sale they also regulate, they levy taxes and control vast treasuries, and they set bank lending rates through which they shape the contours of the macroeconomy in which private firms operate. The point is not that any single state or group of states can firmly control global or even national financial affairs; merely that states as a class of actor in the international system enjoy broad supremacy relative to private organisations and individuals. The situation in cyberspace is very different: state involvement in financial sector security is limited. Take for example the theft by North Korean military hackers of $81 million from the Bangladesh Central Bank – the largest virtual bank heist in history. In February 2016, operatives of the ‘Lazarus Group’, a murky and highly specialised hacking unit of the Korean People’s Army, remotely disabled the printers used to issue monetary transfers at the Bangladeshi Central Bank. The attackers then routed $951 million to various banks and organisations in Asia, exploiting a

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vulnerability in the messaging protocol of the SWIFT global payments system – a private network of more than 10,000 member institutions that routs more than 30 million financial transactions each day. Alerted by the hackers’ misspelling of basic words (e.g. ‘fandation’ instead of ‘foundation’) and references to flagged terms (e.g. ‘Jupiter’, an oil tanker under US embargo), authorities at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York stopped or reversed the transfer of most of the stolen funds. Filipino prosecutors also succeeded in prosecuting the manager of the Rizal Bank from which some of the stolen funds were withdrawn. The case illustrates both the strengths – in the physical world – and the limitations – in the virtual world – of the state’s ability to protect financial systems. The state’s legal grip on the global financial pipelines and the power of its domestic courts enabled authorities to recover most of the stolen funds and to punish some of the culprits (the main thieves in Pyongyang were beyond reach). Yet the governments involved had few powers to defend the banking network from the hackers’ manoeuvres in the first place. The problem again was one of defence fragmentation: because the authorities in Bangladesh, New York, and elsewhere were unable to conduct passive defence measures within the targeted banking network, authorities could rely only on post-attack active defence measures to punish and recover the funds seized by the hackers and their accomplices. Here again, however, the state is not fully absent: it cooperates closely with private sector actors in the assessment and remediation of threats – even if the state’s presence is rarely felt within the private networks that manage the trillions of dollars of daily financial flows across the world. State Absence in National Security Provision

The second manifestation of state absence in cybersecurity involves the state’s own core security interests: it is increasingly less able to protect them without meaningful private sector involvement. The problem is theoretically consequential. Recall Waltz’ maxim about state autonomy, especially in the realm where states are most jealous of their freedom of action – national security. We can observe the problem in two empirical contexts, antiterrorism and information security. Terrorisms ranks highly among national security threats in much of the world. Nations have invested billions of dollars and initiated wars to attempt to eradicate it.9 Thus, it is notable when a private corporation is able single-handedly to impede the government’s attempts to carry out the fight. Such a scenario occurred in the aftermath of the terrorist shooting in San Bernardino, California in December 2015. Following the mass shooting, the FBI presented Apple with a court order to decrypt the mobile phone of one of the two deceased shooters. The phone was cryptographically scrambled; without access to its contents, the authorities could not ascertain important details of the antiterror investigation, such as the identities of possible accomplices. Apple executives refused to abide by the government’s order to decipher the phone’s contents,

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arguing that this would erode the security of the entire iPhone ecosystem, thereby threatening the privacy rights of millions of customers (including against the threat of government surveillance). Apple CEO Tim Cook explained in a muchcelebrated blogpost: We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them. But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone. . . . And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control. (Cook, 2016) The highly public nature of the company’s response and the importance it gave to consumer interests suggest that its main motives for resisting the government were commercial more than ethical or political.10 For a short time, a large private company was in a position to dictate to the most powerful government in the world which of two seemingly competing goods – the public good of privacy (aligned with the private good of corporate income) and the public good of security against terrorism. In the end, the FBI reportedly cracked the phone with the assistance of a small Israeli company. That the government prevailed, then, is no score for statist sympathies: it overcame the resistance of one private company to assist in a matter of national security significance by securing the support of another private company that was more amenable to the state’s desires. Although the government won the battle over the contents of the terrorist’s iPhone, neither side decisively won the grander conceptual struggle for mastery in the balance of players. Another area of partial but growing state absence in national security involves information security within the democratic polity. Here, too, the distinction between the physical and virtual worlds breaks down. Prevailing security doctrine privileges the physical world over the virtual world. The Western conception of cybersecurity reflects this prejudice: it gives more weight to the protection of physical infrastructure, the material interests it supports, and the geographic territory in which it resides than to the security of information exchange or information itself. It is an artifact of a previous era in which the cohesion of the polity relied fundamentally on the integrity of the national soil. Spies and other foreign intruders, to be sure, could affect domestic political affairs, but nowhere near the extent of influence that is possible with remote manoeuvres within digital information spaces. By contrast, Russian and Chinese conceptions of cybersecurity prioritise information security, or efforts to protect the integrity of (or to control) domestic information flows via the Internet, rather than infrastructure security (Segal, 2019). To

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this end, the governments of both nations operate a vast apparatus of Internet surveillance and censorship that involves measures of both information control (to stem the flow of undesirable views) and information dissemination (to fan desirable ones). The two activities go hand in hand: suppressing Internet content entails an ability to monitor it and its users. Although one can surveil information and users without censoring them, one cannot censor without surveilling. Accordingly, Russian authorities operate the System of Operative Search Measures (SORM), now in its third generation, which in collaboration with the national Internet service providers captures online data almost completely. Recent legislation supports the collection of information. In 2016, the Russian Duma passed two bills – collectively known as ‘Yarovaya’s Law’ after one of its conceivers – requiring ISPs to store user’s metadata and content for varying periods of time. Censorship tactics are robust and involve not just Internet blockages, but also disruptive cyberattacks against the websites and machines of domestic political dissidents: for example, the distributed denial of service attacks against the radio station Ekho Moskvy and the vote monitoring organisation Golos during the 2011 parliamentary election (Soldatov, 2012).11 China for its part operates a more stringent censorship machinery. Its most prominent tool is the so-called Great Firewall, which blocks access to Twitter, Facebook, Google and Western Internet services (Weber, 2019). In the world of autocracies, then, the statist prejudice of theory lives strong in the virtual realm of information security. But here we must insert a caveat: the enormous efforts undertaken by Beijing to retain control over its domestic information space belies a concern over the presence of forces that seek to evade such control but which the government cannot supremely suppress – or else the pervasive controls would not be necessary in the first place. More than just primary, if not quite supreme, the state’s role in information security seems only to grow firmer as new instruments and methods of population surveillance emerge. Democratic societies experience a different form of confusion: not about political ideals (the commitment to basic democratic values is overall robust) but about the veracity of important information and events within political discourse. Various kinds of information integrity have come under assault from foreign influence operations: information about the views of political candidates, about the actions of officials, about the policies and activities of government agencies and departments, and perhaps most damaging of all about the reliability of outcomes in the most fundamental democratic institution – elections. The Western security agenda must give greater attention to information security. Information security is no longer the concern mainly of authoritarian nations whose regimes strive to preserve their legitimacy against the grievances of confused citizens. It is also a legitimate interest of liberal democracies. Its scope must expand beyond the normal concern of stemming illicit activity such as financial fraud. Containing malicious political and social content deserves security planner’s greater attention. Such threats affect the minds not of machines (as Marvin Minsky

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put it) but of humans: information campaigns via social media or web postings that seek to sow confusion or division about the legitimacy of political candidates or the coting outcome by disseminating either false information or truthful information that is presented in a misleading manner. For liberal democratic states, however, information security is a severely conscribed realm: their role is neither supreme nor even primary (Kello, 2022). Information control does not come naturally to societies that regard freedom of expression as a fundamental right. The Russian hacking during the 2016 US presidential election showed that the very openness which defines the democratic political culture makes Western nations especially vulnerable to foreign information campaigns. Democracies struggle with a fundamental tension that spares autocracies: how to protect the integrity of political discourse without violating freedoms of expression through over-regulation of social media platforms. The challenge of information governance is complicated by the fact that the platforms are designed, owned and operated by private companies (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) which are largely free from government control. The need to involve them at the centre of regulatory efforts is another hurdle that autocracies do not face. Yet private sector interests will not always align with the government’s, as demonstrated in the Apple-FBI dispute. State Pushback: Supremacy Versus Democratic Freedoms

Masters of a realm they have dominated for centuries, states have not always yielded willingly to their supremacy’s erosion in core areas of national life. They strenuously resist curtailments of autonomy from foreign powers. Why would they not do the same against actors residing within the state box? State pushback has been most decisive and successful within autocratic regimes. Unencumbered by constitutional constraints against surveillance, censorship and physical repression, they can suppress private players who aspire to more than relevance within the rigid box of the state – even if it requires, first, creating a statist enclosure for an originally borderless Internet by coercing service providers and technology companies whose employees, after all, inhabit the physical virtual world. But the liberal sovereign must be cautious. The repressive option is untenable: suppress private actors too tightly and there is a risk of violating the basic freedoms that underpin the state’s legitimacy as master of the political system. In a democracy, surveillance and censorship measures have an innate propensity to backfire because they pit the ultimate goal of freedom with the ultimate goal of security. In 2013, following popular revulsion at Edward Snowden’s disclosure of NSA Internet mass surveillance activities that encompassed at least part of the US population, Google raced to encrypt the torrents of data that flowed through its many data centres and services (Timberg, 2013). State assertion thus provoked private sector retrenchment.

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One ‘soft’ attempt at pushback in the realm of infrastructure protection is the British government’s ‘active cyber defence’ initiative. Not to be confused with the American version of the concept on which the discussion above was based, which is coercive and targets foreign actors, the British version is co-optive and supportive and it involves the domestic population. Launched in 2018, it carves out for the national government a coordinating role in the strengthening of threat awareness and mitigation among the private sector and civil society. It ‘aspires to protect the majority of people in the UK from the majority of the harm, caused by the majority of the attacks, for the majority of the time’ (U.S. Department of Defense, 2015). Organisationally, it expanded the arm of the government in private sector security by establishing, within the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a National Cyber Security Centre. Among its manifold tasks and activities, a few are especially notable for us: the vulnerability reporting service, an ‘exercise in a box’ service that offers realistic crisis scenario planning, suspicious email reporting, and most boldly a ‘takedown service’ that immediately removes malicious computer traffic before harm occurs. True to democratic form, the services – and the attendant government involvement in private security affairs – are strictly voluntary. Its reach is therefore limited owing to an internal limitation: the very sensitivity of infrastructure and financial institutions that makes them rich targets for attack also increases the private defenders’ sensitivity to government involvement in the defensive effort. More difficult has been state responses to politically motivated information threats: they have not gone far. These threats are especially difficult for authorities in liberal democracies to address. Different to cyberattacks and cyberespionage operations that involve malicious actors’ penetration of closed systems, information warfare operations entail manoeuvres within open environments where the free flow of data is encouraged. Regulatory thrusts that seek to hold large social media providers such as Facebook and Twitter to account for information threats on their platforms have stalled owing to fears of curbing free expression and hindering innovation. A cynical mind might also point to the intense lobbying efforts (almost $500 million in 2019) that the seven largest companies direct at lawmakers (Romm, 2020). Britain has proposed giving the telecommunications watchdog, Ofcom, the power to enforce a ‘duty of care’ on social media companies. Companies that fail to remove malicious content face fines. The move however is not decisive; it displays the customary lightness of the democratic ethos by not banning platform users themselves and by ceding to the Internet provides the prerogative of deciding what material to strike. In 2018, Germany introduced a new law – ‘NetzDG’ – that forces content providers to establish adjudication procedures to review complaints against hosted content. Fines can climb as high as €5 million – a rounding error for large companies whose balance books operate in the billions of euros. Perhaps the most robust regulatory effort has unfolded within the European Union. In 2018, the

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European Commission implemented a strict private data control regime (the General Data Protection Regulation, or ‘GDPR’) and, in 2020, it proposed a new set of data governance rules that would increase citizens’ ownership of their private data (European Commission, 2020). That the strongest regulatory thrust in the world has emerged within supranational structures is a partial victory for the state in the battle for relative actor supremacy, for while the EU is not a state (to the chagrin of radical federalists), it is nevertheless an amalgamation of state powers and functions; it is at least a statist creature. In the face of the government’s reluctance to reassert its security role, what has emerged in the information space is a self-regulatory regime. For example, in the summer of 2019, Google removed almost nine million videos from its YouTube platform. Similarly, Facebook’s ‘Reality Check’ function struck 30 million items in the same period. Both of these protective services utilised algorithms to remove the vast majority of potentially harmful content. Yet another class of actor, then, has joined the contest in the balance of players – private and semi-autonomous machine regulators. Conclusion

In proclaiming the state’s dissolution within the liquefier of unrestricted computer code, Perrow believed that he spoke from (more than just for) the future. The future has since arrived; it has not heeded his proclamation. The state remains a central player in cyberspace and beyond it in areas of national life entwined with it. But nor does the current situation conform with the dogma of state centrism that dominates much of international relations thinking. The central tendencies of cybersecurity require that preconceived theories of international relations which privilege the state above all other actors – sometimes to their exclusion – to catch up with the facts. Vanished is the time when states could provide the security of vital infrastructure in core areas of the economy and society without meaningful private sector participation. Gone, too, is the era when the government could independently secure the private sector from all relevant threats. Theorists’ reaction to these developments must reflect both the growing heterogeneity of the international system and the implications of technological change for that system. As vital societal functions rely increasingly on the instructions of machines and code, as democratic political discourse moves onto remote digital platforms, as adversaries find more ingenious ways to operate within cyberspace to threaten national security – in short, as security interests and threats acquire an increasingly digital form – theorists must give greater credence to the happenings of the virtual world of politics. It is a world in which inexorably, if not yet decisively, actors alien to the states system grow in relevance and acquire the features of primacy in defiance of the familiar masters. States have begun to push back – often successfully – against the intrusions of new agents upon their sovereignty. Theorists, however, ­cannot push back against the new empirical reality; our duty is to study, not resist it.

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Notes 1 This form of fundamental change can be labelled ‘first order technological revolution’ (Kello, 2017, Chapter 6). 2 See the Introduction chapter of this edited volume. 3 As Clark explained, numerous papers proposed the creation of a capability to distinguish authenticated and unauthenticated data traffic in the context of defeating DDoS attacks, including new fields in the data packet header, new router functions and new connection protocols. See Anderson, Roscoe, and Wetherall (2004); Clark (2018); Parno et al. (2007); Yaar, Perrig, and Song (2003). 4 For example, in 2019, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for ‘a more active role’ for governments and regulators, including new legislation for ‘protecting elections’ against foreign interference by the company’s social media platform (Press Association, 2019). 5 For this reason, some threat intelligence researchers have called for the reform of the law. See Reforming the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (2020). 6 Even Kenneth Waltz accepted their occasional importance. See Waltz (1979, pp. 93–94). 7 This is not the place for a detailed discussion of state centrism in IR and its critics. For useful explorations of this debate, see Hobson (2000) and Lacher (2003). 8 Even in this realm, however, new blockchain technologies, which enable distributed, decentralised and trustless exchanges of value, threaten to upend the global payments network dominated by SWIFT, a private organisation that broadly conforms with the edicts of governments and their courts (e.g., in the implementation of government sanctions). 9 The US intelligence community places it atop the hierarchy of concerns (below cyber threats). Britain classifies it as a ‘tier 1’ threat (also alongside cyber threats). Some sceptics, however, have dismissed the gravity of the terrorist threat against Western security (Mueller, 2006). 10 When government and private industry choose to cooperate in security matters, efficiencies and effectiveness can be gained – as in, for example, the US government’s cooperation with Facebook, Twitter and Google to stem politically disruptive Russian information operations. See Sanger and Perlroth (2020). 11 For an excellent account of internet suppression in Russia, see Soldatov and Borogan (2015).

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Mueller, J. E. (2006). Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them. New York: Simon and Schuster. NATO. (2020, April 2). Energy security. NATO. URL: http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/ topics_49208.htm. Otuoze, A. O., Mustafa, M. W., & Larik, R. M. (2018). Smart Grids security challenges: Classification by sources of threats. Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology, 5(3), 468–483. Parno, B., Wendlandt, D., Shi, E., Perrig, A., Maggs, B., & Hu, Y.-C. (2007). Portcullis: Protecting connection setup from denial-of-capability attacks. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 37(4), 289–300. Potter, W., & Bidgood, S. (2018, August 7). The good old days of the cold war: U.S.-Soviet cooperation on nonproliferation. War on the Rocks. URL: https://warontherocks.com/2018/08/ the-good-old-days-of-the-cold-war-u-s-soviet-cooperation-on-nonproliferation/. Press Association. (2019, March  30). Mark Zuckerberg calls for stronger regulation of internet. The Guardian. URL: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/30/ mark-zuckerberg-calls-for-stronger-regulation-of-internet. Reforming the Computer Misuse Act 1990. (2020). Criminal law reform now network. Arts and Humanities Research Council. URL: http://www.clrnn.co.uk/media/1018/clrnncma-report.pdf. Romm, T. (2020, January 22). Tech giants led by Amazon, Facebook and Google spent nearly half a billion on lobbying over the past decade, new data shows. Washington Post. URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/22/amazon-facebook-googlelobbying-2019/. Rosecrance, R. (2013). The Resurgence of the West: How a Transatlantic Union Can Prevent War and Restore the United States and Europe. New Heaven: Yale University Press. Russett, B., Layne, C., Spiro, D. E., & Doyle, M. W. (1995). The democratic peace. International Security, 19(4), 164–184. Sanger, D. E., & Perlroth, N. (2020, October 20). As election nears, government and tech firms push back on Russia (and Trump). The New York Times. URL: https://www. nytimes.com/2020/10/20/us/politics/election-hacking-trump-microsoft-cyber-com mand.html. Schmidt, E., & Cohen, J. (2014). The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives (Reprint ed.). New York: Vintage. Segal, A. (2019, December 2). When China rules the web. Foreign Affairs. URL: https:// www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-08-13/when-china-rules-web. Shaban, H. (2018, September 21). Former Google chief predicts the Internet will split by 2028: A Chinese web and an American one. Washington Post. URL: https:// www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/21/former-google-chief-predictsinternet-will-split-by-chinese-web-an-american-one/. Silverman, J. (2015, March 20). How one man’s utopian vision for the Internet conquered, and then warped, Silicon Valley. Washington Post. URL: https://www.washingtonpost. com/opinions/how-one-mans-utopian-vision-for-the-internet-conquered-and-thenbadly-warped-silicon-valley/2015/03/20/7dbe39f8-cdab-11e4-a2a7-9517a3a70506_ story.html. Singer, P. W.,  & Friedman, A. (2014, January  15). Cult of the cyber offensive. Foreign Policy. URL: https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/15/cult-of-the-cyber-offensive/. Slayton, R. (2017). What is the cyber offense-defense balance? Conceptions, causes, and assessment. International Security, 41(3), 72–109.

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3 RISE OF THE NERD Knowledge, Power and International Relations in a Digital World Giampiero Giacomello and Johan Eriksson

Introducing the Computer Nerd: Missing in Theory, Powerful in Reality

This chapter addresses the rise of the ‘computer nerd’ – a powerful yet underresearched actor in International Relations (IR). Arguably, software programmers, algorithm writers, Artificial Intelligence (AI) designers, digital network engineers, computer system administrators and other ‘computer nerds’ have tremendous power in the global information society. These types of experts and epistemic communities design, build, develop, monitor, augment and analyse computer networks, algorithms and ‘Big Data’ upon which contemporary politics, civil society and economies depend. Government officials, policy-makers in international organisations, corporate decision-makers and civil society leaders impact the shaping of global agendas and structuring of world politics. These types of elite leaders, however, are regulating and using rather than creating or connecting the digital applications and computer networks upon which contemporary post-industrial societies depend. Digitalised communications and infrastructure do not simply exist ‘out there’, as some kind of independent and rapidly evolving machine complex. Digital communications and infrastructure are human creations, including machine learning and AI technologies. What then is the power of those that design, create and manage the software and hardware of global information society? What is the meaning and significance of ‘nerd power’, that is, the power of the omnipresent yet typically behind-the-scenes computer expert? Addressing these overarching questions is essential if we are to fully understand the nature and implications of ‘digital disruptions’ of the innovation-oriented contemporary world. Conceptualising nerd power, we contend, further develops the conceptual framework presented by Bjola and Kornprobst in the introductory chapter to this volume by placing a particular DOI: 10.4324/9781003437963-5

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type of agential processes in focus, in the form of computer experts whose designs and constructs result in datafication, heightened speed and increased pervasiveness of both technology and contemporary social and international relations. Hence, the present chapter asks: what is the nature of ‘nerd power’; how can the rise of ‘nerd power’ be explained; and what are the wider implications of ‘nerd power’? As elaborated on herein, ‘nerd power’ is dispersed yet omnipresent in every aspect of global society. Moreover, we contend that while there are a few famous (or infamous) computer nerds (Bill Gates, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden being the most obvious contemporary examples), the computer nerd tends to act behind the scenes of political decision-making. In addition, we suggest that there are three different forms of nerd power – design power, connecting power and analytical power. These forms of power are part of what Bjola and Kornprobst refer to as agential processes, which also sustain technological and ordering processes. The study of the power of individuals is certainly not new in IR. In the classical realism of Morgenthau, Niebuhr and others, ‘statesmen’ (who were predominately if not exclusively men) figure prominently as key decision-makers on the world stage – Churchill, Gandhi, and Eisenhower on the ‘light side of the force’ – and Hitler and Stalin as examples from the ‘dark side’. Likewise, Machiavelli wrote his strategic pieces of advice to ‘the Prince’ – an individual leader capable of seizing power in a state and defending it against foreign intruders and domestic insurrectionists. Moreover, individual leadership, cognition and decision-making under stress are studied in, for example, political psychology (Horowitz, McDermott, & Stam, 2005), international negotiations (Malnes, 1995) and crisis management (Boin, ‘t Hart, Stern, & Sundelis, 2016). Further, there is multi-disciplinary research on the power of celebrities and ‘super-entrepreneur’ leaders such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (Partzsch & Fuchs, 2012). Notwithstanding, while Waltz in his original neorealist theory suggested three levels of analysis – the individual, the state and the international system – IR has been dominated by studies focusing either on systemic and structural conditions, or on states and non-state bodies as ‘collective’ actors, often invoking ‘methodological individualism’, that is, ascribing individual-psychological traits to states and other organisations (cf. Chapters 1 and 6 in this volume). Indeed, Waltz himself quickly dismissed the role of individuals in his Man, the State, and War. The role of actual individuals, then, has often been overlooked. Moreover, while individuals have been addressed in the past in parts of IR, this literature is largely focused on highly visible, salient leaders in politics and business. Whereas both demeaning and celebratory depictions of the computer nerd are abundant in popular culture, study of the arguably stereotypical computer nerd is novel in IR, even if this category of actor has been around since the advent of computers and increasingly since the emergence of our digital society (Blaese, 2020; Sell, 2013). Research on the stereotype of the science nerd in the cognitive behavioural and life sciences has focused more on ethnicity than, for example, gender (Schinske, Cardenas, & Kaliangara, 2015), despite the stark dominance of men in

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Computer Science as well as more generally in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) research and practice. Research shows prevailing and dominant male networks and communities of computer ‘lads’ (Fujii, 2021; Håpnes & Sørensen, 2018; Kaygan, 2016; Klinger & Svensson, 2021; Tassabehji et al., 2020; Tierney, 2018). Efforts at greater representation, through for example incorporating the Arts and Humanities into STEM-cum-STEAM education have made little headway in addressing the persistent lack of gender equality and diversity in these fields (Fujii, 2021). According to the US National Science Foundation (NSF), computer science and engineering are the two STEM science fields with the lowest representation of women ranked as full professors, at 12% and 8%, respectively (Dekelaita-Mullet, 2021, p. 84). We contend that the computer nerd stereotype – variously anchored to some degree in empirics, reputation and celebration as stereotypes typically are – has significant power in shaping global information society, something which begs scrutiny of this type of actor in IR. We do not intend the term ‘nerd’ to be pejorative and refer to lack of social skills, which is often the case in everyday discourse and in popular culture; rather, we consider a ‘nerd’ to be a highly dedicated, knowledgeable and skilled expert in a technical field – particularly computers (Cambridge Dictionary, 2021). The chapter is structured as follows. In the following section, we conceptualise ‘nerd power’ as a type of structural, or system-shaping power, specifically with regard to what we dub design power, connecting power and analytical power. Subsequently, we suggest explanations for the rise of nerd power, which has to do not only with digital innovation and design, but also with ideas and decisions made in politics and business. Such decisions have enabled the development of global information society and propelled increasing dependence on digital infrastructure reliant on the (super)powers of the computer nerd. Finally, we discuss the implications of nerd power in a ‘fragmegrated’ world (technologically integrated yet politically and organisationally fragmented). Computer Nerds: Anonymous but Powerful

Specific focus on the power of computer experts is relatively rare in past research. An exception is anthropologist John Postill; in his 2018 book The Rise of Nerd Politics, Postill addresses the power of ‘tech-savvy nerds’, but the book is concerned only with digital activists – highly influential social media individuals – so-called ‘influencers’ working on crowdsourcing, privacy activism and political protest. Whereas Postill acknowledges that some digital activists are also computer experts – so-called ‘hacktivists’ (Denning, 2001; Richards & Wood, 2018; Sell, 2013; Tanczer, 2017) they are seldom visible to the public, a feature evidenced in the very name of the hacker network ‘Anonymous’ (Richards & Wood, 2018; Uitermark, 2018). While the network is well-known, its members are not.1 The digital world allows both heightened visibility and anonymity, but most computer experts

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have not gained public attention, at least not beyond their relatively isolated epistemic communities. Moreover, the possibility of anonymity in a technical sense, particularly regarding the endemic difficulty of identifying skilled actors behind cyber-attacks and the spread of digital malware, has been exploited by hacker groups such as the Anonymous group which in 2012 brought down the website of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (Olson, 2013). Indeed, it is not only the savvy use of digital technology that matters, but in a deeper architectural sense, code and the writers of computer code. Put simply, the work of computer nerds matters. Moreover, some nerds matter more than others, depending on their skill and to what degree their designs are actually applied in the construction, launching and widespread adoption of computer software, networks and praxis. To be sure, expertise in itself is not sufficient for making an impact on actual computer networks and their application in everything from military intelligence to finance, electricity, transport, telecommunications and other ‘critical infrastructures’. The history of technology is full of examples of proof-of-concept designs that haven’t made it to mass production (e.g. Google glasses), many more inventions that have become outdated (e.g. the ‘dumb’ phone), and designs that excel in some regions and fail in others (flip or foldable phones which were favoured in North America and unsuccessful in Europe). What we are concerned with herein is the top echelon of computer nerds – those with both necessary technological skills and knowledge on the one hand and those whose designs are actually adopted and employed in computer networks upon which post-industrial society is anchored. We are aware that some individual computer nerds have made a significant impact in global politics and business – notably first-generation computer nerds who developed some of the original ‘Big Tech’ companies, such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as second-generation computer nerds who developed social media, notably Mark Zuckerberg and his highly influential Facebook (Moran, 2020). While Jobs is widely seen as the man behind the iconic iPhone, Jobs’ role was much more that of entrepreneur and business leader than tech expert. Much less known than Jobs is Eric Arthur Johnston, the engineer who already in the 1960s developed the touch screen, which is a defining feature of the iPhone and all other smartphones (Hayes, 2018). In short, while a handful of computer nerds have gained visibility as well as significant political and economic power, most computer nerds do not achieve that kind of visibility or significant agenda-shaping or economic power. Hence, computer nerds exercise a largely silent and faceless form of power. The anonymity of computer nerds is certainly intentional in the case of hackers conducting computer break-ins and spreading malicious code (which is not our main object of study). Relative obscurity is common also for writers of social media algorithms, AI designers, 5G network engineers and computer system administrators – the type of actors we are mainly concerned with herein. Yet, the power of the latter more obscure and ‘benign’ type of computer nerd is as significant as that of

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the hacker, if not more so, particularly through their system-shaping capabilities. Notably, the anonymity of ‘benign’ computer nerds is not typically intentional. This anonymity may rather be the result of a general ‘externalisation’ of technology in society as well as in academic research – policy-makers, and other enthusiastic users of digital technology, as well as much of the IR literature, tends to perceive technology as an object or impersonal force, rather than as something developed and designed by humans, with the purpose of satisfying particular needs and interests (Eriksson & Giacomello, 2006; Eriksson & Newlove-Eriksson, 2021; Fritsch, 2014; Leese & Hijtink, 2019). The widespread determinist conceptualisation – typically non-reflective – of a mechanistic, impersonal, neutral ‘technological development’ might be an important reason for why computer nerds – among other technical experts – are seldom considered as the powerful agents they in fact are. Whereas software programmers, network engineers, cyber-security specialists, AI designers and computer system administrators abound – not all of them are equally skilled or influential. Comprehensive data is lacking, but the limited literature available (e.g. Akera, 2008; Ensmenger, 2012; Priestley, 2011)2 suggests that the overall number of highly skilled ‘computer geniuses’ is around a few thousand, most of them based in the United States and other advanced economies such as the UK, Germany, France and Australia. China is catching up however, partly through the commercial successes of TikTok, WeChat and Huawei’s 5G network. Notably, China has decided to phase out all Western technology from the country and make its government and society reliant entirely on homegrown technology – as part of a new ‘tech cold war’ with the West (Lyons, 2019). Further, China aspires to become global leader in AI by 2030 and the sheer number of its university graduates in computer science and engineering makes that a credible possibility. Similarly, the European Union (EU) has prioritised AI in its technological strategy, through massive funding and setting the explicit goal of developing a globally leading platform for ‘AI on demand’ (Newlove-Eriksson & Eriksson, 2021, pp. 48–49). Moreover, Russia is often considered the most successful instigator of information operations (IO) in history (Ajir & Vailliant, 2018), and Israel has made cybersecurity one of its top industrial sectors. India is also likely to follow China’s rapid development, thanks to India’s massive pool of computer science students and graduates.3 The power of computer nerds – individuals who are generally unknown to the public and who lack the financial powers of super-entrepreneurs – rests rather on their ability to shape, develop and manage the digital systems used for global communications, social media, financial transactions and digital infrastructures. Computer nerds do not make decisions on foreign or domestic policy, they do not sign international treaties, and they rarely give speeches to global audiences – but they shape digital parameters of policymaking, they shape how information is stored and disseminated, and they make it possible for people to connect and disconnect from each other. Thus, nerd power is largely a system-shaping type of power, rather

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than any Robert Dahl kind of relational power where, for example, actor A gets actor B to do what B otherwise would not have done. The system-shaping power of nerds may thus be seen as a form of structural power. In IR however, structural power is viewed as the capability of states and international organisations to shape international norms and principles (Baldwin, 2016, p. 81; Barnett & Duvall, 2005, pp. 52–55; cf. Chapters 1, 2 and 6 in this volume), rather than how computer experts shape digital information and communication systems. Yet recent research on how social media platforms, and how the algorithms run by them, imply biases in what and how information is communicated may suggest that computer nerds not only set parameters of communication, but also influence public discourse, including what norms and values gain more or less visibility (Gillespie, 2018). We have thus far argued that computer nerds are crucial to the development of the contemporary digitalised world, that nerd power is largely a system-shaping rather than relational form of power, as well as observed that computer nerds have been surprisingly missing from scholarship on digitalisation and cyberspace, particularly in the IR literature. These observations are important, but also nonspecific. In an attempt to further identify the kind of power computer nerds exert, we suggest three subtypes of nerd power: design power, connecting power, and analytical power. Before discussing each of these types of nerd power, it should be emphasised that while many computer experts specialise in only one of them, those multi-skilled individuals that know how to write algorithms, design software, detect bugs and hack into computer systems, build and connect computer networks, as well as manage and analyse ‘Big Data’ certainly have a competitive advantage. Such combinations of skill and experience are easier to develop within teams of different types of computer experts, which is what organisers of digital support and cybersecurity units of governmental and nongovernmental organisations comprise. The subsequent section describes the three subtypes in more detail. Design power sets the parameters of what currently can and cannot be done with software. By implication, software design also determines what can be done with computerised hardware – such as drones, autopiloted airplane systems and self-driving cars. Designing an autonomous weapons system is definitely one of the most pivotal design powers there is – that is, deciding what a weapons system will recognise as a ‘legitimate’ target and determining how a weapon system makes the decision to fire for effect. Designers are typically programmers and writers of code, both for system software and for specific software applications. On a global level, designers of the TCP/Internet Protocol and DNS (the global Domain Name System) exercise unparalleled power in their field (Eriksson & Giacomello, 2009; Haugen, 2020). These computer experts, working under the auspices of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Names and Numbers) have designed the foundational root system of the Internet. ICANN experts have, for example, designed the DNS in a combined territorial and organisational manner. This design power is not necessarily shaping the behaviour of Internet users, but it inter alia reiterates a

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particular way of understanding the world, as divided into a number of categories, specifically territorial states, governments, civil society, business and educational institutions (cf. Chapters 1, 2 and 6 in this volume). Design power can also be directly effectual, through for example design of software applications, design of AI systems, and in the writing of algorithms. Algorithms are software codes that work to identify user data and exponentially seek to match that with particular alternatives. Algorithms are increasingly a core feature of digital life, through their extrapolations impacting how individuals make choices regarding, for example, music, leisure activities, real estate, food, travel, medical assistance, financial investments and partner matchmaking (Bucher, 2018; Kotliar, 2021). Algorithms are also used in digital surveillance systems, for example, in monitoring of Internet search patterns for ascertaining early warning of epidemic and pandemic outbreaks by centres of disease control (Bengtsson, 2019). Moreover, algorithms are increasingly used in public administration and political decision-making, in what is referred to as ‘automated decision-making’ in the public sector (Cobbe, 2019; Kaun, 2022). Algorithms are also routinely used in, for example, Internet search engines – Google use is so widespread it has become a verb and synonym for search – and in social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. (Thorson, 2020). Embedded in these applications, algorithms assemble and analyse search strings, social media profiles and other user data, nudging or redirecting users to specific websites, postings and other categories of information and services. Algorithms imply systemic ‘confirmation bias’, selecting opinions and beliefs that confirm and reinforce beliefs people already have, while ignoring critical opinions and facts that speak against their beliefs (Bucher, 2018; Saifee, 2020). This ‘confirmation bias’ can be the choice of writers of algorithms or depend on clients that have paid the social media company to steer the attention of users. Algorithms and their tendency to create ‘opinion bubbles’ in social media risk aggravating the spread of ‘fake’ and highly politicised news, further fuelling the negative development of ‘post-truth’ society and disinformation (Bucher, 2018; Iengar & Massey, 2019). Indeed, some observers claim algorithms use ‘hyper nudging-techniques’ to overtly persuade and covertly manipulate people to make certain choices rather than others (Kotliar, 2021; Reviglio & Agosti, 2020). Even when AI is involved in the construction and application of algorithms – for example by arriving at novel results through extrapolative AI use – there are nonetheless experts behind the data who design and update AI, people who make decisions on what given AI applications are intended to do, and how what in a given circumstance is supposed to be done (Winfield, Michael, Pitt, & Evers, 2019). Moreover, AI is sometimes considered to be impartial, something not influenced by emotions or stakeholder interests (Hudson, 2019). Yet it can also be argued that there is risk of confirmation bias even in AI (Saifee, 2020), both dependent on the original design of AI technology, and on the specific machine learning properties of AI. Whereas it is beyond the scope of this paper to examine possible relations in

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detail, it is noteworthy that new constellations of subject and object and of human agency and knowledge production are implied in AI use. While most observers agree on the power of algorithms, it is seldom asked what power the writers of algorithms and developers and designers of technology may have. This knowledge gap is particularly noted within the field of IR, although the power of design has to a degree been addressed in Science and Technology Studies – STS (e.g. Akera, 2008; Albrechtslund, 2006; Ensmenger, 2012; Felt, Fouché, Miller, & Smith-Doerr, 2017; Priestley, 2011). In short, design power has two faces. First, the individuals and teams designing something have the power to decide what an application or gadget is supposed to do, how it does it and largely also for what purposes (e.g. a gun is ineffective for most other purposes besides shooting). Second, once a technological design (including those based on algorithms) is in place and being used, the design might have an impact on the behaviour and worldviews of people, states and organisations (Reviglio & Agosti, 2020; on structural power, Baldwin, 2016; Barnett & Duvall, 2005). Connecting power refers to how tech nerds are the ones who actually build and connect computer networks, construct the systems of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), manage the TCP/IP system and Domain Name System on behalf of ICANN, operate core routers, build 5G wireless networks (and the designing the forthcoming 6G technology) and set up satellite Internet communications (e.g. Elon Musk’s Starlink project; Heaven, 2020). In so doing, these specialist nerds set the parameters for who and what is included and excluded in communications networks, what the capacity of communications are, and also what and how systems are connected to other systems, so-called ‘systems of systems [SoS] engineering’ (Keating, Rogers, Unal, & Dryer, 2003). Such network experts effectively make ‘Big Data’ and the ‘Internet of Things’ possible – a development sped up by high capacity 5G (Li, Xu, & Zhao, 2018; Newlove-Eriksson & Eriksson, 2021). Importantly, connecting power also implies the power to disconnect, to downscale and limit access to networks – knowledge and skills used in network security and in the setup of firewalls, encryption and other means of protection. Arguably, network experts do not create an autonomous selection for decisions on who and what to include and exclude in a network, but rather strive to meet parameters for access and other goals set by their superiors – whether in the military, in public administration or in private business. Still, network experts – like experts in every field – have a general advantage in that their superiors depend on their specialised knowledge and skills. Analytical power, finally, refers herein to knowledge and understanding of how software and computer networks function, and what their properties, strengths and weaknesses are. Analytical power is also about the capacity to process raw data and convert it into knowledge, that is, to identify patterns and suggest interpretations of them. Analytical power is, for example, shown by the ability to detect and

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trace cyber-attacks, and to detect and analyse software vulnerabilities and ‘bugs’. Analytical power is also related to the process of ‘datafication’, that is, the algorithmic treatment and machine-learning tracking, aggregation and de-aggregation and analysis of ‘Big Data’ (see Bjola & Kornprobst’s introductory chapter to this volume; Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013; Mejias & Couldry, 2019; Lycette, 2013). Analytical power is thus also essential for the ability to conduct hacking into computer networks – to locate weak spots and ‘backdoors’, to navigate through ‘systems of systems’, and to decode encryption. Conceptually, analytical power corresponds to Barnett and Duvall’s notion of ‘productive power’, which is about discursive and meaning-making power (Barnett & Duvall, 2005, p. 55). A historical example of tech nerds with impressive analytical power are the Polish and British mathematicians and cryptologists who cracked the German Enigma cipher machine used before and during the Second World War. In the contemporary digital world, analytical power has arguably become even more pertinent, not least concerning encryption software, and it is thus essential for national security, which, according to Realism, is the sancta sanctorum of sovereign states (Giacomello, 2005, Chapter 2; cf. Chapters 1 and 2 in this volume). While design power is what makes applications and algorithms possible in the first place, and connecting power makes applications and algorithms come to use as applications in computer networks and digitalised critical infrastructure, analytical power makes it possible to understand the strengths and weaknesses of applications and algorithms, as well as to perceive patterns and inconsistencies in data and software. Before moving on to discuss what explains the rise of tech nerds, a comment is warranted regarding the intentionality of nerd power. Simply put, do nerds seek power beyond merely being able to do what their superiors tell them to do? To be sure, there are individuals and groups using and developing their computer knowledge and skills to have an impact on society and politics, for which they are neither popularly elected nor employed. It should also be acknowledged that the goals set by superiors may be more sinister than those of loyal tech nerds; consider for example the infamous Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bombs, technology which not only led to the killing of approximately 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also paved the way for nuclear deterrence as a grand strategy that shaped the bipolar system of the entire postwar era. A more contemporary example of how tech nerds work for nefarious purposes is the Cambridge Analytica scandal, revealed in March 2018. Cambridge Analytica was a British consultancy firm with staff skilled in computing and ‘Big Data’ analytics, which without authorisation collected personal data on more than 80 million Facebook users, data used both in the Brexit campaign in the UK and in Trump’s 2016 US presidential election campaign. The firm and its parent company, which was dissolved soon after the revelation of the scandal, had also influenced election campaigns in several other countries.

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While hacking and hacktivism may entail actions that are intended to do harm and need to be taken seriously, we would like to emphasise the much more widespread impact of nerd power, which unlike hacking is not intentional or conspiratorial but rather the sum of innumerable decisions taken over time in incremental code-writing, computer networking and technological analysis endeavours. Taken together, nerd power structures order the digital world. The cumulative power of tech decisions results not only in highly efficient telecommunications and digitalised infrastructure which enables real-time communication of vast amounts of data irrespective of geographical distance; importantly, these decisions have also resulted in highly interdependent and therefore vulnerable ‘world risk society’ (Beck, 1999), in which the sheer complexity of integrated technical systems imply unavoidability of ‘normal accidents’ (Perrow, 1999). What Explains the Rise of Nerd Power?

How then can the rise of nerd power be explained? The burgeoning significance of nerd power is an effect of the degree to which contemporary society has become reliant on computing for both functional infrastructure and leisure activities. If financial systems, transportation, telecommunications, electricity grids, industrial and food supply chains, healthcare and other ‘critical infrastructures’ did not depend on computer networks – then nerd power would be insignificant, and the relevance of expertise in the field likely confined to a hobby sector. Hence, given the increasing global dependency on digital infrastructure, nerd power is rising, ceteris paribus. This proposition is as true as it is shallow; it does not tell us whether nerd power is similar everywhere, whether there are specific drivers that matter more than others, or whether there are distinct drivers for different types of nerd power. We suggest here three key drivers for the rise of nerd power, corresponding to design power, connecting power and analytical power. Further, we address the significance of techno-optimistic ideas in politics and business, as well as the importance of developments in the private sector for the rise of all three forms of nerd power. Finally, we discuss why the power of computer nerds – as a specific category – is generally more significant than that of other tech nerds. First, design power is increasing as a result of the rapid increase in dependency on a myriad of digital software applications and algorithms which guide and support everything from heavy machinery, advanced medical equipment, air traffic controls, military and search and rescue (SAR) drones, financial transactions, intelligence services, surveillance, and geo-engineering to political decisionmaking, to our mundane but also high-tech mobile smartphones which have become highly integrated in the majority of daily lives from an early age. This observation corresponds to Bjola and Kornprobst’s discussion of speed as one of the sources of ‘digital disruption’ (see the introductory chapter to this volume; Wajcman, 2015). Importantly, not only does the digital interconnectedness of previously analogue infrastructures imply real-time communication across vast

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geographical distances, but this speed is also accelerating, particularly through the rollout of higher bandwidth 5G technology (Newlove-Eriksson & Eriksson, 2021; Schwab, 2017). Whereas contemporary software designs are user-friendly, the underlying technology is increasingly complex, requiring advanced expertise in code-writing and program design. Earlier software applications often required some basic understanding of code-writing, which for example was the case with respect to the original versions of the statistical software SPSS, which in its current user-friendly interface does not require more than very basic computer skills. Moreover, with the increasing dependency on algorithms in news media, social media and indeed in automated decision-making in military operations and public administration, the power of the code-writer undoubtedly grows, even where circumscribed by laws, policies and the expectations of superiors. With the increasing dependency on technical expertise in international regulation of a digitalised world, combined with the increasing complexity of technical systems and algorithm-driven systems, the influence of technical experts is generally growing. This has been observed in, for example, international standardisation processes (Demortain, 2008; Novak & Pavlicek, 2021). Second, connecting power is increasing in significance as government and private sectors actively promote a process of digital interconnectedness of critical infrastructure and public services in the Internet of Things (IoT), which previously were analogue and operated independently of one another (Akaev & Pantin, 2014; McCarthy, 2018; Newlove-Eriksson & Eriksson, 2021). Smartphones are in themselves a microworld of multiple functions far surpassing that of a ‘telephone’; the next step, if techno-optimists in business and government are to decide, is the development of efficiency-driven digitalised and interconnected ‘smart homes’ and ‘smart cities’. This major global digitalised integration goes further than the preceding information technology revolution, which mainly concerned the global spread of the Internet (Castells, 1996; Rosenau & Singh, 2002). Importantly, this new digital interconnectedness entails not merely a shift in communications, but in how both information and a whole array of physical, social, economic, political and biological systems are integrated, which relates to ‘pervasiveness’ as one of the key sources of ‘digital distruption’ (see the introductory chapter to this volume by Bjola and Kornprobst; cf. Newlove-Eriksson & Eriksson, 2021). Indeed, the human body is not exempt from digitalisation. Biometric face recognition has existed for many years, and for example, embedded sensor technology for recognition of voices and walking patterns – that is, the ‘gait’ – of individuals is also well under development. More intrusive ‘cyborglike’ technologies are also coming into use, such as microchips implanted under the skin of individuals, which use personalised Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags for ID and credit, and can be used for transportation ticketing, to give just one example (Newlove-Eriksson & Eriksson, 2021, pp. 34–35). Less controversial biotech applications are those used to treat, for example, diabetes and other serious

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chronic illnesses. Notably, such identification and surveillance technologies are increasingly interconnected in digital networks, through compressed cyber transmission of sensor-enabled multiple-source information, ‘ubiquitous’ technology processes sped up by higher bandwidth 5G. With the dissemination of high-speed 5G wireless technology, the ‘IoT’ is no longer simply an idea, but a reality. According to the Ericsson corporation, a leading 5G developer, in 2021 approximately 28 billion ‘smart devices’ were connected with the help of sensors and rapid transmission across the world. What the implications of this will be for international relations remains to be seen; the rather sparse IR literature on 5G to date concerns primarily security implications with respect to China and the West regarding Huawei; many observers in the West fear, for example, Huawei’s use of 5G technology for espionage on behalf of the Chinese government (Rühlig & Björk, 2020). Third, analytical nerd power is increasing in significance due to tremendous advances in ‘Big Data’ and quantum computing, that is, what Bjola and Kornprobst identity as the first source of ‘digital disruption’ (see the introduction to this volume by Bjola and Kornprobst; Lee, 2017; Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013; Mejias & Couldry, 2019). While analytical power is largely the result of computer research and development, it would not imply much power unless the demand for Big Data number crunching had risen equally fast, in every part of government, industry and society. In business, the use of Big Data is becoming more diverse and widespread, for purposes such as trend forecasting in market analysis, and for specific statistical analysis in everything from agriculture, spatial planning, crowd control and mining and retail (Lee, 2017). It has been argued, however, that for Big Data to become a core tool in business strategy and management, a change in business culture is also required: ‘You can’t manage what you don’t measure’ (McAfee & Brynjolffson, 2012, p. 4) sums up this techno-behaviourist attitude. Advocates of Big Data also emphasise that it is not just another word for ‘statistical analysis’, but that it implies pivotal changes in volume (from gigabyte to zettabyte), velocity (rapid insight on for example the geographical location patterns of mobile phones), and variety (everything from GPS signals to sensor readings and social media postings (McAfee & Brynjolffson, 2012, pp. 4–5). What the Big Data and quantum computing revolution do then, is promise a leap from relying on ‘hunches and clues’ to ‘reliable data’. Whether such a change is actually taking place is however questionable. Increased reliance on Big Data may very well satisfy an emotional need for control, without really answering the most important questions for decision-makers in business, government and civil society. In particular, whereas Big Data may give you the ‘big picture’, highlighting dominant patterns and most likely outcomes, it tends to miss deviating or outlier cases, the out-of-ordinary (Eriksson & Giacomello, 2013). In risk analysis, the less likely but more consequential (e.g. a solar storm causing a global power blackout) is equally if not more important than the most likely outcome. Notably, Big Data also has implications for national security, which is particularly noteworthy in increasingly digitalised intelligence analysis.

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In addition to change in the demand and supply of digital technology, ideas also matter as drivers of technological change and nerd power. In particular, technooptimistic, determinist ideas fuel the development of the global information society. These ideas, based on modernisation theory and which are reminiscent of the Enlightenment, suggest that technological innovation is germane for coping with societal, environmental and political challenges (Dai & Hao, 2018; Sokolova, Troyanskaya, & Glavatskikh, 2020). The impact of technological optimism is evidenced by the widespread belief in evolutionary societal development, where both individuals and society as a whole get ‘smarter’ by way of technological revolutions. Not only are people regularly using ‘smart’ phones for a large part of everyday activities, but political and business leaders are also advocating ‘smart homes’, ‘smart cities’ and even a ‘smart future’ (Lee & Trimi, 2018; Newlove-Eriksson & Eriksson, 2021, pp. 36–37). The ‘smart’ label strongly implies that digitalisation and interconnectivity are considered fundamental for societal and economic progress. Notably, dangers of such a technologically attuned and dependent risk society tend to be downplayed or dealt with separately from national strategies of technology and industry, where ministers even hold dual portfolios such as energy and digitalisation (e.g. former Swedish minister Anders Ygeman) signifying optimistic technological determinism. Moreover, it remains an open question as to who, what and how something is seen as ‘smart’. Notwithstanding, the political impact of techno-optimism is undeniable – particularly significant during ‘the liberal decade’ of the 1990s – when Francis Fukuyama (1989) and other liberal thinkers projected the ‘end of history’ and the victory of liberal democracy and global capitalism. This period of liberal optimism coincided with the global spread of the Internet, which not least US administrations considered a tool for the spread of democracy and freedom around the world. The notion of ‘internet freedom’ however was and still is countered by ‘internet sovereignty’, the latter advocated by China, Russia and other autocratic states (cf. Ch. 2 in this volume). The liberal, and US-led ‘Internet freedom’ campaign, has also been criticised for being overly optimistic and even naïve in its proponed conviction that free Internet access could pave the way for democratisation. Evgeny Morozov, for example, shows that many autocratic countries quickly adapted to the digital world and learned how to use digital surveillance and social media for control of information and discourse (Morozov, 2012). Further, the rise of nerd power is facilitated by the immense growth of the private sector in digitalisation of the world. Researchers have estimated that in 2018 the size of the global digital economy was worth $11.5 trillion, and that the share of the digital economy of global wealth is 15.5%, but also that its share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is growing two to three times faster than GDP itself (Henry-Nickie, Frimpong, & Sun, 2019). On a general level, power in the global information society has been perceived as divided between national governments, private business and individuals (Choucri, 2012; Dunn-Cavelty & Suter, 2009; Eriksson & Giacomello, 2006; Giacomello, 2003; Hoijtink & Leese, 2019;

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McCarthy, 2018). Civil society should be added to the list, as many social movements and other civil society stakeholders have become preeminent in cyber, not least in the social media sphere. Civil society cannot match the private sector in cyberspace however; nor can national governments, generally speaking. The exception that proves the rule is heavily state-controlled national cyber domains, in particular those of China. In most liberal and market-capitalist countries however, national governments have been unable and possibly unprepared to ‘rein in’ other players. Indeed, ‘reining in’ has not been the aim of most governments in liberal democracies, given strong appetites for privatisation and outsourcing. An example of this is the Swedish Transport Agency which in 2014 began a process of outsourcing several nationalsecurity databases to IBM, which in turn outsourced data further to unvetted subcontractors, including the national driving license registry, the national vehicle registry, data on secret agents and other persons with protected identities, and databases on airport and harbour security – examples of critical information infrastructure (Newlove-Eriksson, Giacomello, & Eriksson, 2018). This outsourcing was swiftly accomplished without vetting any of the foreign private company computer nerds who were granted access to highly sensitive databases. When this unvetted outsourcing and the worries of the Swedish Security Service (indeed these circumstances required their investigation into the activities of other Swedish authorities) were revealed by the Swedish newspaper DN, the political scandal was a fact, with the Director of the Swedish Transport Agency and two ministers (Anders Ygeman – then Minister of the Interior; and Anna Johansson, Minister of Infrastructure) resigning in 2017. The extent of the damage done to national (and possibly even EU) security was never fully disclosed. This episode reveals how nerd power can be expanded as a result of political decisions and incompetence, in this case by a Social Democratic government (thus it is not simply a choice preferred by neoliberal parties). It also demonstrates how the role of the traditional national security state is changing. As Adam Smith observed (Coulomb, 1998), defence has been one of the necessary expenses of government; individuals and their businesses would pay a (relatively) small amount, through taxes, but would gain advantages such as security from the common good of defence. In other words, the latter were net beneficiaries. This state of affairs can be seen to remain basically unaltered since the end of the Cold War – undoubtedly, businesses and tax-payers contributed to national security, but they did so indirectly. This balance appears to have changed in many Western countries, where outsourcing of public utilities and even core functions of national security began in the 1980s and 1990s. Consequently, breaches of national security and secrecy are more likely than in the more traditionally ‘insourced’ national security state. Moreover, with private actors and public-private partnerships (PPP) taking over certain national security functions, problems of accountability typically ensue (Giacomello, 2021; Newlove-Eriksson et al., 2018; cf. Chapters 1, 2 and 6 in this volume).

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The rise of private authority in the domain of digitalised national security began with the transfer of the original Internet from the US Department of Defense to the Department of Commerce, which, with great insight, was made publicly available, for individual users and businesses to use (Hafner & Lyon, 1996). As is well known now, the ‘net’ was at first a gizmo for researchers, academics, visionaries and computer nerds. Importantly, the design power exercised by original developers of the Internet continues to determine the scope and parameters of Internet usage, particularly through the TCP/IP and Domain Name Systems for websites and the browsing histories and identification of interconnected devices. Business took notice and in 1999 the ‘dot com’ bubble burst, as the early digital economy was based on potential rather than real gains; the ‘net’ could certainly be a huge window for its products and was a boon for media. A decade later, digitalisation of business took off in earnest, boosted also by the development of social media, which resulted in new forms of design and connecting power. Simultaneously, public utilities and critical infrastructure became progressively digitalised and outsourced to private companies or privatised with PPP for regulation. The Y2K or ‘millennium bug’, a bug in the basic clock setting of computers all over the world 1999/2000, was not only detected by computer experts, but also ‘fixed’ by the same type of nerds. This global point in time spurred widespread fear, from the possibility that automated banking machines and medical life-saving medical technology would stop working, to rendering airplanes unable to fly and trains impossible to drive. The Y2K episode not only highlighted the power of the computer nerd – both as culprit (for erecting the fallible computer clock system in the first place) and as an essential party to solutions – but also demonstrated the pivotal role of the private sector. The private sector owned and managed most of the systems affected, and the relevant expertise to fix the bug lay mainly within private companies. Since then, the reliance of governments on critical information infrastructure maintained and protected by private actors has rapidly increased, as well as demands for greater oversight (Giacomello, 2021; Newlove-Eriksson et al., 2018). Another element of the shift towards private authority was the emergence of genuine digital technology companies: Amazon was born in the mid-1990s; in the early 2000s Microsoft not only maintained its dominance in the PC software market but also expanded into online services and gaming; Apple launched its first iPhone in 2007, which made online connectivity possible from a handheld device; Facebook appeared in 2010, and has since then been a dominant social media company. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and various lockdowns of 2020 dramatically boosted the digital share of the economy. The impact of digital companies on the world economy has become paramount, to the point that today, the wealthiest companies are no longer oil companies, but Big Tech, while ‘traditional’ businesses struggle to adapt. As noted by Hyslop (2007, p. 5), ‘[t]he privatization of utilities and the adoption of “Just in Time” delivery techniques for food and fuel mean there is very little

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“give” in the system to cater for unexpected events’. Circumstances have allowed companies owning and operating cyber-physical infrastructures to become so essential to contemporary life and economies that they are almost ‘untouchable’ – certainly not damaged or hampered by current fluctuations and disturbances. Given this state of affairs, it is hardly surprising that calls to ‘break up’ such companies go unanswered and that ‘Big Tech’ is openly recognised as ‘big bullies’ (Ovide, 2020); for modern societies, these digital companies and even the smaller ones are deemed essential – interruptions in their service delivery would have a tremendous impact on social life and well-being. As a result, most digital businesses and in particular ‘Big Tech’ have an extremely powerful bargaining position when it comes to dealing with users and even governments. In the physical world, arguably not even ‘Big Oil’ has ever enjoyed the influence or clout of digital capital. China, where internationally as well as domestically successful digital companies such as TikTok and Huawei are closely monitored if not controlled by the central government provides an interesting case. With the exception of China and other autocratic states, national governments cannot easily rule cyberspace against the desiderata of digital companies (cf. Chapter 2 in this volume). Simultaneously in the West, demands on the regulation of ‘Big Tech’ and release of their ‘Big Data’ has arisen over the last decade, notably with regard to Facebook (Smyth, 2019) – it remains to be seen if Australia’s recent challenge to Facebook in response to the company’s criticised ‘banning’ of public information will have a resounding impact. How, then, does the rise of the private digital business sector facilitate the bolstering of nerd power? In sum, there are three aspects of this. First, given general ‘Big Tech’ power vis-à-vis national governments, combined with the fact that computer nerds build and manage the technology and digital services provided by private companies, nerd power is generally increasing. Second, the trend of privatisation, outsourcing and PPP may imply heightened capacity and efficiency – note, however, that substantial empirical evidence indicates otherwise, particularly with respect to delays and heightened costs – but this in any case almost always comes with a cost in terms of loss of transparency and public accountability. In turn, this may create increased discretion for individual companies as well as for the computer nerds who actually construct and operate the digital systems. Third, computer nerds may on occasion find themselves in temporary positions where they can have a more direct impact on political agendas around the world, as in the case of ‘hacktivists’ such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Finally, we suggest that computer nerds constitute a generally more powerful epistemic category than that of other nerds, such as experts working on nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, to take a limited specific example, even though these specialisations may also entail computer expertise overlap. Importantly, advanced skills in computer programming are no longer a separate nerd domain proficiency but are pivotal in basically every other field of technology as well, as a general result of digitalisation. For example, automated weapons systems, drones and military command and control systems all depend on the skill and knowledge of

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computer experts, from design to operation, maintenance and upgrade. Moreover, individuals with profound and specialised knowledge of software programming and computer networks typically have an insider ‘legacy’ advantage that can significantly strengthen or weaken the knowledge reservoir, position and influence of any organisation, whether state or non-state, that highly competent nerds may decide to work or not work for. Whereas development and control of for example advanced weapons technology is highly restricted, requiring security classification, and the ‘applicability’ of automated weapon systems is comparatively limited, the wider community of computer nerds find their knowledge and skills applicable in far wider domains of society, business and politics. Conclusion: Nerd Power in a ‘Fragmegrated’ World

We have made the case that nerd power is on the rise, largely due to increasing global dependency on the power of computer nerds to design, connect and analyse computer software, networks and ‘Big Data’. While critical infrastructures and multiple public utilities, as well as private homes, workplaces and even human bodies are increasingly digitally interconnected, control and responsibility appears to be more dispersed and compartmentalised. Simultaneous technological integration and political-organisational fragmentation is captured by the notion of ‘fragmegration’, coined by the late James N. Rosenau (1997, Ch. 6). It can be argued that this ‘fragmegration’ contributes to increased discretion and power of computer nerds, as they are the experts actually orchestrating technological integration, whereas oversight, transparency and accountability are typically at a loss. This is yet more the case in circumstances of fast-paced technological development and change, where regulation typically lags behind economically driven innovation. While we have focused specifically on the power of computer nerds, the notion of digital ‘fragmegration’ may thus be seen as an overarching concept, which captures the disruptive, ordering and agential processes outlined in the introductory chapter to this volume. The power of computer nerds is increasing, but nerds are not coordinated in a single global epistemic community, but rather work for hundreds of thousands of corporations, public administrations, international organisations and civil society organisations around the world. Contrary to ludicrous theories of ‘global conspiracies’, which have gained traction through social media and algorithmic confirmation bias, there is no single ‘megamind’ out there (Roose, 2020). There is merit to the observation that Google and Facebook are dominant ‘platform companies’, whose computer nerd employees are more powerful than others, which might imply that power is clustered rather than dispersed. Notwithstanding, the complexity of global ‘digital disruptions’ implies that the power of individual computer nerds, even the most skilled, is generally confined to particular computer networks or certain types of social media. Moreover, with the notable exception of ‘hacktivists’ and possibly some top echelon experts working for major ‘Big Tech’ companies,

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most computer nerds are not necessarily aware of their power, which might be the saving grace of these ‘hidden orchestrators’. Moreover, we have suggested that the type of expert power maintained by computer nerds is primarily of a system-shaping rather than relational kind. This system-shaping power consists of three subsets of nerd power: ‘design power’ that shapes the digital platforms and applications used by individuals and organisations; ‘connecting power’ that shapes the networks which allow real-time communication and digitalisation of infrastructure; and ‘analytical power’ which controls and produces knowledge of the digital world, including the increasing use of ‘Big Data’. The system-shaping nature of nerd power is a form of ‘structural power’, as conceptualised in the IR power literature (Baldwin, 2016, p. 81, Barnett & Duvall, 2005, pp. 52–55). Nerd power is not, however, confined to the realm of ‘structural power’, but also has ‘productive’ capacity (Barnett & Duvall, 2005, p. 55), specifically with regard to the analytical power of computer experts. We have suggested that the rise of nerd power is a result of a combination of three key drivers. First, design power is growing because of the speedy increase in dependency on digital software applications and algorithms which not only individuals but also major public services and infrastructures rely on. Second, connecting power is growing because states and non-state actors are involved in a process of digital interconnectedness of critical infrastructure and public services, which previously were analogue and operated independently from one other (cf. Ch. 6 in this volume). Third, analytical nerd power is increasing in significance because of the quantitative growth of information, through advances in ‘Big Data’ and quantum computing, that is, what Bjola and Kornprobst in the introduction to this volume identify as one of the main sources of ‘digital disruption’. It remains to be seen whether continued technological development of, for example, machinelearning AI and 6G communications – the latter predicted to be characterised not only by greater data volumes and speed but by transforming user experiences – will alter the shape and significance of nerd power. There is promise for further research on nerd power in applying and developing the three subtypes of power and in seeking to reveal patterns of similarity and difference across techno-organisational domains where boundary distinction is evident. For example, does nerd power play out differently within major ‘platform companies’ in comparison with for example small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), public administration, and the military? How is nerd power conditioned by political and economic circumstances, that is, how does it vary across democracies and autocracies, as well as across richer ‘information economies’ as opposed to less prosperous countries? How does legislation and regulation attempt to keep pace with technological developments, as is observed for example in the area of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) norm-building? Systematic empirical inquiry is needed in computing-heavy fields, particularly approaches which promise to penetrate the black box of tech communities and organisations, to get as close as possible to the real world of computer nerds and their ‘communities of

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practice’ (Wenger, 1998). Further insight into the significant gendered dimension where males dominate computing professions – particularly at higher levels – is also needed in order to understand and explain nerd power and its implications for international relations. Notes 1 See also Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires, a 1996 three-part TV documentary by Robert X. Cringeley. See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115398/ (accessed 22 February 2021). 2 Another indication, albeit inexact, is found in the Wikipedia web page dedicated to the most influential programmers in diverse fields. The majority of them are Americans, and the list is also heavily dominated by male names. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_ of_programmers (accessed 9 January 2023). 3 Russia, for example, has the highest number of graduates in engineering (all specialisations), according to the OECD.

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PART II

Agential Processes

4 CAN YOU TRUST IN ZOOM? BONDS AND TRUST IN DIGITAL SPACES Marcus Holmes and Nicholas J. Wheeler

Introduction: The Puzzle of Bonding and Social Network Development in Digital Environments

‘You can’t “Zoom” trust’ (Stavridis, 2020) is a common refrain in diplomatic, military and policymaking circles in a COVID-19 world. Faced with a pandemic that abruptly halted most non-essential air travel, diplomats, civil servants and even leaders resorted to replacing physical face-to-face interactions with mediated communications in digital environments. Video conferencing through platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Skype quickly became routine and habitual, with some notable successes. A virtual summit held by G20 energy ministers in April 2020 led to an agreement to cut crude oil production in order to stabilise the effects of the pandemic on oil markets. The G7, International Monetary Fund and World Bank all successfully convened video conferences in the early days of the pandemic (Naylor, 2020). Almost as quickly, however, lamentations that interaction through digital means could not replicate the face-to-face experience followed. While criticisms of digital interaction varied, the basic claim is simply that digitally mediated interaction, as Ashok Mirpuri, Singapore’s veteran ambassador in Washington, put it, is ‘not real diplomacy’ (quoted in Heath, 2020). There can simply be no substitute for being in the room together. Whether because of an inability to read important social cues and signals transmitted in and through face-to-face interaction, or the lost opportunity to broaden one’s set of contacts and social networks through informal in-person meetings, the argument is clear: digital interaction simply cannot compare to its physical counterpart and relationships, networks, and trust-producing social bonds suffer as a result. Intriguingly, however, existing research suggests that diplomats, ambassadors and heads of state have long been able to create bonds with one another and develop DOI: 10.4324/9781003437963-7

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sophisticated social networks, through non-face-to-face modalities of interaction. Whether the use of letters in Italian Renaissance diplomacy (Lazzarini, 2012) or diplomatic cables and letters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Jönsson & Hall, 2005), prior to safe and regular air travel, leaders and diplomats often had no choice but to build bonds and trust through the written word. As scholars of early modern Europe have pointed out, there is a very long history of individuals building social networks and trust through mediated communication of this kind because that was the only possible way to accomplish it. Consider a merchant in eighteenth-century Europe who had to rely on the trustworthiness of agents whom he or she had never met and the temptation to cheat omnipresent (Hudson, 2014). In other work, we (Wheeler & Holmes, 2021) have demonstrated that a bond can develop through text between the leaders of two nuclear adversary states, exemplified by the relationship of trust that formed through the exchange of letters between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a bond that ultimately contributed to that event ending peacefully rather than in disaster. More recently, some scholars have pointed out how the use of mobile phones, particularly their text messaging capabilities, can similarly sustain, or perhaps even build, bonds in much the same way that letters did in earlier periods (Ling, 2008a, 2008b). This creates something of a puzzle. Diplomats and leaders bemoan the limits to trust in digitally mediated interactions, such as video conferencing, while they historically have been able to build trust and networks with far less. This is particularly puzzling since new digital technologies provide the opportunity to mimic, at least to a large degree, the visual face-to-face experience. In this chapter we explore this puzzle by interrogating how bonds are created in diplomacy. Drawing upon recent work in microsociology, we elaborate on the conditions under which social bonds can be expected to form between individuals, including diplomats and leaders. We then assess the extent to which these conditions are present in face-to-face interactions, telephonic, text-based communication, and finally video-conferencing technology. We argue that diplomats and leaders are not wrong to point out the limitations of video conferencing technologies, but they have not articulated the fundamental nature of the problem, which includes a lack of the information richness that exists in and through face-to-face interaction, the preclusion of serendipitous encounters, and crucially, a reduced ability to exclude outsiders. Moreover, we demonstrate that while physical interactions are required for strong bond formation, these other communication modalities at the disposal of leaders and diplomats may offer opportunities for bonding, albeit of a weaker type. While in the modern period leaders and diplomats are accustomed to the opportunity and potential to bond in person, we argue that copresent interaction is not a necessary condition for weaker bond formation. These bonds, in turn, open up possibilities for agential processes of enticing and winning over, as discussed in the Introductory chapter of this volume. We conclude with reflections on how social bonds between dyads of diplomats may be created and extended in cyberspace.

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Interaction Ritual Chains: Building Bonds

How social networks initially emerge and subsequently grow, particularly those characterised by strong social ties, such as interpersonal bonds, remains one of the central questions in the field of microsociology. Put simply, how and why do individuals hit it off with others in some cases, but not others, and how do these bonds proliferate to form large networks? Microsociology, the study of individuals and their interaction, is premised on the notion that large macro-level phenomena, such as a social movement or even society itself, are rooted in the aggregation of microlevel events. Microsociologists are therefore interested in the ways in which interactions between individuals, or groups, and ‘chains’ of those interactions, combine to create structures. Randall Collins (2004, p. 276), a leading theorist in the field, puts it in the following way: we can view the social world as ‘a bundle of individual chains of interactional experience, criss-crossing each other in space as they flow along in time’. The interactional experiences that individuals have are referred to as interaction rituals, and they vary considerably in just how ‘micro’ they are: from two individuals gossiping at the water cooler at the office, to thousands of individuals simultaneously expressing nationalistic solidarity by singing the national anthem at a sporting event. Collins (2004, p. 39) theorises that we engage in such interactions in order to gain positive ‘emotional energy (EE)’, or a ‘socially derived . . . feeling of confidence, courage to take action, [and] boldness in taking initiative’. Consequently, interactions that produce EE are experienced as more positive, uplifting and ultimately desirable. Some interaction rituals, on the other hand, are not as successful in producing EE and, as a consequence, the interaction falls flat. To explain this, Collins identifies four interaction ritual ingredients that are required for positive EE to be generated: bodily co-presence, mutual focus of attention, shared mood and a barrier to outsiders. Bodily co-presence is defined by Collins (2004, p. 48) as ‘two or more people physically assembled in the same place, so that they affect each other by their bodily presence, whether it is in the foreground of their conscious attention or not’. Co-presence is necessary because it provides individuals the ability to ‘monitor each other’s signals and bodily expressions’, facilitating ‘that human nervous systems become mutually attuned’ (2004, p. 64). Mutual focus of attention refers to ‘a common object or activity’ where individuals ‘become mutually aware of each other’s focus of attention’ (Collins, 2004, p. 48). Singing the national anthem in the stadium before a sporting event, participating in a religious event where the congregation is focused on a particular prayer, or even having a conversation about a film with a co-worker at cafe, for example, all are examples of individuals both turning their attention to a common focus and, crucially, being aware of that common focus in others. Additionally, individuals must also ‘share common mood or emotional experience’ (Collins, 2004, p. 48). Collins notes the importance of affective matching: a disjuncture between emotional states, such as apathy by one and excitement by the other, results in a mismatch that is inauspicious with respect to the prospects of bonding. When individuals

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are effectively matched in mood or emotion, there is a possibility of getting ‘into shared rhythm, caught up in each other’s motions and emotions’ (Collins, 2004, p. 64). Shared mood and mutual focus of attention may also reinforce one another. The physical co-presence of individuals aids this by allowing individuals in the interaction ‘to signal and confirm a common focus of attention and thus a state of intersubjectivity’ (Collins, 2004, p. 64). The theorised causal mechanism by which the four ingredients produce bonding is collective effervescence. Originally theorised by Émile Durkheim, collective effervescence is ‘intensification of shared experience’ (Collins, 2004, p. 35) or simultaneity of thought or action. For Collins, it is this shared experience of the interaction, including the shared intensity of experience, shared affective arousal and mutual entrainment that results in positive EE and a social bond. Crucially, however, not all interactions will produce bonds. Many, perhaps most, interactions fall flat. As Collins (2004, p. 51) argues, when interactions fail, the ingredients to success are not present, and the result is a negative corollary of positive EE: ‘a sense of a drag, the feeling of boredom and constraint, even depression, interaction fatigue, a desire to escape’. Put simply, ‘[s]uccessful rituals are exhilarating; failed rituals are energy draining’ (Collins, 2004, p. 53). Finally, while Collins has not fully elaborated on the concept, Boyns and Luery (2015) highlight the potential for negative EE. Their intervention is to point out that not all of these emergent effects are normatively positive. Indeed, there is a ‘dark-side’ of emotional energy that can be found in anger, rage, resentment and distrust. In a social media context, for example, QAnon followers in the United States may develop bonds with one another where the collective effervescence is rooted in anger. Collins (2021) reflecting on the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, remarked on the ritual destruction behaviour, that which ‘is seemingly purposeless, to outsiders and opponents. But it is meaningful, or at least deeply impulsive for those who do it: a collective, social emotion for those involved’. Several aspects of this model, as they affect applicability to digital networks, are worth noting. The first is perhaps evident, but worth emphasis: interaction elements are privileged over dispositional or situational/environmental characteristics. One might imagine, for example, that a successful bond between two individuals, say world leaders, would develop because of their personal dispositions, such as personality, or perhaps shared historical experience. On this reading, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan developed a relationship in the 1980s through summitry because their personalities were amenable to bonding and both possessed a shared disposition that a nuclear war must never be fought. One might also argue that the international environment facilitated such interaction in the first place. Similarly, if one was interested in explaining why Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin’s relationship did not replicate the success of Reagan and Gorbachev, one could argue that the addition of the two personalities clashed, or that the international environment was not conducive to interpersonal bond formation among leaders. The Collins approach challenges us to focus less on attributes that are reducible to the

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individuals involved in an interaction and take more seriously that which occurs between individuals in an interaction. This is not to say, however, that dispositions, traits or environmental factors are irrelevant. Far from it. Each might be critical in creating conditions under which an interaction takes place, may serve as an input to an interaction, or may affect how likely it is for each of the ritual ingredients to be present. For example, some individuals might find sharing emotion or holding mutual focus of attention easier than others, ultimately affecting the likelihood that a social bond will form in the interaction. Additionally, gender and race elements are clearly part of the interaction and cannot easily be separated from the interaction itself. Finally, the notion of interaction ritual chains implies that history, specifically the history of previous interactions, matters as well. As Collins puts it, ‘the history of their chains – what sociologists have conventionally referred to as their positions in the social structure – is carried along in emotions and emotion-laden cognitions that become the ingredients for the upcoming encounter’ (2004, p. 105). Reagan and Gorbachev were able to develop new social bonds through their summitry in the second half of the 1980s, and it was through their summits that began in Geneva in 1985 and ended in Moscow in 1988 that the two leaders developed bonds that were built upon and reinforced as Reagan and Gorbachev entered each interaction with the results of their preceding successful ones. Second, Collins’ interaction ritual model is one that is extremely broad in scope. It attempts to account for the emergence of social order by focusing on the iterative and repeated interactions at the micro-level. It should, in principle, be able to analyse any dyadic, triadic or group social interaction, as well as the networks of ritual chains that follow. This means that what each of the four ingredients means will be interaction dependent. Consider shared mood and mutual focus of attention. In previous work (Holmes & Wheeler, 2020; Colins, 2021) we have applied the Collins model to reassurance diplomacy, arguing that the shared exercise of security dilemma sensibility – an actor’s intention and capacity to perceive the motives behind, and to show responsiveness towards, the potential complexity of the military intentions of others [and] understand the role that fear might play in their attitudes and behaviour, including, crucially, the role that one’s actions may play in provoking that fear (Booth & Wheeler, 2008, p. 7) – creates a mutual focus of attention, whilst positive identification of interests and humanisation are necessary for the presence of shared mood. In a context outside of reassurance, the components of shared mood and mutual focus of attention will be very different. Consider diplomats negotiating over a trade deal or a communique regarding a pandemic. In these contexts, mutual focus might consist of specific quantitative data on trade flows while shared mood is anxiety and fear over a catastrophic level of infections.

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Third, barriers to outsiders implies that individuals in an interaction are able to delineate those within the interaction from those outside it. For Collins, this is crucial because it is what allows individuals to feel that they are part of a shared purpose and intentional endeavour. That is, while creating barriers may produce other desirable effects, such as reduced need for grandstanding or a belief about confidentiality, from an interaction ritual perspective it helps to generate collective effervescence because individuals feel group membership and belonging. The ability to exclude, in itself, is often important and can generate closeness and intimacy with others. Excluding outsiders has long been a feature of religious and club rituals, for example (see Wellman et al., 2014). Importantly, barriers may exist in both material/physical and ideational/symbolic senses. First, with respect to the physical realm, policymakers such as diplomats or leaders are often accompanied by translators, note-takers, advisors, photographers, and so on. While each of these individuals tend to occupy the same physical space, protagonists in an interaction are often able to exclude them from the interaction itself. Sometimes this exclusion is subtle, such as a whispered conversation in the back of the room. Other times, it is more overt, such as the 30 minutes North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and former South Korean President Moon Jae-in spent alone sitting on a park bench in Panmunjeom, North Korea at the May 2018 Inter-Korean Summit. In either case, the ability to exclude in the material sense involves a physical separation and barrier between who is within the interaction and who is outside of it. Barriers can also be created through non-material means as well. Discursively individuals can utilise linguistic stratagems whose true meaning might only be ascertained by individuals within a particular interaction. Overt examples might involve a cryptolect, argot or anti-language, where a dyad or group utilises either new language or existing language in new ways, to exclude outsiders from grasping meaning. More subtle examples include reference to ideas or concepts that only those in an interaction could understand. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev often referenced their singular shared responsibility as leaders ensuring the continued existence of the planet by avoiding nuclear war (Wheeler & Holmes, 2021). This ‘cultural membership capital’ (Collins & Hanneman, 1998), or knowledge of group symbols, represents a form of barrier creation, as outsiders will be unfamiliar with the symbols that have developed over time in the group. Finally, and crucially, not all bonds are created equally. In previous work (Wheeler & Holmes, 2021), we developed a conceptual continuum of weak and strong bonds, explaining the variation in terms of the presence/absence of the ingredients of barriers to outsiders and especially co-presence. Strong bonds are products of interaction rituals where all four elements identified by Collins are present, whereas weaker bonds are products of interaction rituals where bodily co-presence is absent and barriers to outsiders challenged, but mutual focus of attention and shared mood are present. Using the case of the interpersonal bonding between Kennedy and Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we show how, despite very inauspicious beginnings with respect to their interactions at the Vienna

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summit in June 1961 (their only face-to-face encounter as heads of state), the weak bond that developed between them through the letters they wrote to each other produced a limited form of trust and solidarity. This is contrasted with the strong bond of trust that developed between Reagan and Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s, arguing that this stronger form of trust became possible because of the face-to-face meetings that took place between the two leaders and the barriers to outsiders these encounters made possible. Trust is differentiated here in terms of the degree of hedging and risks between two individuals. Strong bonds produce a form of trust where neither feels the need to hedge against the intent and integrity of the other in relation to a particular issue-area – this has been called trust as suspension (Möllering, 2001, 2006; see also Wheeler, 2018). By contrast, weak bonds give rise to a more limited form of trust that is characterised by the two individuals continuing to factor the risks of defection on the part of the other into their calculations and planning. The claim that the presence/absence of the ingredients of bodily co-presence and barriers to outsiders influences the strength of the bond, and hence the depth of trust possible in social interaction, opens up the possibility, as with letters and mobile phone messaging, that similarly weak bonds can form in cyberspace through video conferencing, for example. But it also invites exploration of the intriguing possibility that unlike letters and mobile phones, digitally mediated interaction may substitute for co-presence in ways that make possible stronger bond formation in cyberspace than in other modalities of non-F2F interaction. The Challenge of Extending Bonds in Cyberspace

This difficulty in creating successful interaction chains online is seemingly why diplomats have often lamented that virtual interaction is a poor substitute for faceto-face interaction. Several specific complaints about the online environment have been articulated. First, diplomats note the difficulty in picking up on important social signals that are, at best, degraded in online representations relative to the physical experience. If ‘winning over’ (see Introductory chapter) relies on being able to read your interlocutor, it is not surprising that mediated communication, even highly sophisticated digital communication, would be viewed as inferior to physical interaction. Second, online environments have difficulty replacing ‘corridor diplomacy’, or the spontaneous and impromptu interactions that can be crucial for gaining consensus, building trust or winning an argument. Relatedly, because these interactions are not taking place, diplomatic network extension to new contacts is hindered. Third, the requirement of barriers to outsiders is similarly challenged. According to Ashok Mirpuri, ‘The reason you send diplomats out to foreign capitals is to engage personally and share confidences and confidential assessments’ (quoted in Heath, 2020). While video-conferencing technology often adopts stringent security protocols, individuals engaged in online meetings can never be certain that others are not listening in, either in the present or potentially

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in the future. The potential here for digital disruption, disruption from an outsider, is potentially quite high. While many of these concerns rose in prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced face-to-face diplomacy to be replaced with virtual interaction, theorising the limitations of video conferencing as a proxy for physical face-to-face interaction has been noted since the relatively early days of the technology. We review each of these limitations, and their implications for social bonding, in turn. Cues and Nuances

Mirpuri notes that virtual diplomacy lacks the ‘cues and nuances’ available in faceto-face interaction. What are these cues and why are they available in face-to-face interaction but not its virtual counterpart? Over the last several decades a wealth of evidence from diverse fields such as psychology, sociology, biology and cognitive science have demonstrated the importance of human non-verbal expressive behaviours as signaling mechanisms. Some of these behaviours, such as facial expressions, are overt signals that are picked up on consciously. Others, however, are much more subtle and are processed subconsciously. As Alex Pentland (2008, p. x) puts it, ‘These ancient primate signaling mechanisms, such as the amount of synchrony, mimicry, activity, and emphasis, form an unconscious channel of communication between people’. The signals, for Pentland, are ‘honest’ because that are processed unconsciously and are uncontrollable. Robert Jervis (1970), writing nearly 40 years earlier, and building on the pioneering work of Erving Goffman (1959) identified the importance of those signals that are ‘not under the control of the sender’, as indices, or ‘inherently credible’ indicators. Uncontrollable, nonverbal, subconscious behaviours therefore likely serve as indices for individuals engaged in a face-to-face interaction that offer ‘an unmatched window into our intentions, goals, and values’ (Pentland, 2008; see also Holmes, 2013, 2018; YarhiMilo, 2014). While overt facial expressions of emotion (anger, fear, and so forth) are often controllable, at least to a large extent (some are better than others at controlling facial expressions), microfacial expressions of emotion (hereafter microexpressions) are involuntary (Ekman, 1985, 2009). Microexpressions are ‘spontaneously occurring, non-concealed, non-repressed facial expressions of emotions’ (Matsumoto & Hwang, 2018; see also Matsumoto & Hwang, 2017). Unlike normally occurring emotional facial expressions, which may last for a few seconds (or longer), the duration of microexpressions is much shorter, typically under half of a second (Matsumoto & Hwang, 2018). Consequently, they are very difficult to identify consciously and reflectively, but rather are processed subconsciously and automatically. Or, using the dual process metaphor of ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’ made popular by Daniel Kahneman, but proposed originally by Stanovich and West (2000), microexpressions are processed in system 1. Given their automatic processing nature, and uncontrollable origin, microexpressions

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have been hypothesised as one of the honest signals, or indices, that Pentland argues is so crucial for social interaction. They allow us to understand, in an automatic and subconscious way, what another person is experiencing emotionally in an interaction, providing critical information, or ‘cues’, as to their current disposition and mental state. Perhaps even more important from a diplomacy perspective, there is some evidence that microexpressions are a vital cue for distinguishing ‘truths from lies about future malicious intent’ (Matsumoto & Hwang, 2018). While detecting deception is obviously not a foolproof proposition, it does seem to be the case that face-to-face interactions provide evidence regarding deception that would be unavailable in other interaction modalities (Holmes, 2018).1 Finally, as many psychologists argue that facial expressions, and their micro counterparts, ‘are universally produced and recognized’ (Hwang & Matsumoto, 2016), interaction in cross-cultural and crossethnic settings should produce similar abilities to pick up on these subtle cues and nuances. Other forms of nonverbal expressions are also relevant. Kinaesthetics, sometimes referred to as body language, or the communication that occurs through ‘body posture, mannerisms, gestures, and the prosody of . . . movement’, similarly plays an important role in social interaction as microexpressions by ‘providing important clues about the intentions, emotions, and motivations of others’ (Tipper, Signorini, & Grafton, 2015). Proxemics, or the use of spatial proximity to convey information, similarly provides insights into how individuals feel about one another, delineating social space from personal space and intimate space (see, for example, Sundstrom & Altman, 1976). While microexpressions focus on the face, body language studies bring in the rest of the human body to the analysis, replacing the misnomer face-to-face interaction with ‘body-to-body’ interaction (Fortunati, 2005). One of the extraordinary findings in this literature is what some researchers have referred to as the ‘chameleon effect’, or the subconscious mimicry of body language, including proxemics, mannerisms and so forth (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). The visual perception of another’s physical behaviour often induces the engagement of that same physical behaviour.2 The relevance of this effect for interaction is that there are social consequences of the mimicry: ‘mimicking someone causes the mimickee to have more positive feelings about the mimicker’ (Casasanto, Casasanto, Gijssels, & Peter, 2020). One explanation for this finding is that the mimicker’s actions communicate something along the lines of ‘I am with you’ or ‘I am like you’ (see Bavelas, Black, Chovil, Lemery, & Mullett, 1988), while another is that mimicry signals ‘the mimicker’s readiness to perform cooperative actions’ (Casasanto et al., 2020). The effects of mimicry on trust can be stark. In Pentland’s studies of mimicry as a honest signal, he finds in physical body-to-body interaction that not only did the amount of mimicry predict variation in the negotiation outcome, but crucially that ‘negotiations with a lot of mimicry left both the boss and the new employee with a strong feeling that everyone had cooperated to avoid getting stuck in sharp

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IMAGE 4.1 

G7 Meeting, March 2020

Source: 首相官邸ホームページ

disagreement’, suggesting that mimicry is an honest ‘signal of the trust as well as the empathy required for successful negotiations’ (Pentland, 2008, p. 12). The difficulty with moving diplomatic interactions online is degradation of the facial cues and often absence of many of the body cues. As mentioned earlier, microexpressions are subtle and quick. In order to be read they need to be visible. Depending on the video setup, this may be difficult. Lighting, distance from the camera and a number of other variables can easily affect one’s ability to pick up on overt, let alone subtle and unconscious facial behaviours. Publicly available photographs of the G7 meeting in March 2020 demonstrate this nicely, as some leaders are seated quite far from the camera, where the face represents a very small percentage of the frame, in poor lighting, while others are closer to the camera in better lighting. Further, while video conferencing technology has improved significantly since its mainstream adoption beginning in the late 1980s, media richness theory suggests that it falls short of physical face-to-face and body-to-body interaction in its ability to reproduce the information produced in physically co-present environments (Kydd & Ferry, 1994). Even the most sophisticated digital representation algorithms on the fastest connections must confront several challenges not present in physical interaction, including latency (i.e. the delay between information being sent and received), jitter (i.e. variation in the time that information is received, typically caused by non-local network congestion), information loss (i.e. data not

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reaching its intended destination) and frame rate (i.e. the rate at which the video setup can produce unique images). For example, consider the potential effects of video packet loss or reduced frame rate when it comes to viewing a split-second microexpression. Or consider a very slight delay between audio and video representation, where in a physical co-present interaction a viewer would be able to match microexpression with a word being said, but in the digital environment the match is no longer perfect, introducing ambiguity into the intended meaning of the sender. These types of problems may be exacerbated by less powerful technological equipment and distance from centralised servers, a problem that may be particularly acute for less wealthy countries, which we address further later. Similarly, because many video-conferencing settings may be set to capture ‘head-to-head’ rather than ‘body-to-body’, an important source of information for cooperation, expressive behaviours, and the mimicry that often follows from those behaviours, is lost. The aforementioned G7 photographs illustrate this well, as all heads of state are seated with only their upper bodies available for view. Mimicry in these conditions will be challenging at best. Another ramification of physical cues being difficult to read is that individuals will attempt to make up for this deficit by paying acute attention to parsing other available indicators, such as auditory speech acts. As Andrew Franklin argues, research in cyberpsychology points at the problem: ‘For somebody who’s really dependent on those non-verbal cues, it can be a big drain not to have them’, resulting in a phenomenon some have referred to as ‘Zoom fatigue’, or the taxing nature of video-mediated interactions due to the brain making up for physical cues that are normally available by searching elsewhere for them (quoted in Sklar, 2020; see also Bailenson, 2021). As the number of individuals on a given screen proliferates, as in the G7 case, the fatigue problem is magnified. Video-mediated-induced fatigue likely has several effects, including elevated cognitive effort. Or as Jena Lee puts it, ‘Simply put, videoconferences can be associated with low reward and high cost’ (2020). Bramsen and Hagemann (2021) note this phenomenon of virtual interactions feeling ‘physically very draining’, and outline the deleterious effects such fatigue has on peace diplomacy, most notably shorter meetings that dissipate any positive emotional energy that has developed through the encounter. On the flipside, shorter meetings may be welcome if they reduce any negative emotional energy that has developed between the participants. From a proxemics or spatial relationship perspective, video technologies challenge the ability to create interpersonal or intimate space between leaders. Proxemic interactions often are delineated into at least four discrete distance zones, with ‘public space’ interactions composing those interactions that take place with individuals 12 or more feet apart, ‘social space’ interactions composing 4–12 feet of separation, ‘personal space’ or interpersonal space as 1.5–4 feet, and ‘intimate space’ as less than an inch up to 18 inches (Hall, 1963). Interpersonal interactions, such as the ones one might expect in diplomatic interactions, typically occur in the personal space zone of 1.5–4 feet separation. Individuals will utilise changes in

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personal or intimate space to convey sincerity, concern, or other to convey emotion. The challenges for digital videoconferencing are threefold. First, many technology setups cannot sufficiently reduce space between individuals to less than 4 feet. The reason is that individual perceptions of space, in mediated environments, often differ from the objective ‘distance’ between two individuals and their cameras (Wainfan & Davis, 2004). Second, video conferencing setups are also not often conducive for reducing distance between individuals, as leaders, in particular, often wish to interact at a distance from their camera. Finally, unless individuals physically vary their distance from the camera, affecting change in the separation between individuals, it is difficult to move from social space to (inter)personal space, which likely has effects in the ability to interact more intimately and form strong bonds. Turning to the challenge of building trust virtually in conflict environments where there is little or no trust, Bramsen and Hagemann argue, based on interviews with participants in women mediator networks in the Yemeni and Syrian conflicts, that the absence of body-to-body interaction can negatively impact the possibility of developing trust. According to one person they interviewed, speaking in the context of how co-present interaction makes it easier to ameliorate any tensions that have arisen in the course of a formal meeting, ‘we deal with that at the end of the meeting, we pat each other’s shoulders and we go and have coffee together and we smile’ (quoted in Bramsen & Hagemann, 2021, p. 13). Another interviewee reflected on the limits of virtual trust-building compared to co-present interaction. What was missing from her virtual interactions was the physical contact, the eye contact, the informal discussions around lunch, dinner, corridor, and so on that make a difference in those meetings, but when it is virtual it is only their voice and our voice and I find these meetings quite disappointing . . . the trust building doesn’t happen virtually. (quoted in Bramsen & Hagemann, 2021, p. 18) It is these body-to-body interactions, what Bramsen and Hagemann called negotiating ‘not just with your face but with your whole body’ (2021, p. 13) that make possible the humanisation of one’s enemy – the shared mood ingredient in our theory of diplomatic social bonding. One important finding of Bramsen and Hagemann’s research, confirming Ling’s (2008a) earlier finding, is that where some trust had been developed through earlier co-present interactions, this could be maintained through virtual interactions. However, where the trust had not developed before, it was ‘impossible’, according to Bramsen and Hagemann, ‘to build through online contact only’ (2021, p. 18). This is an important finding that will need to be tested in other empirical cases, but if accurate, it has disconcerting conclusions for leaderto-leader interactions in the context of quick-breaking crises, perhaps involving nuclear-armed adversaries, where the only modality available of interpersonal interaction is digital.

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Yet, such a negative finding on the possibility of developing trust virtually contrasts with our argument that Kennedy and Khrushchev were able to develop a weak bond and a corresponding form of trust through textually mediated interaction during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What makes this finding so important is that the US and Soviet leaders entered the crisis in a relationship of deep distrust; their first, and only face-to-face encounter as heads of state, being their disastrous encounter at Vienna in June 1961. Could textually mediated bonding of the kind achieved by Kennedy and Khrushchev in October 1962 be replicated digitally in a crisis involving potentially more than two nuclear-armed states, such as the triangular dynamics between India, China and Pakistan in South Asia, where leaders were operating with fear and suspicion of their adversaries? Or, does effective crisis management in the multipolar nuclear world of the twenty-first century require a minimum foundation of interpersonal trust, or at the very least the absence of distrust, before digitally mediated interaction can be relied upon to de-escalate a crisis? As Shah and Walker point out in the context of the crisis management potential of existing nuclear hotlines, ‘trust is the issue: trust in the identity of the interlocutor; trust in the system itself, including its robustness under the most extreme conditions; and trust in the messages it carries’ (Shah & Walker, 2021). Leaders interacting virtually may overcome the problem of identifying the interlocutor (though so-called ‘deep fakes’ may still pose concerns), but there is the concern – as with hotlines – that leaders might find it easier to deceive their opponents in environments that lack the information richness of face-to-face interaction. As Holmes (2018) has argued, the brain’s deception detection capacities – though not foolproof – are at its most advanced in physically co-present interaction, largely due to the presence of cues and nuances that are challenged in digital contexts. It is conceivable, or perhaps even probable, that continued technological development will ameliorate some of the issues we have discussed in this section. Virtual reality, artificial intelligence and augmented reality technology (see Bjola, 2019), for example, may soon allow diplomats and leaders to engage in more embodied interaction, where tele-presence allows individuals to feel as if they are physically present in the same room with one. Theoretically, these technologies should make it easier for individuals to share common affect, or, crucially, to share mood. Ministries of foreign affairs have been experimenting with virtual embassies for some time and some governments (Sotiriu, 2015), such as the US, have formed working groups and workshops investigating the potential for new ways to interact virtually beyond the computer screen (Herman, 2016). It must remain an open question given the speed of technological change in the digital world whether future technologies will close the bonding and trust gap in conflict situations between body-to-body interaction and attempts to substitute for it using digitally mediated interaction. What can be said with greater certainty is that individuals, whether grassroots peacemakers or political leaders, continue to value meeting their adversaries in a co-present space above all other modes of interpersonal interaction.

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Limitations for Network Expansion

In addition to the degradation of physical cues and the absence of some bodily expressive behaviours, the nature of the virtual meeting similarly poses challenges for spontaneous network expansion and strengthening of ties between network nodes. While the virtual summit, for example, allows for interactions to occur, these are often typically relegated to the realm of the formal. The problem is that it is often the informal and spontaneous meeting that leads to cooperation and progress. Or, as Tristan Naylor (2020) puts it, ‘These inter-moments are those in which leaders can engage in subtle diplomatic arts between scheduled sessions, and it is these moments that often give rise to the most significant breakthroughs in international affairs’. By not allowing for impromptu or unstructured interactions in the corridor, across the street at a park, or in line at Starbucks, much of the value of this type of diplomacy might be lost. As Vincent Pouliot (2016, p. 129) reports one UN diplomat’s take on the issue, ‘Most people see what happens in the conference rooms but that’s not the UN at all. It’s the corridors that determine what happens at the UN’ (also quoted in Naylor, 2020). At both the level of heads of state as well as lower levels of diplomacy, it is often these interactions on the periphery of the official summit or conference that build relationships. At lower levels, Pouliot, for example, notes the importance of a somewhat anachronistic metaphor: ‘diplomats cultivate social ties and build up what they still call, rather obsoletely, their “rolodex” ’ (2016, p. 128). They do this by engaging in the spontaneous or serendipitous opportunity for an interaction; utilising the ‘corridors, lobbies, stairways, coffee shops and cafeteria of the conference building’ (ibid.; also quoted in Naylor, 2020). And crucially, these spontaneous interactions are unplanned and unpredictable, with diplomats not knowing who they will meet or, perhaps even more important, be introduced to. The difficulty with digital virtual diplomacy is that the unplanned becomes largely impossible. Video conferences are set up often days or weeks in advance. At the United Nations Security Council, for example, a meeting on coronavirus took weeks to put together, for both technical and political reasons. Further, once scheduled, these meetings are typically meticulously planned with specific agendas. Lastly, there is simply no virtual functional equivalent of ‘roaming the halls’ to see who one might run into. This precludes the ability to strengthen network ties through spontaneous interaction, but as importantly precludes opportunities to expand diplomatic networks. This can be particularly detrimental to building coalitions and gaining agreement on issues. As Estonian Ambassador Sven Jürgenson puts it, ‘WhatsApp chats can’t replace the corridor diplomacy for getting consensus’ (Heath, 2020). The nature of video conferencing may also increase or decrease the level of formality/informality perceived by the participants, affecting network expansion. As one senior ambassador in London reportedly put it, With Zoom, there is no real interaction, but compromise needs interaction and diplomacy feeds off compromise. It is all far too formal and hierarchical. We

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press the mute button at the end and we are no further. Everyone has set out their previous position in 12 monologues. Maybe it’s fine for businessmen, but not for us. (Wintour, 2020) In other cases, the interaction may feel too informal. Devoid of much of the symbolism that surrounds diplomatic visits and the interactions that occur therein, an important aspect of the structure of diplomatic interaction is lost. As Matthew Davies (2022, p. 6) has argued with respect to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), symbols are tightly connected to diplomacy, particularly by ‘shap[ing] the visible, explicit, and public acts of acceptance’. By removing the more formal public displays of symbolism, the ‘pomp and grandeur’, diplomats and leaders may be missing opportunities to reduce uncertainty simply by demonstrating, publicly, that the rituals they have come to rely on as indicators of stability will indeed continue (Holmes, 2021). Barriers to Outsiders

Finally, the inability to effectively exclude outsiders from the interaction poses a distinct challenge for bonding and developing trust in cyberspace. While encryption and other security technologies can provide states with some comfort regarding the security of their live transmissions, there are several aspects of virtual interaction that make it difficult to socially delineate who is part of the interaction and who is not. The presence of administration officials who are managing the technology likely means that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy during the meetings. Individuals interacting virtually are typically only presented with a relatively small visual field, meaning that they are unable to know with any certainty who is offscreen but still in the room. As one European diplomat puts it, There are now always 10 people sitting in the room. That makes several hundred people in Europe listening . . . Yesterday there was a video conference for 54 with interior and health ministers. Then you don’t see anyone on the screen. (Agence France-Presse, 2020) Finally, leaders and diplomats cannot be sure that a meeting is not being recorded and will thus be available to unknown outsiders in the future. ‘Anyone can record this and pass it on to the press. It’s a completely different atmosphere’ (Agence France-Presse, 2020). All of these characteristics come together to make it extremely difficult or impossible to replicate the private walk or informal private meeting, such as the one Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un engaged in. The barrier to outsiders problem imposes severe limits on the building of trust between groups where the interaction is taking place in a context of mistrust, and even active distrust (we define mistrust as actors neither trusting nor distrusting

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another in relation to a particular issue, whereas distrust is an active belief that they cannot be trusted in relation to this). Bramsen and Hagemann quote one interviewee who said that just the act of turning off the camera in a meeting left her feeling vulnerable, because It made me have some kind of restriction about what I can say and to whom and why. You know in conflict, the social fabric is completely destroyed, so you mistrust people. I was thinking during my speech: Is he recording, where is he standing, who is listening with him? (quoted in Bramsen & Hagemann, 2021, p. 10) For trust to grow in such spaces, it is vital that those who are participating in the search for peace know that they can speak confidentially and that they will not find themselves exposed in their own communities, accused of selling out or treachery. In adapting to this challenge, leaders, diplomats and grassroots activists could utilise linguistic/rhetorical or symbolic strategies aimed at substituting for the barriers to outsiders that exist when actors meet physically. For example, a diplomat might address private information shared only between her and the other in the interaction, in an effort to create a barrier. If outsiders do not have access to the private information, then they will be unable to effectively be part of the interaction. Similarly, leaders might utilise cultural membership capital, by engaging in topics, or particular linguistic stratagems, that only other leaders may fully understand and appreciate. They might also invoke mutual knowledge, or ‘I know that he knows that I know that he knows’, in order to discuss topics without necessarily talking directly about them. In these instances, outsiders will be able to hear the words that are used, but unable to grasp their full meaning. Nevertheless, despite these strategies, the virtual nature of interaction presents immense challenges for the prospect of effectively excluding outsiders to the interaction, both in the present, but also crucially, in the future. As a result, diplomats will often accept the lack of barriers and adjust their behaviour accordingly. As one diplomat puts it, ‘It’s a situation that can lead leaders to have more guarded and prudent language’ (Agence FrancePresse, 2020). Yet, as the example quoted earlier shows, the inability to exclude outsiders is likely to significantly limit the possibilities for building trust between groups that are interacting from a starting point of fear, suspicion and distrust. A Mixed Record of Success

Bringing these characteristics of virtual interaction together suggests the immense challenge for bonding and trust development in digitally mediated environments. Unable to meet physically and as a result, properly read the cues and nuances of interaction partners virtually, leaders diplomats and negotiators (official and unofficial) alike will not be able to create the key ingredient of bodily co-presence in the Collins model. Consequently, they should have difficulty achieving the mutual

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entrainment required for positive social bond formation. Further, the inability to exclude outsiders means that a second key ingredient is not present, further reducing the likelihood of bond formation. What is more, these limits to bonding are exacerbated by the disruptive problem of how to achieve in digital spaces the spontaneous and impromptu social interactions that lead to network strengthening and expansion. As discussed in the Introductory chapter to this volume, if digital technologies are to have enticing effects, ones where diplomats and leaders are encouraged to cooperate and compromise, then they need to be able to replicate the enticing features of face-to-face interaction, which, as we have argued, can enable trust-building. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the early empirical record for virtual diplomacy has been somewhat mixed. While some meetings have been successful in ‘getting to yes’ (Fisher & Ury, 1983) in terms of agreement, such as the 10th (Extraordinary) OPEC and non-OPEC Ministerial Meeting in April 2020, which saw participating countries agree to a number of principles as well as specifical crude oil production steps, it has also been noteworthy what the meetings have lacked in terms of outcomes. As Naylor (2020) points out with respect to the G20 communique, for example: the extent to which individual state interests dominated the G20 communiqué following its emergency online meeting is notable. Most illustratively, no new funding announcements were made to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic; rather, funding commitments listed by the club were merely an aggregation of previously announced, uncoordinated spending by national governments. The group also made no specific commitments to support international financial institutions, failed to acknowledge – let alone support – the burden carried by transnational medical non-governmental organisations and refused to increase support for the World Health Organization. On trade, the G20 failed to reaffirm its traditional commitment to resist protectionism and tariffs and left the door open for states to place restrictions on trade in medical supplies, food and other essential supplies. The trade paragraph also began with the phrase ‘consistent with the needs of our citizens’, obfuscatory diplomatic language which gives states cover to do whatever they want in line with particular national interests. It is exactly such particularlist, raison d’état–driven policies, which overall do more harm than good, that multilateral global governance seeks to overcome – not, as is the case here, uphold. It is of course impossible to know how such an event would have played out in person. Indeed, it may be that the types of egoistic state behaviours would have obtained regardless of the mode of interaction. Nevertheless, diplomats and leaders have admitted to the limitations, noting, as the Ambassador of Antigua and Barbuda to the United States and the Organization of American States puts it, that the move to digital ‘is severely limiting the work of diplomacy’ and that it may

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‘have a lasting adverse effect on international relations’ (Sanders, 2020). Whereas summitry of the past was, at least partially, about changing identities, the danger moving forward is, as Naylor puts it, in states merely communicating their interests and displaying their identities, rather than engaging with others about them and transforming them. Overcoming Digital Challenges Through Habituation and Adaptation

We now return to where we began: the puzzle as to why diplomats and leaders at best marginalise, and at worst dismiss, the trust-building possibilities of videomediated interactions compared to face-to-face interaction when they have managed to build bonds and trust through textually mediated communication for centuries. It may be difficult to identify reasons why video-conferencing would be on an equal or superior footing compared to physically co-present body-tobody interaction,3 but it is equally difficult to imagine that trade merchants in early modern Europe would not have jumped at the opportunity to meet their partners in Zoom, were such technologies available. In this concluding section, we offer two explanations for this puzzle: one relating to the nature of evolving technologies and its intersection with politics, and the other relating to habituation with, and adaptation to, these changing technologies. The first explanation is straightforward: the nature of technological innovation is that it often creates new problems as it solves others. As Peter Lunenfeld puts it, ‘Every design solution creates a new design problem, and so it is with the ways we have built our global networks’ (quoted in Pew Research Center, 2020). The design solution of being able to transmit real-time video images and sound across the planet solves the problem of not being able to see each other and thus solves a core limitation of the telephone, but it does not do away with the old telephonic problem of not being able to read the subtle cues of others. Crucially, however, this is only a problem in the sense that it has become an expectation of face-to-face interaction. In past times when bodily co-present interaction was not the norm of diplomatic and commercial interaction, there was no experience and hence expectation of the subtle cue reading capabilities that we now know come from body-to-body interaction. This suggests that, in effect, technological evolution creates the very problem that it then must solve precisely because as technological development brings us closer to simulating co-present face-to-face interaction, the demand is that this technological progress provides an equivalence of the signal and cue reading available when meeting face to face. In effect, the better and more sophisticated the design, the more demand is created for even better design. There is a second explanation, however, that relates to habituation and adaptation. As logic of habit (Hopf, 2010) and practice theorists (Adler & Pouliot, 2011; Pouliot, 2008) have argued, the quotidian routines of policy officials create takenfor-granted knowledge and stable expectations regarding interactions with salient

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others. Put simply, routinised face-to-face interactions create habits of interacting face to face and expectations about the nature of diplomacy such that when such interaction is not allowed, it is jarring. Breaking the habits of interacting face to face requires iterative video-mediated interactions in order to develop new routines and expectations. Concurrently, policymakers have to adapt to the medium available and work with what is there. But as the reflections of diplomats during the COVID-19 pandemic shows, breaking the habit of face-to-face interaction is hard for those diplomats who have been schooled in the conviction, in Edward R. Murrow’s words, that ‘The really critical link in the international communications chain is the last three feet, which is best bridged by personal contact – one person talking to another’ (quoted in Burns, 2014). Video-conferencing may be an imperfect substitute for bodily co-present diplomatic interaction, but as we have argued, there are no good theoretical reasons to think that weak bonds, and the type of trust this gives rise to, cannot form in digitally mediated interaction just as they have formed through textually mediated communication. Testing this proposition empirically is an important area for future research, as is exploring how far the type of bonding and trust that is possible through video-conferencing is superior to that achieved through other forms of mediated communication. Notes 1 Though see Fornaciari and Poesio (2013) on the possibilities of detecting deception in text-only environments using machine learning through natural language processing techniques. 2 It is important to note that there are several conditions under which this occurs and does not occur, though the finding is robust. 3 This is not to say that there are not any. One might argue, for example, that heterogeneity in diplomat and leader preferences could account for some variation in preferences. Some leaders may prefer online interactions, for a variety of reasons, that could conceivably then lead to increased probability of trust-building. These individual-level differences would be worth exploring in future research.

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5 METRODIPLOMACY How Digital Connectivity Can Expand the Power of Urban Influence Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook

Introduction

The catalytic pressure of technological change has moved cities around the world to form integrated and data-driven networks to optimise how to tackle the greater impact transnational challenges are having on dense, urban environments – from climate change, to pandemics, to terrorism – in coordination. Over 200 multiparty urban networks exist today (Kosovac, Hartley, Acuto, & Gunning, 2020, p. 7). The datafication of many of the solutions cities are now elaborating together as networks, in part using corporate solutions (i.e., smart city software to make measurable everything from heat maps, to traffic patterns, to sensor data measurable and comparable and the use of digital twinning to facilitate planning and forecasting) creates a new source of power vis-à-vis their host nation-states and internationally. The degree to which cities can now use data – and the way in which they have solved development, privacy and storage issues, gives them a new power base: they can prove ‘what works’ in international public policymaking – on climate interventions, on pandemic mitigation and a number of other, inter-connected areas. As a secondary, but potent effect, these urban networks are now emerging as either a supplement, alternative or in some very particular policy areas even as a counterforce to the diplomatic weight of nation-states – because of the diplomatic intelligence they can harness through data and the pressure points in the agential process they have discovered for themselves. The mounting impact of transnational threats applied to the density, diversity and inequality of global cities puts mayors and their bureaucracies on the frontlines of pandemic and terrorism prevention and management, climate change mitigation, cyber threats and immigrant integration. In urban centres, because of how density catalyses the effects of these issues, these DOI: 10.4324/9781003437963-8

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issues are often more vivid and urgent than at the level of the nation-state which has historically been tasked to tackle such challenges. While nation-state politics in the 21st century are marked by polarisation and a rise of populism, cities remain anchored in practicality and focused on achieving efficacy. Though cities compete with one another globally for node dominance in the network of global supply chains, battling for control over a part of the valuable flows of finance, technology, knowledge and talent, their leadership has increasingly realised the need to turn co-dependence into a political asset in addressing common transnational threats. Where urban leaders perceive eroding competence or control at the national level, mayors have come to realise that crafting their own, data-driven networks and learning from others – even cultivating their own ‘foreign policy’ – is among their greatest assets in an international system strained by myriad tensions, not least the simultaneity of great power competition and global interdependence. Their increasing capacity to see themselves as agents in the international system by building issue-based and interlocking networks (at least in part) results from their capacity to create, interpret and use data. That capacity, in turn, increases their ability to negotiate vertically with other actors (including with business and directly with nation-state governments other than their own) and enhances their ability to develop and employ strategies to ‘win over’ (very) specific capacities of states in key circumstances. As Bjola and Kornprobst argue in the introduction to this volume in describing the emerging agential process, networked cities (like some states) have wedged themselves into a plain of vertical and horizontal negotiation, resulting from the discovery that datafication is a strategic resource allowing them to consolidate and articulate joint interest. Their capacity to aggregate and analyse data intersects with a definitional shift in international relations, towards a more inclusive reading of national security threats, where linkages and dependencies can be weaponised. These linkages – economic, infrastructure, people – come together in urban centres. The diagnostic capacities of cities, particularly digitally linked ones, thus become vital sources of information and threat mitigation for nation-states, if the latter accept cities’ agential capacities. Cities represent an agility in the international system that can influence the hierarchy of international decision-making in certain areas in the medium term. This chapter will argue that while nation-states will remain the defining entities of the arbitration of military and financial power for the predictable future, cities are increasingly fulfilling critical tasks of diplomacy: connection, data aggregation, analysis, anticipatory forecasting and information sharing to ensure the security of their people, their economies and their physical and cyber-networked spaces (from their power plants to their city grids). As such – networked – they have become vital contributors to addressing the most challenging, interlocking global issues from climate impacts to poverty and from disease prevention to cyber security, as it affects communities at the local level. They are the seismographs of threats and

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the incubators of solutions. With their comparatively nimble governance structures and direct links to citizen and diaspora interests and outcomes, and more recently a greater capacity to operate with a view to distinct international interests, nations should see their cities and mayors as the increasingly networked, digitally connected assets they are. The rapid growth of digital technology has supported individual urban networks’ ambition to prove their role in international relations, delivering evidence of their problem-solving capacities. For the purposes of this chapter, digital power is defined as the ability to aggregate data at scale, store, interpret and analyse it to assist in planning/strategy, predictive and behavioural (economic) analysis, and to use different sources of connected digital infrastructure to facilitate this work. In utilising digital connectivity strategically, urban networks have carved out a valuable resource of power – influence – which, next to economic and demographic/ democratic remain cities’ primary methods of political currency with nation-states and multinational organisations. Their ability, as Bjola and Kornprobst lay out in the introduction to this volume, to ‘deploy datafication methods to understand, predict and generate events of strategic relevance’ will make the connected cities of the future more relevant as agents in the international system. While their status of a legitimised organising system gives cities both a greater stickiness in their international collaboration and their ‘winning over’ of the nation-state (or the supranational level in the case of direct urban influence on the EU), offering a distinctly different organising impact than transnational advocacy organisations discussed by Nina Hall in this volume, ‘issue volatility’ is real. Not all issues of urban interest are useful in a networked structure when issues such as financial dependence are too often (still) unidirectional and locked into systemic hierarchy. Further, cities are still unequally party to these urban networks. Megacities with digital capacities dominate functional networks. Where networks are either (a) less issue-bound, (b) less resourced and (c) and members more easily manipulable by overarching entities (i.e. in autocratic systems), these networks become disaggregated or dysfunctional (Clüver Ashbrook & Haarhuis, 2019). Network analysis is as applicable here as elsewhere in political science: ingroup and out-group dynamics abound, issue salience matters, cities in democracies and autocracies can wield different degrees of influence. Much of the level of organisation still depends on the capacity of individual mayors or urban administrations to deploy digital technology strategically. Mayors are high-minded as they are short-term instrumentalists, depending on political, national and geographic contexts. And yet, to ignore developments among particularly the data-driven and digitally connected urban networks is to ignore an emergent set of actors capable of wielding measurable influence and power in international affairs. The development of sub-national power challenges classic definitions of might in international relations. Does the combined economic, political (influence), demographic and digital power of cities imply a weakening of the state? Do cities

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retain their dependent status vis-à-vis nation-states because territorial and defence issues remain managed through national governments, or is a flattening multi-actor model ultimately more helpful to understand the power shifts we might continue to see as entities beyond nation-states contribute ever faster to the solution of global problems? Once the nation-state tackles the issues around which urban networks seem to be coalescing, will these simply cease to exist, or atrophy in the way earlier efforts at parallel diplomacy of sub-national actors – paradiplomacy – have? After a brief discussion of the elements that constitute urban power, this chapter will trace the development of networked metrodiplomacy as a particular outgrowth of sub-national diplomacy. Two examples – C40 and Voluntary Local Review – will highlight the capacity of organised cities, powered by data-derived metrics derived through digital sources, to shape multinational decision-making. Finally, this chapter will discuss how nation-states might analyse and respond to the power of increasingly networked, digitally powered cities as an alternative matrix of competition, collaboration and active diplomacy towards resolving collective action problems. Urban Power: Can It Exist Beyond the City Line?

Globalisation has changed the way power is defined and mitigated in the international system (Slaughter, 2017, p. 161ff ). Military might, financial and economic power, information and influence traditionally accorded to the nation-state have been replaced by a ‘complex, three-dimensional chess game’ (Hoffmann, 1970, p. 390ff; Nye, 2010, p. 7), which continues to assert the primacy of the nation-state in military power terms (a game now increasingly dominated by the United States and China) in the first tier, a secondary tier of the multipolar world of economic power and finally a third level of non-state actors, who have harnessed a series of tools to participate in the shaping of a more multi-dimensional power architecture. This vertically integrated world design has become punctured and further reorganised horizontally, Castells argued as early as 1996, with the advent of digital technology that superseded, and in some cases bypassed channels and systems of hierarchy and authority (Castells, 1996, p. 135ff.). Social actors – actors within a society widely defined – will increasingly seek to ‘establish their power position by constituting a network that accumulates valuable resources’ and define their power by embracing a strong gatekeeping and a regulatory function, lest the network be jeopardised by the interests dominant to the network’s program, which in turn depends on ‘ideas, visions, projects and frames’ (Castells, 2011, p. 776). Castells identifies four sources of power, which apply to the international action taken by cities that outstrip earlier efforts of paradiplomacy – parallel diplomacy by sub-national, non-state entities – networking power, ­network power, networked power and network-making power. Networking power is derived from the creation and inclusion of members in a global network derived from the

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exclusion of others. Network power results from the standards that shape the interaction within a network, the ‘rules of inclusion’. Networked power speaks to the power of some actors within the network hold over others, the type of which is unique to each network. Finally, his network-making power category falls to a very specific and limited set of actors, those who can program specific networks according to their own interests and values and derive from that standing the ability to switch networks based on strategic alliances between these dominant actors within a network. As globalisation has created new linkages, it has reinforced and magnified the political influence cities can have on a specific set of cross-boundary issues, as long as they organise as networks and organise around clearly identifiable goals. More so, over the past decade, the degree of influence that cities have been able to carve out for themselves vis-à-vis their nation-states and multilateral organisations can be linked to the extent to which urban networks have either transformed themselves or been newly created to address very specific issues with policy urgency and metricbased solutions. Cities continue to have to prove themselves as actors in the international arena. As the discussion will show, they increasingly do so by delivering proof-of-concept through catalysed data aggregation capacities. The capacity to deliver data on certain, concretely circumscribed issues is an outgrowth of digitally supported urban planning processes that began in the 1980s and 1990s – now, cities are embracing ‘digital twin’ modelling to achieve comparability and efficacy through data towards maximising urban efficiency in everything from wastewater to transportation to healthcare delivery. Achieving network cohesion and derived networking power is directly dependent on cities’ ability to narrow their collaborative focus and increase their collective credibility using data, aggregated digitally. In short, where cities can transform information into an asset of political power at a larger scale through collective pooling and comparative usage, as Bjola and Kornprobst imply in the introduction to this volume, they add to the ‘potential to disrupt IR at the level of the agency’. However, as with many international actors – cities are not created equal – nor are their networks. The discussion of the evolution from paradiplomacy to metrodiplomacy in later parts of this chapter will highlight what the longest-lasting, effective urban networks have learned from earlier efforts of subnational diplomacy. Networking power has allowed for urban alliances to grow quickly and form their own node function – as is the case with the C40 network with its node headquartered in London – such that it can even attract cities from authoritarian countries where information-sharing might not be the cultural norm outside of nation-state borders. Both examples discussed in this paper have excelled at creating network power: setting rules of inclusion discreetly and demanding member states deliver proof to continue group belonging. Networked power that can influence nationstates, the examples in this chapter will show, remains the domain of megacities (London, New York, Paris), who are able to hold sway (economic, political,

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influence-setting) over other members of the network. Their dominance in defining the form of an urban network underlines that unless inefficiencies and inequalities are addressed as early as the formation of a new form of international architecture, urban networks stand to replicate the structural weaknesses inherent in nation-state networks, that is, multilateral institutions. Network-making power can compensate for some of these inefficiencies (as long as it is effective, internal inequality might matter less) but is unlikely to be able to be as decisive as the other three of Castell’s power definitions in evaluating the resilience of urban networks over time. Network-making power in the urban context is reserved for a distinct, few cities and their (former) mayors. The ability to use Bloomberg Philanthropies to economically incentivise urban connections or Bloomberg Media – particularly its CityLab sections – to highlight the achievements of C40 and other networked urban initiatives, for instance, is unique to former Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. It makes ‘Bloomberg, the man’ a ‘programmer’ within the web of existing urban networks. His capacities have amplified certain networks’ influence – and yet, the longevity, internal functionality, resilience and degree of influence cannot all be linked to the presence of these individuals. More relevant, still, is the capacity of networks to harness digital and data-driven sources. Where networks are unable to deliver proof-of-concept and hence create influence, they often remain disaggregated and unable to leverage collective power vis-à-vis other entities in the international system (Clüver Ashbrook & Haarhuis, 2019). This makes metrics to assess the functionality of urban diplomacy all the more important. They include the establishment of representative function (1), the definition and protection of citizen and city interest (2), data and information aggregation and communication to act on these interests (3) and the active promotion of functional relations across multiple dimensions (4), that is, city-state, city-region and city to international cities and foreign actors. Assessing Urban Power: Ancient Roots, New Definitions

The rise of cities as actors in the architecture of international relations, and their expressed desire to be recognised as such in the international system, is a relatively new phenomenon with ancient roots. As ‘democracy’s original incubator’, the polis was the foundational organising principle, the roots of monarchy, empire and later the nation-state (Barber, 2013, p. 3). Cities like Venice and Milan – both backed by powerful armies – took on diplomacy to shape their reality then with first diplomatic missions abroad, and they are doing it now. Cities were effectively the states of their time. The Hanseatic League of the Middle Ages took urban power to a new level. Through economic connections, negotiated trading policies and the support of military interventions, the League leveraged its economic and political clout such that it could ‘run’ monarchies for significant political gain, and as such remains the only historic urban collective to rival what nation-states captured for themselves in the Peace of Westphalia and beyond.

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Territorial control, in the Hobbesian sense, remained firmly in the hands of nation-states for hundreds of years, which allowed the monopoly, use and manipulation of state-based power to manifest in military and economic might. Today, the ‘physics of complexity’ (Khanna, 2016, p. 29) has come to dominate the 21st century’s interconnected, technologically mobilised value chains, globalised lives and borderless financial systems – and thus empowered other actors alongside nations (Sassen, 1991, pp. xviiv–xix). Now, nation-states can no longer claim to have the monopoly on the use of militarised violence to control territory (ISIS and Al-Qaeda challenged that notion – lost – but challenged it nonetheless), nor control of information flows (social media has widened that field), nor assert the primacy of nation-state currency (digital currencies are at least in part designed to question state control of money) (Clüver Ashbrook, 2018; Kilcullen, 2013, p. 52ff; Khanna, 2016, p. 389ff; Slaughter, 2017, p. 29ff ). Tectonic shifts are afoot in the flow of power in international relations, as other chapters in this volume have illustrated, forcing nation-states into ever more inclusive engagement with corporations, nonstate actors and increasingly with their own and foreign cities as more empowered, internationally connected actors. The US National Intelligence Council concludes that today’s world must be classified ‘as urban’. Dense, digital connectivity sourced from webs of economic activity, the movement of people, goods and services, among global urban centres has raised the domestic and international power and the aspiration of cities (and their mayors) to new levels. In their desire to be responsive to citizen needs, mayors of well-resourced cities – New York, Auckland, Hong Kong, London, Paris, Seoul, LA and more – have moved quickly beyond merely the use of digital connections (including positioning their mayors as powerful voices beyond city hall) to strategically using higher-quality, comparative data in the planning, forecasting and the international sourcing of solutions. Defining the Power of Cities in Contemporary Domestic and International Relations

By 2050, between 55% and 68% of the world will live in cities, compared to 37% of the world in 1975.1 Half of the world’s cities of today did not exist in 1975 (OECD, 2020, p. 7) – and metropolitan regions are increasingly merging into fully urban areas. Half of the world lives in cities. Global pandemic notwithstanding, even the world’s megacities are projected to continue their growth trajectory. The world’s largest cities with over five million inhabitants grew the fastest in terms of their own population – and the number of these cities also doubled over the past quarter century (OECD, 2020, p.  6). By 2030, there will be 43 megacities with more than ten million residents each (Ayres, 2018). Cities harness the power of their economic connections, their changing political power, their demographic composition and the capacity of technology to define their interests and engage internationally as individual agents. They also understand themselves as the loci of

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some of the world’s most challenging problems – they emit an estimated 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions, use 80% of global energy supply and consume 75% of all natural resources (UNEP, 2015; UN-HABITAT, 2011). COVID-19 emanated from an urban wet market. Terrorist attacks, whether kinetic or cyber, are focused on cities and more often than not are planned in other cities or perpetrated by those who felt shut out by the promise of a city. Pandemic disease – SARS, MERS, COVID-19 – spreads and mutates more rapidly in dense environments. Inequality is most evident, when and where people live close together. And warfare itself, as evidenced across the once-sovereign territory of Ukraine, has become quintessentially urban – with cities supporting other cities in rebuilding, while a nation-state takes particular aim at the destruction of urban human thriving. In terms of economic output, individual cities have long outrivalled other entire nations, with 23.9% of global economic output urban based – and in the United States alone 15 urban centres accounting for all economic activity. It makes the economic viability of cities a key concern at the nation-state level. Cities comprise 42 of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, demonstrating their large footprint in the global economy (Toly & Tabory, 2016, p. 1), with Chinese cities home to at least eight metropolitan areas that rank among the 100 largest economies (figures from 2016) and steadily beginning to rival the United States with 12 cities in this ranking. When as early as 2016, Mexico City and Guangzhou already had economic outputs comparable to the world’s seven largest corporations – Walmart, Royal Dutch Shell, China Petroleum & Chemical, Exxon Mobile, BP, PetroChina and Volkswagen (at the time) – it is worth examining how cities might exercise similar influence nationally and internationally. Some have even argued that the cities that compose a nation and the economic power they exercise are more important than the state as an actor itself (Hidalgo, Klinger, Barabasi, & Hausmann, 2007, p. 485). Adjusted for population, before the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Los Angeles and New York’s economies ranked among the world’s 20 largest – and will remain there even as the global economy works through the impact of the post-pandemic recession (Florida, 2017). Clearly, the economic strength of an individual city cannot be read without its nation-state enabling factors (infrastructure, defence, fiscal redistribution) and the division of labour between urban leadership and national government, including members of an urban community chosen to serve at the national level. As individual cities, these economic powerhouses cannot exercise as much political influence as rival corporations or even the federal states in which they are embedded. As networked cities, they can do more. The economic power of cities was once dictated by the transportation networks – ports, railways, airports – that connected them with other nodal hubs domestically and around the world, financed by redistributed funds from the national government. However, cities have found ways of making these investments far more valuable, adding to their own power of influence. Urban scale, the ability to concentrate linked industries, capital, knowledge (universities), people and technology

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together in one urban environment creates the agglomeration economy (Glaeser, 2011, p. 2ff.), creating a feedback loop among these vectors that classically drive up wages (and prices for housing, services, etc.), which then demands direct, peoplecentric urban government intervention. And, of course, these cities are in direct competition with one another for the economic growth, for example, of the tech industry that can continue to power economic growth in cities: Singapore, it a city and nation in one, feels justified to have out-run Silicon Valley when it comes to funding the global start-up and innovation economy. As a result of this economic power, modern urban diplomacy has the practical tendency to ‘jump category’: Los Angeles works directly with the Japanese government and the country’s private sector to source ‘green hydrogen’ technology to power the city’s electrical grid, respecting Washington’s laws, but cutting it out of the direct picture, and hosts prime ministers and presidents from Germany, Spain, South Korea and Canada (Garcetti & Hachigian, 2020). The former US Ambassador to ASEAN ran Los Angeles’ international Affairs for nearly five years, before heading back to the US Department of State to run a newly created department dedicated to subnational government – and integrating their intelligence into the diplomatic forecasting of the foreign ministry. LA is but one of many examples where self-interested cities have not waited for their capitals to take action and have taken matters into their own hands – and subsequently created change at a nation-state level. Where respect for and trust in national political entities internationally has faltered, cities and their mayors still retain civic/political trust that imbues them with authority and power vis-à-vis the nation-state. Institutional trust is at a historic, stagnant low around the world at 49%. Americans (52%) are particularly sceptical of trusting government with addressing international crises from pandemic management to climate change – with only 20% trusting government at all. Cities retain the image of direct-democratic standard bearers in democracies across the globe (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2020). Where national politics world-over has descended into populism and partisan conflict, cities and their mayors retain the highest approval ratings as non-partisan pragmatists – at 69% globally and 66% in the United States (Pew Research, 2022). In a 2019 Pew Research Survey, 86% of Americans went further, saying that cities can be ‘laboratories for trust-building to confront partisan tensions and overcome tribal divisions’ (Pew Research, 2019). Direct democracy – and even the semblance of influence over local decisions, as is the case of non-democratic city-state Singapore, for instance – is associated with greater ethical leadership in public opinion (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2020, p. 6). Part of the reason cities fall into the crosshairs of nation-state governments is because they succeed in vividly highlighting nation-state failures. At no point was this more obvious than during the COVID-19 pandemic, when, for example, US cities and the Visegrad ‘Pact of Four Cities’ – Budapest, Warsaw, Prague and Bratislava – were able to self-organise in opposition to their national governments to coordinate the sourcing of PPE and ventilators when national governments slowed

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the distribution on political grounds (to starve out a left-wing urban leadership in a radicalising anti-democratic national context), based on sub-national diplomacy they had cultivated and technological capacities that empowered them to take action quickly, in open defiance of their nation-states (Hopkins & Schotter, 2019; K. Tutto, personal communication, September 16, 2020). The same was true when former US President Trump attempted to deny pandemic aid to cities who were otherwise not compliant in his political agenda (Edelman, 2020). Or where the mayors, federal states, businesses and NGOs organised as part of ‘America’s Pledge’ and US Climate Mayors are able to uphold America’s commitments to the Paris Climate Change agreement when the United States relegated its leadership role and departed from the agreement in the early years of the Trump administration (America’s Pledge, 2020a; Climate Mayors, 2017; Myer, 2019). Or where cities are seizing the opportunity to harness influence and control by joining data-driven networks, even when they cannot afford to purchase a full suite of technology services. The comparatively high civic trust urban leadership enjoys has enabled cities to use OpenSource data, address privacy and data management concerns flexibly – sometimes using their in-city resources (universities and research centres) and share that data internationally with impunity. Even the use of Twitter and other social media channels as a direct form of accountable city governance and urban diplomacy (international outreach), was more quickly adopted by mayors than by national leaders and the followership of megacity mayors or former mayors, including Anne Hidalgo of Paris (1.5M), Eric Adams (1.5M) and former mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York (2.6M) and Sadiq Khan (1.1M) can compete with national leaders in terms of their outreach, when scaled for size of population. Megacities across the globe retain their roles as the bastions of talent, tolerance and technology, all challenges notwithstanding (Florida, 2012) – and actively compete for these resources, creating demographic power. Movement of people attracts input factors that amplify urban agglomeration economies, including universities, technology manufacturers and R&D facilities. A 2017 World Economic Forum Study found that 92% of US immigrants live in cities, and 95% and 99% of immigrants to the United Kingdom and Australia live in their urban centres, respectively (World Economic Forum, 2017). People on the move – regardless of immigration status – want to move to cities. Increasingly, they aren’t moving to the next city in their own country, they are drawn to other, large global cities through economic promise or familial ties, creating a hierarchy of urban nodes in the global economy that move with people (Sassen, 1991, p. 23ff ). After all, the technology hubs in China – Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen – were built by Chinese citizens trained in Silicon Valley. Now Singapore, through a range of representations in the Valley, actively recruits possible ‘tech migrants’ and their companies to the globe’s most powerful city-state. There is no reason other, democratic cities couldn’t follow that example. Far removed from economic development agencies of old, BLOCK71, for example, Singapore’s

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tech and recruitment network sponsored by the National University of Singapore, helps promising start-ups from the city-state get access to markets overseas, by presenting itself as a node of information: Singaporean companies have representation in Silicon Valley, BLOCK71 can recruit US-trained Singaporean tech talent and their companies back home, and it can attract American tech FDI to Singapore, functioning ‘as a global network, enabling opportunities for cross cultural learning and collaboration’. While the city-state decides at home, which tech industries, from AI to agri-food, to self-driving technology, best fit its focused planning needs, it ‘takes a 360-degree view . . . and puts its entire “shoulder to the wheel” ’ to make it happen (Reuters, 2019). New York City has built a competitive strategy, to attract and retain tech talent, to expand its own technological capacity through open-source data usage and by building a technology campus at the heart of the city on Roosevelt Island (Cornell University Press Release, 2017). When the Trump administration cut down on the number of H1B visas available, Boston – now extremely reliant on fresh, global talent to power its biotech industry, created a pooled system to support its businesses to expedite H1B visas. Cities openly use the power of their people to project technological power, but they also create multi-actor (NGOs, universities, start-ups) urban networks that can compete internationally to satisfy the pressures of global economic flows. Finally, cities now command their own digital power and wield it internationally. Data-tracking moved into city hall as early as the 1970s, with early experiments in ‘urban cybernetics’ (Flood, 2011, p. 197ff; Townsend, 2013). A decade later, data was at the heart of new attempts at innovative urban governance, and the merging of ICT and urban infrastructure planning (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011, p. 22). Datadriven urbanism picked up political speed when technological capacities made it possible to drive down the cost of technology usage for city halls. Sub-sets of urban administrations, particularly police departments, were already using off-the-shelf technology to support predictive policing, making available data internationally comparative for use in terrorism prevention. In 2021, worldwide investment in technology programs for cities reached $135 billion, $511 billion in 2022 and valued to double from that starting point by 2027. The global digital map market size alone was estimated at $6.19 billion in 2019 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 13.0% from 2020 to 2027, powered by the increasing use of AI in map generation. The results are measurable – consulting group Dalberg estimates that for rapidly urbanising India (400 million new residents in its cities by 2035), mapping technology alone could reduce carbon emissions by one million metric tons and save 13,000 lives by ‘creating safer environments’ in terms of housing and transport. Following the COVID-19 pandemic and cities’ desires to rethink the use of urban spaces, this figure will likely receive an additional, significant bump (Dalberg, 2019; Kulkarni, 2021). Sensor technology, digital twinning in the metaverse, drone surveillance mechanisms, heat mapping – all of these are now part of ‘smart city’ packages offered by major ICT companies, who discovered

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cities as stable and reliable markets after the 2008/2009 financial crisis, which shrunk corporate spending on tech expansion (Hartley, 2019, p. 1). Cities, including those in the global South, now control costs in one of two ways: Either they invest in ‘off the rack’ smart city solutions offered by big technology companies, including IBM, CISCO and Google, or they invest in govtech, sourcing own tech talent and working through the promotion of OpenSource data usage – or a combination of the two. With the catalysing help of technology, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil has gone from being an ‘ungovernable’ and ‘feral city’, in the early 2000s (Norton, 2003, p. 2) to running all urban digital operations centre, described as ‘mission control, built for cities’ (Singer, 2013). This development has strong positive sides but is not without drawbacks. In the most rapidly urbanising areas of the global South, a race for digital supremacy has begun between China and Western technology providers in a new form of ‘digital colonialism’. Where data is the 21st century’s gold, ‘free’ surveillance software in the hands of governments without sufficient understanding of data privacy impacts can have deeply antidemocratic effects (Clüver Ashbrook, 2020) – and has become a staple of repression in Iranian cities by late 2022, with Chinese urban surveillance technology rolling into the country apace. As ever with technology-generated data, who controls its flow, who manages it and who owns it remains critical. Thousands of cities across the world now have both a chief information officer controlling data and cyber security/privacy issues, a chief resilience officer and a ‘foreign minister’, working in concert similar to an inter-agency process in national governments. Singapore’s congestion pricing and emission measurement model began with simple data aggregation through license plates but has now been expanded to provide emissions and heat data, along with a number of other metrics. With the help of integrated systems to monitor everything from transport systems (‘smart mobility’), traceability around crime and pandemic spread (‘smart living’) and government accountability (‘smart government’) and through either off-the-rack or custom-built govtech solutions or on the basis of open source data (i.e. Open 3-1-1, the comparative data set to track urban responsiveness), cities now have data sets at their disposal with which to engage in shaping international best practice, setting metrics around shared, international policy goals around climate, health and security, all while keeping their cities productive, healthy and safe at home. The combination of civic authority, participatory data gathering and usage to achieve measurable results across policy areas is what city network C40 calls ‘Polisdigitocracy’ (Cosgrave, Doody, Frost, Lawrence, & Austin, 2015, p. 11). Having citizens actively participate in providing city data and innovation, through crowdsourcing, hackathons, open-source data harvesting and publicly accountable data management, is designed to make urban technology more inclusive (tech company solutions were often blind to demographic inclusion issues), more democratically supported and, because of the inclusion of a broader group of participants, more effective in political advocacy work, particularly on climate

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mitigation. Bringing the citizen in on the ground floor, so the theory goes, will make policy solutions that emanate from this data more actionable and supported by the widest group of members in urban society, creating lasting, supporting public change, while driving down costs. Similarly, the availability of open technology allows cities to create networks both within its urban confines, with NGOs, universities, start-ups and beyond. Examples include the civic tech infrastructure built by the offices of New Urban Mechanics in Boston or Philadelphia; the use of crowdsourcing platform Spacehive, powered by the Greater London Authority and other cities in consortium with major energy and technology providers to get only citizen-proposed projects securely funded with local means and other innovative ways to combine digital and physical urban engagement (Paris, Buenos Aires, Paris, Mexico City).2 As will be discussed later, urban diplomatic networks – both city-to-city and nodal arrangements (C40, U-7, U-20; Global Covenant of Mayors and the Voluntary Local Review program), rely on this data to build and retain stakeholder engagement, to provide proof of concept, vis-à-vis nation-states and to increase (so long as they are organised into networks for that purpose) their moral and political authority in their advocacy work towards countries and multilateral organisations. However, for all the impressive developments at speed and scale, rapid improvements in technology for cities have not always been even: While megacities largely excelled at buying or building the technological capacities they need (often through civic tech fellowship programs or direct partnerships with R&D centres in city universities), others are left behind. Outdated technology and insufficient systems to operate or modernise technology make cities vulnerable: 70% of all reported ransomware attacks in the United States target cities and local governments through denial-of-service attacks (Siegel, 2019); the municipal tram system in Dublin; Stockholm’s air traffic control, powerplants in Johannesburg and Hyderabad – all have fallen prey to ransomware attacks in the last five years (Muggah & Goodman, 2019). For cities across war-torn Ukraine, these are all but hourly realities. In some cases, the nation-state has ‘saved’ these cities, in others they have had to make decisions that affected their urban bottom line and have paid ransom. In Ukraine’s case, major American software companies – Microsoft, Palantir, Starlink – have come to the rescue of individual cities, infrastructure providers and the nation as a whole. In Singapore, changes in the data management structure have led to the creation of the ‘transparent citizen’, where its ‘Smart Nation’ concept will deliver data around the ‘E3A’, model to the city’s technologists: ‘Everyone, Everything, Everywhere, All the Time’ (Poon, 2017). The way it has exploited the pandemic tracing technology for other purposes demonstrates how quickly a lack of democratic control over data privacy issues can tilt towards the Chinese model, where data tracking in cities is a key component of the social credit system (Marr, 2019). In fact, Singapore and Chinese cities are expressly utilising the trust individuals innately invest in the local versus the national for questionable, if not corruptive, data practices. Here, as discussed later, democratic nation-states eager to benefit from the knowledge

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created by cities towards addressing transnational problems could serve as a correcting force, helping to create data accountability mechanisms. The openness to the use of technological solutions to amplify the delivery of essential city services and to increase a city’s functionality and capacity to act beyond its borders for the provision of security (both physical and resource security) and greater liveability have created – 20 years on – an ability to analyse the impact of digital and data power in urban international relations in Europe, the United States and parts of Asia, and make initial predictions about future possibilities, as discussed later in this chapter. Yet, in terms of traditional political power, cities – with rare exceptions – remain tethered to their nation-state system, with little true measurable urban political influence. City-states, such as in Germany and city-nations, such as Singapore, are rare exceptions. In the United States, the Constitution favours rural political power over urban – purposely designed by the Founders but no longer contemporary in nature, given particularly the economic clout these cities wield. In short, the American political system’s bias is ‘anti-urban’ (Barber, 2013) and the main political conflict in the country has been described as ‘urban vs. rural’, and not ‘left and right’ (Rodden, 2019, p. 10ff ), as manufacturing atrophies and knowledge industries in the country’s cities thrive, while some cities ‘die off’ and others benefit, yet without proportional political representation in Congress. Despite an urbanisation rate of 82%, half of Americans will be represented by only 16 Senators in 2040 – while the non-urban parts of the country will wield the power of 84 Senators determining policy for the entire country. This division will be the source of future conflict, when it comes to resource allocation through taxation and political might in representative democracies, particularly for those large cities plagued by income inequality, housing shortages and crumbling infrastructure, who – in large federal systems like the United States don’t receive their ‘fair share’ of federal tax allocation returned from Washington to tackle these issues apace. This sets up the potential for conflictual relations between cities and sub-national actors, such as states, and the federal government, as cities begin to use their international contacts and their examples to create localised solutions – such as local investments, expanded participatory budgeting or in-state redistribution – to evade a system that doesn’t grant them representative power in accordance with their economic strength. From Paradiplomacy to Metrodiplomacy

If Hedley Bull’s definition of diplomatic action as the ‘socialization of relations among international actors, nurturing a system of rules, norms and common ­expectations – even between adversaries’ (Bull, 1977, p. 156) holds true, and cities are increasingly becoming international actors without going through national capitals then it should be of paramount interest of states to create functional ways of engaging the international activities that cities have cultivated for themselves.

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The objective should not be to paternalise or control, but to be able to make use of the myriad of self-interest guided ties – contractual and networked – cities have created for themselves over the past decade. Cities are part of a complex diplomatic environment, where the ‘national’ and the ‘international’ are increasingly difficult to separate neatly, as globalisation and a shifting threat environment continues to blur the lines (Van der Pluijm & Melissen, 2007, p. 9). For cities, diplomacy must be understood as the ‘conduct of external relations by official representatives of cities with other actors, particularly other cities, nation-states, NGOs and corporations’ (Kosovac et al., 2020, p. 6). If diplomacy must now be thought as more multilevel, ‘21st century statecraft’, from the outset, ‘complementing traditional foreign policy tools with newly innovated and adapted instruments of statecraft that fully leverage the networks, technologies, and demographics of our interconnected world’, then cities should be key interlocutors for foreign policy institutions of nation-states (U.S. Department of State, 2009–2017). A better understanding of the dynamics of parallel diplomacy (paradiplomacy), sub-national diplomatic activity, as it pertains to cities in particular and an application of network theory and the understanding of power flows within networks can serve to better grasp the catalytic role of technology in this complex web, and thus, will help in understanding and forecasting the role urban, aggregated – in short, networked power might play in the future of international relations (Ferguson, 2017). Preferential attachment – the ‘tendency for well-connected hubs to get even better connected’ (Ferguson, 2017, p. 403) – implies for urban networks that ‘success’ in networked political influence vis-à-vis the nation-state begets success. If powerful cities can imbue urban networks with resources and knowledge, which states cannot access as easily or politically motivate with the same range, then these node functions can thrive. Even in what seems like a flatter world, hierarchies exist: Currently, megacities profit more than the rest from being effectively networked through node-like structures, such as C40 discussed later. If states and other actors want to understand the dynamics of networked, urban diplomacy they must evaluate their effectiveness with an understanding of network interaction, as mapped out earlier in this chapter. Can Cities Succeed Where Regions Have Fallen Short?

To assess the nature and future of cities in international relations – and to eventually come to a more complete theoretical understanding of their role in global affairs – it is worthwhile to delineate the specificities of metrodiplomacy, which have different origins and hence likely different trajectories than the paradiplomatic action of regions detailed later – the most frequent subject of sub-national government diplomatic engagement. Studies in multi-level governance and the advent of parallel diplomacy, or paradiplomacy, defined as diplomatic and foreign policy activities of political agents on a governance level below that of the state, have emerged with increasing

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frequency since the 1990s (Keating, 1999, p. 2); Michelmann & Soldatos, 1990). EU integration theory has brought forth another set of examinations on multi-level governance with regions engaging in ‘multi-layered diplomacy’ in the supranational architecture of the European Union, via state-organised institutions such as the European Committee for the Regions – or, in seeing the entire Union as a conglomerate of regions, with other regions in the world, engaging in ‘complex interregionalism’, through diplomatic means (Hardacre & Smith, 2009, p. 167 ). Motivating factors for paradiplomatic activity include the assertion of rights vis-à-vis the central nation-state (Québec; Catalonia/Basque country; Scotland: German Länder, some of which are city-states) – these include rights of representation, language usage and education, economic activity and participation in supra-regional associations – reflecting both notions of parallelism and subsidiarity (Aguirre, 1999). Already, this is a strong difference in political motivation in comparison to the networked actions of cities, who are pragmatic problem-solvers, looking to address specific issues in either city-to-city or urban networked formats and seem to care less about traditional vestiges of hierarchical power being accorded to them. Paradiplomacy is classified as ‘the extension of specific domestic situations or conflicts, which are manifested through and embodied in, institutional frameworks’, and not designed or thought of to create international presence simply as a demonstration of power and influence (Lecours, 2002, p.  93). This interpretation explains why so many regions that imitated Québec’s model in its push for greater independence from Canada – the establishment of trade representation and other regional institutions, coupled with an attempted triangulation [in Québec’s case, by leaning heavily on its relationship with France to extort political rights from Ottawa] – ultimately failed. In the 1980s, the Québec-model led to a flurry of non-central government contacts of paradiplomatic nature (Alvarez, 2020, p. 2), but because they were established without clear political intent or pre-established political interest (independence was rarely the declared goal) that spoke to the institutional structure ‘at home’, these were shuttered over the following 20 years (Keating, 1999, p. 2ff ). At the same time, supporting the argument of institutional power in the context of paradiplomacy, nation-states reacted to the advances of dependent regions by strengthening regional institutions that could, effectively, subsume regional interests and steer them more effectively towards an international policymaking process. These exist at the national level (U.S. Governors Association; National Association of Regional Councils) or at the supra-national level (100 Euroregions; Merco-Cities [Mercosur] Committee of the Regions; Council on Europe Congress of Local and Regional Authorities; and in different formats at the UN level]. Because of their compounding influence, they have become the target of foreign policy action by other nation-states, particularly China, looking to expand investment in Europe and the United States (Allen-Ebrahimian, 2020). China picks these regions off to

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effectively instrumentalise their associations and individuals within them to do its bidding versus nation-states. In short, paradiplomatic action by states and regions has most frequently created affinity, rather than issue-based networks, to contest, or at least engage with questions of subsidiarity and governance vis-à-vis the nation-state. Where nations have felt threatened, they have paternalistically created networks for regions, to create avenues of consultation, but also to control their radius of engagement. The premise of metrodiplomatic networks around specific transnational issues is precisely inverse. Here, the thinking is that the nation-state should be more active on behalf of the whole – whether it is on environmental/climate issues, development, security or human rights – but it is failing to ‘act in time’, which prompts greater, independent action by cities. City networks have not formed to make general assertions of governance; they are looking to exchange data/metrics and best practice to then define joint advocacy action to catalyse concrete, coordinated intervention by nation-states. Modern metrodiplomacy, as a potential subset of paradiplomacy, has a similar origin, but a different political outcome, in part because of the catalytic power of digital technology. Coordinated city interaction began in the 1970s with the UN Conference on Human Settlement, HABITAT, convening cities from all over the globe. Through today, HABITAT focuses on managing migration and sustainable urban design, creating the roots of muscle memory of urban collaboration now at play in metrodiplomatic networks. In parallel, beginning slightly earlier, citizen diplomacy formats were being developed to link cities nationally and internationally in sister city relationships, with ‘soft power’ objectives of further person-to-person contact, linguistic and cultural exchange and benefiting economic development. These exchanges laid important acculturating groundwork for city-to-city collaboration but are a far cry from the interest-driven and data-driven _impetus behind today’s urban networks. Cities economic, political and demographic rise and interconnection through globalisation and the acute nature with which that brought transnational challenges to city hall fundamentally changed the way mayors saw their interactions with national and international counterparts. Today, issue-oriented urban networks, based around interests and concrete goals, have the capacity to outpace national city organisations, such as the US Conference of Mayors, in their effectiveness to command nation-state and multilateral organisation attention. The networked structure is underpinned by an entire caste of ‘superstar’ mayors, who have realised the potential of their own voice and stature in international affairs, imbued by the strength of their cities as nodes of economic and ‘people’ power projection. Michael Bloomberg has led this group with his personal investments in building functional network nodes, actively catalysing university and NGO support for many of these networks (through his philanthropic investments in leading US research universities and Bloomberg Philanthropies, which culls urban best practice by ‘rewarding’ urban innovation with cash prizes).

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In Asia, now deceased Seoul mayor, Park Won-Soon, had established himself as an international leader, most recently convening mayors, public health officials, universities and private companies for the world’s first COVID-19 mayoral summit concluding with the proposal of the ‘Seoul declaration’, on solidarity around climate, health, energy, education and smart city business by cities for cities, with 42 mayors committing to closer cooperation. Sadiq Kahn became a vociferous interlocutor for his city’s EU citizens and a welcome figure in Brussels as he tried – for years – to keep ‘London open for business’, using all resources at his disposal. Building on bi-lateral ties of interest-driven, pragmatic politics – which continue apace – to address individual urban concerns, from building sea-level rise resistant airports, or exchanging information on global PPE sourcing in the midst of a pandemic – these mayors have taken leadership roles in urban, data-driven networks that, with one rare exception (the Global Parliament of Mayors) have as a goal to address singleissue problems. Their goal is thus not necessarily to establish permanent institutions, as is part of the goals of region-based paradiplomacy, but to bring to bear the cumulative expertise of cities around issues, ideally to put themselves out of business – with the challenges of climate change, terrorism and pandemic prevention resolved. As van der Pluijm and Melissen point out, ‘city actors do not necessarily ride along different diplomatic routes, but rather along the same route although in a different car’ – arguably a much faster car (Van der Pluijm & Melissen, 2007, p. 9). Cities have become active international actors in security, economics, climate and energy matters (including planning), health policy, development, migration, human rights and democratic defence, precisely because of their innate linkage and the impact they have on a city’s progress. All of these issues have direct, urban policy counterparts, from law enforcement, to investment screening and income distribution/inequality measures, to transportation and housing, to health infrastructure and hospital management, to fairness and equality of access, to integration and community-building and to equality in the law. Cities have come to shoulder both the local and international demands of these issues and become effective, two-level negotiators in the process, though shortcomings remain. In fact, where goals have been less defined, or where ‘clean data’ can be influenced by cultural, social and economic factors, including norms and rights, networks become less sticky over time. Human rights and immigration-focused urban networks, for instance, have proven less resilient, when compared to networks whose work centres around development, climate change or security, where interests can be more stringently defined and measured (Marks, Modrowski, & Lichem, 2008, p. 47ff.). Assessing Networked, Urban Diplomacy – City-to-City and Urban Networks I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have entered into the

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diplomatic world that Washington does not have. – Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York City. (Walker, 2011)

The previous discussion has highlighted how cities’ power overall has shifted in the international system – despite obvious differences in power projection, depending on size, resources, embedded national construct and leadership – and how an increase in digital urban administration has created more ability and agility for direct contact between cities, more avenues for influence in a crowded political agenda – as mayors remain or extend their image as (the last) trusted actors in government – and a greater ability to compare, scale and implement solutions to transnational problems. Cities have engaged in city-to-city diplomatic relations since the creation of the polis. They are ‘ineluctably interdependent and naturally relational, not just in the modern context of global interdependence but by virtue of what makes them cities’ (Barber, 2013, p.  113). Now, urban diplomacy has come into the modern age. Urban-led networks can preserve international agreements that nation-states have stepped away from, proven by the hundreds of urban, non-profit, business, state-level and philanthropic partners that have underwritten ‘America’s Pledge’, the commitment to upholding the goals formulated by the United States in its commitment to the Paris Climate Change agreement even after the Trump administration formally declared its intent to leave it. While surely the United States would be in better shape if it had never left the agreement – and scientists are critical of what these types of climate networks can really muster in the absence of national power behind them – surely the international realm would be worse off had all goal-setting and practical action on mitigating and preventing the harmful effects of climate change fallen flat over four years. Cities have foreign representations, they lead trade delegations, they sign Memoranda of Understanding and compacts with one another, negotiated over different rounds, expressing common and different interests. They hire former ambassadors or foreign policy professionals as their diplomats.3 Megacities from London, to Paris, to New York, Singapore and Shanghai fulfil all four of the criteria listed earlier across a number of sectors, for other rapidly urbanising environments, the costs of international presence and connection still often outweigh the benefits. Given the direct impact urban action can have on issues from climate change to development, as discussed later, lifting up particularly cities in the global south to participate in city-to-city or networked urban diplomacy should be a joint objective of nation-state and multilateral diplomacy, through the Sustainable Development Goals, but also as part of an ambitious global agenda for a new Office of Subnational Diplomacy at the State Department (introduced by bipartisan bill in 2019) and installed in 2022, that is, the new Urbanisation initiative at the German Foreign Office (Lieu & Wilson, 2019).

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Cities that are large and powerful enough now ‘jump category’ (not merely city-to-city but also city-to-nation) powered by an increased need to find costefficient, technology-driven solutions: Los Angeles cuts out the Washington, D.C. middleman to work directly with the Japanese government and its private companies to implement ‘green hydrogen’ technology to deliver zero-carbon energy to LA’s electrical grid; Colombian city halls work directly with the Dutch government on integrated water management, canal structure and irrigation. A simple WhatsApp group run by mayors’ offices in early spring 2020 coordinated the sourcing of PPE for their urban hospitals – while bypassing national capitals (Garcetti & Hachigian, 2020).4 Where cities individually cannot create this leverage, they define themselves more by building ‘bridging capital’, hooking them up with domains outside their boundaries, than through ‘bounding capital’, unifying them internally (Barber, 2013, p. 113). ‘America’s Pledge’, which connected cities, federal states and businesses or the Rockefeller Foundation’s now concluded 100 Resilient Cities, which funded and connected Chief Resiliency Officers in cities that could not otherwise afford such positions, and the Harvard Kennedy School Bloomberg City Leadership Initiative, which trains new dozens of newly elected, international mayors each year in how best to tackle inter-agency, interdisciplinary problems as a cohort from across the globe are but a few examples. Technology has catalysed the ability for Singapore, Boston and San Francisco to work on their airport designs as much, as it has enabled hundreds of NYPD officers embedded in foreign city police forces as part of the International Liaison Program and the NYC Counterterrorism Unit (referenced by Mayor Bloomberg above) to prevent New York City from another cataclysmic terrorist attack. Much more is possible, if the nation-state level fully realises the potential of robust city-to-city networks and begins to capitalise on the intelligence these generate while refraining from attempts to subsume them into national structures. As a number of analysts have suggested, urban intelligence will be vital in rebuilding Ukraine such that it truly can ‘jump category’ to a green and technology-driven future as it rebuilds its cities following an eventual end to the war and a restoration of sovereignty (Roggof et al., 2022, p. 26). Urban security and terrorism prevention is precisely an area in which city-tocity collaborations could be expanded and productively linked to produce multilevel, holistic crime and anti-terror strategies, supporting local law enforcement and national intelligence to cooperate. For decades, NYPD officers have been embedded in foreign policy forces from The Hague to Tel Aviv to Sydney (Dienst, McHugh, Ing, & Neubert, 2016; Winston, 2018). As a result, the NYPD was able to immediately step up the security of French institutions following the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015 and train Amsterdam security officials on counter-terrorism strategies for its city’s marathon after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. As cities continue to be the main targets of kinetic warfare and cyber acts of terrorism, urban institutions, including law enforcement-linked intelligence should be better

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prepared to operate in a world in which perpetrators are often lone wolves, radicalised through the provision of extremist content via technology. Urban security actors are the first on the scene: profiting from international best practice, from training with international colleagues supported by the kind of technology that can provide collective urban intelligence, and practical training on first-reaction, response and investigation, striking a balance between data collection and civil liberty successfully, in part because urban authorities are so much closer to citizens (Ljungkvist, 2019, pp. 3–4). Following a double-zipper principle, responses to violent extremism, terrorism, crime, political violence and social tension could be tracked, traced and interpreted at the local level, where they are likely to play out and coordinated up and down the institutional value chain, urban and international first, then with national intelligence and law enforcement and where appropriate with multilateral bodies including Interpol, NATO, Europol and anti-corruption and anti-trafficking entities. This should work up and down the zippered chain. NGOs and universities have a role to play in providing research that allows for the removal of bias from these processes (NYPD’s CompStat crime statistic software is seen as a failure for its inability to do so) and maintaining public accountability and the protection of civil liberties. Assessing Networked, Urban Diplomacy – Urban Networks

Two case studies demonstrate that, in particular, tightly circumscribed political areas such as climate change and development, networked urban action – powered by data – has surpassed nation-state capacity to remain accountable. These networks have created a power source all of their own (networking power), which makes them useful to nation-states moving forward. To be both successful and useful to nation-states and other sub-national entities, digital, urban networks must not always follow the same model, but they need to be interest-driven and issue bound. As Castells (2011, p. 776) underlines, network power implies the creation of standards and rules of inclusion. Within strict issue boundaries, these are easier to achieve. Networks that embrace a more ‘paradiplomatic’ approach, pushing ‘simply’ for more urban consideration in international policymaking seem to be less measurably ‘successful’ in creating engagement and partnership-based acceptance by the nation-state level, which should be a goal of urban networks: Not to be subsumed by nation-state frameworks built around these initiatives to appease them, as was the case for paradiplomatic structure of the 1970s–1990s, but to become serious political stakeholders – as networked actor nodes – in their own right, on the basis that they can deliver data-bound solutions to issues such as the measurable reduction of emissions, the provision of effective terrorist deterrence or the reduction of pandemic spread, supported by civic trust and authority, faster than the nation-state.

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Example I: C40 and the Compact of Mayors

On climate policy, a number of urban networks have emerged, all with a central node and organisational stewardship, including C40, the Global Compact of Mayors (the ‘contractual’ obligation that binds C40 members with those of ICLEI and another, large urban network) and US Climate Mayors. Membership in these networks overlaps, creating synergistic effects in the best-case scenario, duplication and network fatigue in worse cases (Kosovac et al., 2020, p. 20). What allows them to retain their ‘stickiness’ is the central stewardship, metric guidance, resource sharing and power amplification these networks provide. Here, the degree of networked power – the power that some members hold over others – and networkmaking power, the ability of actors within the network to program these networks becomes vital to assessing which of these groupings will thrive and which falter. With 97 affiliated cities covering 25% of the world’s GDP, C40 sees itself as a network, a data hub and an accelerator in the race to find functional solutions to the integrated challenges of climate change. It measures its own success in influence (and aggregated emissions data), noting that ‘one third of the actions member cities reported were directly influenced by collaboration between cities and 70% of C40 cities have implemented new, better or faster climate actions as a result of participating in C40 networks’, with its four-pronged strategy to connect city officials, inspire by way of example-setting, advise and influence the national and international policy agenda.5 Its intelligence network is specifically designed to support cities in the design of data networks and privacy management, so that scientific data can be easily shared and compared. Before COVID-19, 27 of the world’s largest cities, all members of the C40 network, reported that they had successfully reduced emissions over a five-year period by 10%. City halls in places like Berlin, Warsaw, Los Angeles and Melbourne reached this crucial milestone despite increasing population numbers while still providing robust urban economic growth. These cities have continued to decrease emissions by an average of 2% per year since the 2012 peak, while their economies grew by 3% and their populations by 1.4% per year on average.6 In the COVID era, the network immediately pivoted to create a new intelligence hub on urban adaptation to acute pandemic management, while addressing issues of inequality, density mitigation and climate-conscious post-pandemic planning to its work stream. While Bansard, Pattberg, and Widerberg (2017, p. 239) display well-founded scepticism on the absence of publicly available, specific data on individual emissions paths to truly compare the ambition levels of C40 members across the entire membership, its diplomatic achievements (along the four criteria established earlier) hold nonetheless: (1) It has a strong representative function with its physical hub in London and issue-bound networks supported by the data aggregation and evaluation capacities within the hub; (2) it clearly defines its mission as protective of citizen and

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city interest; (3) its data and information aggregation capacities are unsurpassed for a stand-alone urban network and (4) it has actively engaged to promote functional relations across multiple dimensions, fostering its concept of ‘polisdigitocracy,’ to expand its membership increasingly toward the global South. The network has also undertaken multi-lateral, multi-stakeholder diplomatic efforts in the creation of the Compact of Mayors, a negotiated agreement by city networks, including ICLEI and United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG/ CGLU) – partnering with the Covenant of Mayors (the network of thousands of European mayors to rapidly advance on Europe’s climate change agenda) and supported by the UN – to make inter alia, annual reporting data on local climate action ‘publicly available’ and to establish ‘robust and transparent data collection standards’, including a commitment to compliance with the negotiated agreement (Compact of Mayors, 2014). It has leveraged the influence it has built, as a responsible international actor might, to source funding and support to engage in a type of development policy: With support from several European national governments and philanthropic funders, it is providing in-depth technical assistance to over 37 primarily Global South cities across C40 regions. Membership in C40 has exogenous effects of multiplying urban diplomatic power, but it also has endogenous effects on the functionality of urban administration at home. A combination of the public trust it engenders because it is supported, financed and utilised by cities and mayors; the fact that it maintains revolving political leadership by a mayor, with a node entity run by a bureaucracy capable of steering data aggregation, privacy protection and responsible data stewardship, and the fact that the collaboration between cities has led to actual results in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions that outperforms the comparative achievements of individual nation-states have made this network an equal partner in the multilateral framework. Despite oft-cited network fatigue, cities within the network now have a trust-based way of working with one another that has enhanced mutual trust in bilateral urban diplomatic interactions.7 No COP since Paris without C40 and its constituent entities might be a summary of its exogenic effects. The endogenic effects are characterised by the fact that the engagement of different levels and different functions of urban bureaucracy further inter-agency cooperation ‘at home’. Or: The Biden administration can rejoin the conversation on ambitious standard setting as part of COP26 in part because a joint initiative led by America’s mayors, engaged in C40, saved US international credibility and more importantly its actual commitments to reducing the long-term effects of climate change (America’s Pledge, 2020b). In short: membership in C40 creates synergies in city hall that weren’t there before (comparable to an inter-agency process in a national government) and that culture shift has begun to outlive individual leadership. Finally, C40 is a clear example of network-making power, exemplified in the personage of Michael Bloomberg, who was instrumental in launching it, using his

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media influence (Bloomberg’s own CityLab) to showcase the network’s progress and who could, once this network had matured to where it no longer served his personal interests as directly, ‘switch’ (Castells, 2011, p. 784) to building and supporting another network that better served his interests at the time (‘America’s Pledge’), only to then serve as the bridging factor between these two networks, towards forming a functional, strategic alliance to influence both the international level (UN/COP) and the US domestic environment, where the national government in Washington under Trump had decided to abrogate from the Paris Climate Change agreement and deny the very scientific and data-driven proof around the functionality of emission controls C40 has been pushing since its inception. Is it a replicable and sustainable model in that way? No. Too great were the dependencies on the stand-alone figure of the former New York City mayor. Does that imply that less hierarchically (networked power) structured organisations cannot be as resilient over time, invalidating the thesis of growing urban influence over time? No, as the second example demonstrates. However, it does underscore the degree to which all criteria for a functional, digitised urban network still need to be met to create influence comparable to that of individual nation-states on a specific transnational issue. It does not invalidate the claim that cities who remain engaged in metrodiplomacy can’t be useful to the nation-state or multilateral level, as the validity of cities’ on-the-ground data collection, pattern observation, sensor tracking all remain just as valuable to the host nation, if it is able to capitalise on this existing intelligence. Conversely, major policy failures can occur when that linkage is not heeded, as the 2022 example of the city of Hamburg shows. Its former mayor – now German Chancellor – had begun negotiation with Chinese container company COSCO under the radar of national officials. As the deal came to a close under a new mayor, and against the consolidated wishes of the German cabinet, the now-Chancellor (former mayor) of Hamburg, Olaf Scholz, used the executive power embedded in his national role to realise a single business deal that could endanger national security, through the arrival of additional Chinese-build technology embedded in Europe’s second-largest container port. Example II: Sustainable Development and the Voluntary Local Review (VLR)

The example of the VLR, one of the newest urban networks, underlines that functional alliances can follow a different pattern to still create influence and diplomatic value in international relations. Developed by New York City’s Commissioner for International Affairs, Penny Abeywardena, and her team embedded in the UN building on New York’s Upper East Side, the goal for the creation of the Voluntary Local Review to supplement national review processes towards the achievement of the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is similarly based in a desire to leverage urban advances in evidence-based policymaking and the use of data as a means to identify gaps and mobilise new

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policy, partnerships and resources. A secondary goal was to create – for New York – a goal-setting mechanism that aligned its strategic plan with the UN goals as an additional accountability mechanism for different entities of NYC’s urban administration – again, exogenic and endogenic effects. Further, the development of the VLR process, that aligns metric-based, digitally accountable urban planning goals with the SDGs, represents a further way for cities to liberate themselves from the paternalistic view of their international capacities as seen by member states. SDG 11, for instance, has a ‘cities’ goal – to create ‘inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities’. Only Commissioner Abeywerdana’s office pushed back, without the active engagement and participation of economically, demographically, technologically and civically powerful – and rapidly growing cities – the entire SDG agenda would be unrealisable. Abeywerdana saw the timebound outcomes of the SDGs as an ambitious and common ‘North Star’, pulling together all urban interest areas (Pipa & Bouchet, 2020, p. 6). Designed as a tool of metric-driven alignment, the Voluntary Local Review exercise is sequenced in four steps – awareness [of the SDGs], alignment [of urban strategy and planning], analysis [of existing capacities and aims], action and accountability. Its value proposition is to offer, through a baseline structure [highly customizable] a tool for better organisation of policy, increased internal policy coherence and coordination [the inter-agency process], the setting of timebound, measurable targets and the application of data to solutions with the aim of engaging diverse stakeholders, who, through digital means, participate in data aggregation with the wider goal of amplifying influence in global policy. Again, the alignment of urban interests and measurable, time-bound priorities, coupled with multi-stakeholder support architecture to this network of 17 – from the Brookings Institution, to Carnegie Mellon, to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs to the data-driven support of an LA created ‘GitHub SDG Wiki’ and a comparative data hub, sponsored by the Thematic Research Network on Data and Statistic (TReNDS) and other partners that create a data hub, a dashboard structure and a means to aggregate third-party data, while providing microgrants to seed and support data innovations in cities whose resources would otherwise be too constrained to participate, fulfils the criteria of functional, urban networked diplomacy.8 While an initial Brookings assessment notes, data inputs vary and will need more review moving forward (smart city capacities are not equally available across all 17 members), more sophisticated analysis and modelling will be able to achieve greater comparability and equitable assessment (Pipa & Bouchet, 2020, p. 18ff ). Here, too, the unifying data node is outsourced to a third party, but unlike C40, city stakeholders themselves provide the accountability. While the VLR is young, it fulfils all four criteria of diplomatic urban action, with the establishment of two representative functions – physically at the UN (though, under the VLR portfolio of New York City Commissioner’s office) and in its data hub (1) its alignment of nation-state defined SDGs with urban priorities, defining and raising the protection of citizen and city interest (2) setting metric

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based goals to act on these interest (3) and actively building functional relations across multi-agency organisations, from NGOs, to academic institutions to urban agencies internally (4) with the joint goal of measurably increasing its impact on the national and multinational level. Again, the early conveners, who set the norms and guidelines for a network, even one that has shared deliverables but a different pathway of achievement for each city, steer the degree of influence. Both C40 and the VLR process uphold a friendly, pragmatic but nonetheless competitive angle to their work, reflecting the basic nature of cities in the international environment. As more comprehensive, comparative urban network analysis shows, diplomatic urban networks fray when a mission statement is less specifically defined, when data-drive metrics play less of a role in accountability and where, similar to traditional paradiplomatic action, the achievement of greater power or greater recognition is a goal in itself. As with every organisation, leadership matters, jointgoal setting and an inclusive playing-field matter. As such, the Global Parliament of Mayors – introduced with much fanfare after the publication of Benjamin Barber’s book, ‘If Mayors Ruled the World’, falls short of expectations: both membership and working areas are too broad; goalsetting is not clearly defined and leadership is diffuse. It defines itself as a ‘conduit for mayors to build partnerships and collaborate toward meeting local challenges arising from global problems’. Given all we have seen cities can achieve on their own in city-to-city networks and through more nodal, hierarchically set networks, a conduit function seems nary enough to assert political power in contested environment.9 The Global Parliament of Mayors will not serve a supra-national ordering function in 21st-century international relations. Though it is too early to tell, many have high hopes for a ‘network of networks’ that addresses the economic power of cities more directly. Analysts hope that the U-20 – the urban offshoot of the G-20 – could contribute to a novel ordering structure that takes rapid globalisation and urbanisation and a greater understanding of power within diffuse, issue-oriented networks to the most economically powerful nation-states. Created in 2018 by C40 and United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), also party to the Compact of Mayors, this network is to subsume the issue-bound work on climate action with access to multilateral and national financial organisations for cities (Klaus, 2018), indicating cities, in catalysing solutions to global issues with greater speed, efficacy and accountability than nation-states, will want to be more deeply engaged in novel financing concepts for the implementation of the ideas from the city outward, that will, in fact, address the most pressing issues of our time. The Role of the Nation-State

How should nation-states react to the rapid evolution of urban, digital networks that eclipse the speed of their implementation of international solutions to transnational problems with greater accountability and civic engagement? By offering

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power-sharing partnership. Cities are of nation-states and their success is national success. Early warning on terrorism and security threats; mitigation of seawater rise with destructive impacts on communities; sensor data on the movement of people from city to city to prevent human rights dilemmas – if cities are more capable of tracking, aggregating and taking initial action on these issues in a way that does not make them overly dependent on specifically owned technology that can be manipulated and subverted, national governments win. But now is the time to further enable cities – not to curtail the power and reach they have manifested, but to improve on its coordination. First, national diplomatic institutions must make room for cities, who are aggregating knowledge/intelligence daily that should be of paramount interest to those charged with forecasting the future of nations and the international system. Foreign Ministries must treat urban issues not as part of their development work, as is the case in many European ministries, but as the seismographs their own cities are for changes in the economic, demographic, political and digital global landscape. If national governments want to make rapid progress on combatting terrorism, creating food security, preventing and curtailing pandemic spread, and mitigating climate change, they will need access to scalable, tested, data-grounded solutions, which exist in their own cities among their partners abroad. Foreign Ministries should consider the creation of ‘urban desks’ as part of their analytical or policy planning staff teams. The United States has heeded that logic in creating an Office of Subnational Diplomacy at Foggy Bottom. Second, given the crisis of democracy across the West, national governments should use cities actively to engage citizenry around global issues. If the Biden administration is serious about a ‘foreign policy for the middle class’, then surely that must begin with engaging American mayors around international issues that dominate their decision-making – foreign investment and economic flows postCOVID; resilient urban health systems and a mitigation of climate change effects. Inaction on the local level can stymie national progress, coordinated action on the local level can supersede national ambitions, the lesson of ‘America’s Pledge’, teaches us. The fact that the administration met nine times with the leading mayors’ organisation over the first 100 days shows that Washington is well aware of urban power and influence – and wants to harness it for administration objectives to pursue a progressive, publicly supported policy agenda. Four years of the Trump administration tested urban leadership in the United States on migration, climate and health. Cities’ power to stand up to the federal level has not gone unremarked by President Biden. In the first of four phone calls with urban leaders from across the United States since the confirmation of the vote, the President has assured hundreds of mayors they ‘now have a friend in the White House’, as he depends on their support and advocacy to implement his COVID-19 recovery plan for the country’s health system and its economy. Who really holds the key to power? Third, national governments working through multilateral institutions can work as correctives to balance the inequities between city networks by encouraging their

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expansion to cities currently left out, for lack of economic or technological reasons. National governments could use their more expansive convening power to help create larger, city data banks like the city data used after the Second World War to rebuild much of the world. This should be a part of the Marshall Plan-like thoughts developed for the future rebuilding of Ukraine. Different forms of aggregated, ‘clean’ data might allow financial institutions to better assess municipal debt in the developing world (Klaus, 2016) or increase investment accuracy in global health systems, where cities will always be nodes of research, health delivery and outcomes monitoring. Conclusion

Metrodiplomacy is not attempting to actively challenge nation-state sovereignty in the international system, but to move – rapidly – ahead where national governments are constrained politically and ideologically. The rise of nationalism, populism and great power rivalry is a distraction to cities, who are putting out proverbial fires every day, for whom the ‘international’ and ‘national’ can no longer be neatly separated, but whose institutions remain administrative institutions that are ill-prepared to tackle the plethora of challenges at the speed and scale at which they arrive at the city line. As a practical alternative – not with duplicative intent – cities have formed issue-based diplomatic networks that are increasingly underwritten by data and reinforced by the ability of actors to use this data in the process of ‘winning over’ other actors in the hierarchy of international relations, where the monopoly of power of the nation-state (see Kello in this volume) is being renegotiated. Cities are valuable because they offer an additional, potentially alternative web of diplomacy, the elements of which (data gathering, foresight projections, trust in public action) which could be put in the service of national objectives – data-based, fact-based, practical and pragmatic in addressing global and local challenges. Or – as was the case with the ‘Visegrad Four’ significantly challenge the nation-state’s agency, as the latter attempted to enforce anti-democratic structures – placing city and nationstate in direct conflict, where cities rallied to lobby (through their agency) the next highest ordering layer (the EU) to achieve its own objectives, grounded in the values (democracy) the nation-state was seemingly violating. How nation-states evaluate and interact with the emerging, networked agency of cities will determine the role cities play in the shifting hierarchy of agents in the international system. They could be of extreme value to nation-states going forward, if the state develops capacities to engage with the intelligence urban networks are generating. In the 21st century, these types of networks – though not all might prove durable – are emerging as an important second line of diplomacy that may have the capacity to tangibly change the world, because they can call on the trust-based authority that dense cities and direct contact between citizens affords, where technologybased disinformation threatens to atrophy social fabric and trust. Cities provide vital intelligence for the organisation of power such that democracy, pluralism and

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equality can be preserved and strengthened in the international system. Nationstate governments must recognise and amplify this power to assure their own, continued progress. Notes 1 Adjusted for COVID effects. 2 Examples of urban innovation practice and ICT abound, that is, Cosgrave et al. (2015, pp. 31–35). 3 Prominent examples include former US Ambassador to ASEAN, Nina Hachigian, who was the Deputy Mayor for International Affairs in Los Angeles until the end of 2022; Almut Moeller, former head of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin as Hamburg’s City Councilwoman for international affairs and EU representative; and Penny Abeywardena, former Director of Women and Girls Integration at the Clinton Foundation and current Commissioner for International Affairs in New York City. 4 See ‘Cities Against COVID’, http://english.seoul.go.kr/covid/information-storage/ [assessing the progress of this particular initiative will be challenging, due to Mayor Park Won-Soon’s untimely death this summer]. Ambassador Nina Hachigian, Los Angeles’ Deputy Mayor and former US Ambassador to ASEAN shared impressions of the mayoral WhatsApp group as part of the European Alpbach Event, op.cit. ‘Tale of All Cities’. 5 C40. https://www.c40.org/networks. 6 C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (2018). 27 C40 Cities Have Peaked Their Greenhouse Gas Emissions, 13 September 2018. These cities are Barcelona, Basel, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Copenhagen, Heidelberg, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Melbourne, Milan, Montréal, New Orleans, New York City, Oslo, Paris, Philadelphia, Portland, Rome, San Francisco, Stockholm, Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver, Warsaw and Washington D.C. 7 P. Abeywardena, interview, 31 August 2020; N. Hachigian, interview, 31 August 2020; A. Moeller, interview, 31 August 2020. 8 See TReNDS/SDNS Local Data Action Microgrant Program: https://www.sdsntrends. org/local-data-action. 9 To be fair, the GPM has developed – in partnership with Georgetown University – an assessment tool to determine the strength of local health systems, which could be very useful as cities move through COVID-19 and beyond. https://georgetown.app.box. com/s/0sruh3cnji6txorqt2acgm0z9xx73ac1.

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Slaughter, A. M. (2017). The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World. New Haven: Yale University Press. Toly, N. J., & Tabory, S. (2016). 100 top economies: Urban influence and the position of cities in an evolving world order. Chicago Council on Global Affairs. URL: https:// www.thechicagocouncil.org/research/report/100-top-economies-urban-influence-andposition-cities-evolving-world-order. Townsend, A. (2013). Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. UNEP. (2015). Climate Commitments of Subnational Actors and Business: A Quantitative Assessment of Their Emission Reduction Impact. Nairobi: United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). UN-HABITAT. (2011). Cities and Climate Change: Global Report on Human Settlements, 2011. London: Earthscan. U.S. Department of State. (2009–2017). URL: https://2009-2017.state.gov/statecraft/index. htm. Van der Pluijm, R., & Melissen, J. (2007). City Diplomacy: The Expanding Role of Cities in International Politics. The Hague: Institute of International Relations Clingendael. Walker, H. (2011, November  30). Mayor Bloomberg: ‘I have my own army’. Observer. URL: https://observer.com/2011/11/mayor-bloomberg-i-have-my-own-army-11-30-11/. Winston, A. (2018, August 21). Stationed overseas, but solving crimes in New York City. New York Times. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/nyregion/terrorism-nypdintelligence-crime.html. World Economic Forum. (2017). Migration and its impact on cities. URL: http://www3. weforum.org/docs/Migration_Impact_Cities_report_2017_low.pdf.

6 STICKING TO THE STATE? TRANSNATIONAL ADVOCACY NETWORKS IN THE DIGITAL ERA Nina Hall

Introduction

Leading IR scholars have highlighted how the Internet era has transformed citizens’ potential to organise (Simmons, 2013; Warkentin, 2001). Scholars have called for detailed empirical analysis to examine how international actors are ‘utilizing new communications technologies to their advantage and/or have been changed themselves in the process’ (Price, 2003). We know, for instance, that most NGOs use the Internet and view social media as effective for advancing their cause.1 However, we do not know if and how digital technologies are facilitating new kinds of transnational advocacy networks. International Relations (IR) scholars have not yet examined if and how the nature of transnational advocacy is changing due to datafication, the speed and pervasiveness of digital technologies. This is a major oversight for IR given the growth of digitally based advocacy and the Internet’s purported impact on issues as diverse as anti-globalisation, and the Arab uprisings (Gerbaudo, 2012; Juris, 2005).2 This chapter takes up this challenge by examining a group of new digital advocacy organisations, such as MoveOn, Campact, GetUp and 38 Degrees (Chadwick & Dennis, 2016; Karpf, 2012; Vromen, 2017).3 These organisations launch campaigns through email, online petitions, Twitter, Facebook and viral videos. They complement online actions with offline marches, demonstrations and vigils to push for change (Chadwick & Dennis, 2016; Hall, 2019a, 2019b). Importantly all these organisations take advantage of datafication, speed and the pervasiveness of the internet in their campaigns. First, they use digital analytics to identify which issues are most likely to garner member-support (Karpf, 2016). They conduct A/B tests on their emails to figure out the most effective messaging and framing for their campaigns. Second, they are rapid response campaigners. Thanks to digital DOI: 10.4324/9781003437963-9

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technologies they can quickly, and cheaply, set up new campaigns and mobilise their members. Third, they have large lists of followers, from whom they crowdfinance their budgets, due to the pervasiveness of the internet. Digital advocacy organisations have been active for over a decade. MoveOn in the United States, for instance, has been campaigning actively since 1998 and has over 12 million members. Campact was founded in 2003 in Germany and has over one million members. Meanwhile, 38 Degrees in the UK has over two million members and GetUp! in Australia has over one million members. Digital advocacy organisations have rapidly accrued large membership bases because they have redefined what it means to become a member of an advocacy organisation. Members of these organisations do not need to pay dues or regularly attend meetings but rather simply sign up to receive an email and/or regularly support an online campaign. Digital technology has enabled the emergence of this new form of advocacy organisation (Hall, 2022; Karpf, 2012). Importantly, digital advocacy organisations have paid, professional staff. They are permanent and formal organisations, not ‘leaderless’ horizontal movements.4 Hence, they are distinct from important but sporadic social movements such as #Indignados in Spain, #OccupyWallStreet in the United States, or the global #metoo movement (Gerbaudo, 2012; Tufekci, 2017). They operate at international, regional, national and even the local level. MoveOn in the United States pioneered this new model of member-driven, rapid response, digital campaigning in 1998 (Karpf, 2012). Subsequently, activists around the world have emulated this model from Israel (Zazim) to South Africa (Amandla), New Zealand (ActionStation) to Sweden (Skiftet) (Hall, 2019a; Karpf, 2013). There are now more than 20 organisations worldwide which emulate MoveOn’s model of advocacy. These digital advocacy organisations are also recognised as influential actors by the media, the public and politicians. The Australian Financial Review Magazine named GetUp as one of the top ten actors with ‘covert power’ in Australia in 2016.5 In Germany, Campact successfully mobilised public opinion against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) (Bauer, 2016). MoveOn was one of the ‘leading advocacy organizations’ mobilising people against the Iraq War in the United States (Busby, 2010, p. 19; Heaney & Rojas, 2007) and also in the resistance against Trump (Fisher, 2019). Yet most IR advocacy scholars have missed the emergence of digital advocacy organisations (Jurkovich, 2020; Medie, 2020; Price, 2003). Political communications scholars have studied these organisations in their national contexts but have not examined the transnational connections between them (Dennis, 2019; Karpf, 2012; Vromen, 2017). This chapter, written from an IR perspective, focuses on the transnational dimensions of digital advocacy. It investigates when, how and why these digital advocacy organisations collaborate transnationally. In doing so, it contributes to our understanding of whether, and how, new digital actors are transforming patterns of collective action. It finds that the digital era has enabled new forms of advocacy organisation, and it has not changed the locus of power.

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The nation-state remains the most important target for digital advocacy organisations’ actions. Digital advocacy organisations represent an easy case for transnational advocacy, precisely because they all share the same mode of digital advocacy. They can quickly and at low cost share tactics, strategies and messaging (e.g. emails, online petitions, Twitter storms, Facebook videos).6 In addition, the staff working in these organisations share progressive values and common cosmopolitan concerns: they want action on climate change and refugees rights; and greater international collaboration to address pandemics. Although all the organisations in this study are nationally based organisations, they have created a strong transnational network: the On-line Progressive Engagement Network (OPEN). Through this network, digital activists meet regularly in person and have built up an extremely high level of trust, which I  observed over five years of studying them. They share tactics, technology and funding (Hall, 2022). In sum, we might expect digital advocacy organisations to frequently run transnational campaigns, given they have: common values and organisational form, a strong institutionalised network of activists, and use digital technologies to campaign. So, do these organisations frequently campaign transnationally? I answer this question through a combination of deductive and inductive theorising. Surprisingly, I find that, despite operating in a globalised and digital era, digital advocacy organisations generally target the nation-state and do not work with international partners. Although they frequently campaign on international issues, they neither target international actors nor work frequently with international allies. Digital activists see the nation-state as the most important political actor. Digital IR scholars should not assume that advocacy in the digital era will all become transnational, or lead to the formation of a ‘global civil society’ (Warkentin, 2001). Rather scholars should study how advocacy is ‘trasncalar’ and operates across multiple scales – including cities, nations, regions and at the international level (Pallas & Bloodgood, 2022) (see also Ashbrook, Chapter 5, for a discussion of the role of cities in digital diplomacy and how they are not directly challenging the nation-state). This chapter challenges the assumption that a new generation of digital advocacy organisations will rapidly and easily organise transnational campaigns. However, this finding is not generalisable across all advocacy organisations or social movement organisations (Smith, 2022). We may see different patterns of transnational collaboration in traditional advocacy organisations established before the digital era. NGOs which frequently run transnational campaigns with international partners and international targets may well continue to do so. For instance, Greenpeace may continue to target the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC); or Oxfam may continue to target the World Bank and the World Economic Forum to reduce poverty and inequality worldwide. Many traditional NGOs gain power from their expertise over an issue and use insider lobbying tactics to exercise influence. In contrast, digital advocacy organisations have expertise in digital campaigning and digital analytics and derive power from their

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ability to rapidly mobilise their members (Hall, 2022). They are the digital ‘nerds’ within the advocacy sector (see Giacomello and Eriksson’s Chapter on Rise of the Nerd). This chapter is structured into five parts. In the first section, I outline how the digital era has led to the emergence of new digital actors who have the potential to disrupt international relations. In the second section, I examine whether we might expect the digital era to transform transnational advocacy. In the third section, I explain my research methods and analyse how four digital advocacy organisations campaigned during the early phase of COVID. Fourthly, I explain why we rarely see digital advocacy organisations targeting international actors, and instead, they target the nation-state. I conclude with reflections on the importance of studying transnational advocacy networks in the digital era. New Advocacy Actors in the Digital Era

Political scientists have examined how the digital era is transforming political activity and advocacy. The internet has empowered new non-state actors, such as Anonymous, who exercise power because of their ability to code, hack and harness digital technologies. These new actors have ‘disruptive power’ which is ‘formless, unstable and collaborative’ (Owen, 2015). Scholars have also illustrated how individuals can more efficiently, cheaply and quickly scale up collective action through distributed networks connected by weak ties (Fung, Russon Gilman, & Shkabatur, 2013; Shirky, 2008). Some scholars have suggested that the internet has heralded transformative changes as people can connect without formal organisations, rapidly, and at low cost (Shirky, 2008). They have identified new forms of ‘connective action’, whereby individuals use digital platforms to build personalised, rather than collective, action frames (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013). We have seen the growth of digitally enabled social movements, which come together at particular critical junctures but are not necessarily institutionalised or permanent organisations. #OccupyWallStreet, #BlackLivesMatter, and #FridaysforFuture have all galvanised thousands, if not millions, of people both online and offline.7 Some scholars have noted that traditional political organisations still play an important role in collective action, even in the digital era (Bimber, Flanagin, & Stohl, 2012; Han, 2014; Karpf, 2012, 2016). Although digital platforms can facilitate the formation of new social movements, formal political organisations are critical for sustaining advocacy efforts and developing more effective tactics. This is because political organisations have hierarchies and institutional structures which store information and enable learning (Tufekci, 2017). In fact, large, hierarchical organisations are often more effective at using digital tools than loosely networked groups (Schradie, 2019). Hierarchical organisations typically exhibit a division of labour that permits staff specialisation in digital communications and the formulation of a unified strategy (Bond & Exley, 2016). In contrast, individual volunteers

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in grassroots groups or horizontal networks may not have the time, skills, or tech support to develop advanced digital communication skills. This chapter does not make claims about the impact of digital advocacy tactics. This is because it is not useful to separate online and offline actions. In the past, this debate has been oversimplified. Some have argued that digital activism is simply ‘slacktivism’ which encourages low-level commitment, and unthreatening actions that are unlikely to result in any transformative political change (Gladwell, 2010). Others have been more optimistic about its impact and suggested that small individual actions such as tweets and Facebook likes can scale up rapidly and lead to political change (Margetts, John, Hale, & Yasseri, 2015). Yet this debate over ‘slacktivism’ misses the point: after all, most advocacy is neither purely online nor offline (Han, 2014). Most political actors use social media and digital communications, alongside traditional face-to-face methods, to mobilise people offline and online. Table 6.1 provides examples of new political actors which have emerged in the digital era on the right and left of the political spectrum.8 Their use of digital technologies distinguishes them from traditional (pre-Internet) social movement organisations and advocacy organisations. Digital advocacy organisations are part of a much broader trend of digitalisation of advocacy and political engagement. In this chapter, I focus on progressive digital advocacy organisations groups which are by now well-established, permanent organisations, with large memberships. These organisations have often been at the forefront of digital advocacy in their respective countries (Dennis & Hall, 2020; Karpf, 2012; Vromen, 2017). However, they are not representative of the total population of actors engaging in online activism. It would be hard to identify such a representative sample, given most NGOs and advocacy organisations use TABLE 6.1  Examples of New Political Actors in the Digital Era9

Type of Political Actor

Right/Conservative Political Orientation

Left/Progressive Political Orientation

Digitally Enabled Social Movements

#AmericaFirst #Alllivesmatter

Digital Advocacy Organisations & Interest Groups

Right March (US) The Vanguard.org (US) Freedom Watch (US) Advance Australia (Australia) CitizenGo (international)

#Metoo #Blacklivesmatter #FridaysforFuture #Kony2012 #Occupy Wall Street Arab Spring MoveOn (US) Avaaz (international) SumOfUs (international) Campact (Germany) GetUp! (Australia) 350.org (international)

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digital tools today. I do not include right-wing digital advocacy organisations in this study, but encourage readers to consult the emergent scholarship on groups such as CitizenGo (Ayoub & Stoeckl, Forthcoming).10 Digital advocacy organisations are distinct from traditional NGOs, in the latter have professional staff select issues to campaign on based on their expertise and commitment to a particular issue (Hall, 2019a, 2019b).11 In contrast, digital advocacy organisations work across many issues simultaneously, starting and stopping campaigns according to their members’ interests and preferences. Unlike most NGOs, they neither have expertise on a particular issue (e.g. human rights, the environment or development) nor do they campaign on a sustained, long-term basis. They can rapidly start and switch campaigns thanks to the low costs involved in sending an email, launching a petition or posting on social media (Hall & Ireland, 2016). They regularly engage in ‘analytic activism’, listening to and surveying their members to identify which issues to campaign on, and how (Karpf, 2016). However, digital advocacy organisations are influencing the practices of other NGOs. Greenpeace, a traditional NGO, for instance, has adopted digital campaigning tactics and in some chapters giving power to members can start their own e-petitions (Silberman, 2017). In turn, scholars have started to examine why some NGOs are more effective in digital campaigning than others (Hall, Schmitz,  & Dedmon, 2020). Furthermore, some scholars have argued that these new digital advocacy organisations are replacing traditional NGOs and enabling new forms of transnational solidarity (Bush & Hadden, 2019). Bush and Hadden, for instance, claim that the growth in internet-enabled campaign groups like Change.org, MoveOn, or Avaaz may mark the emergence of a new organizational model in which activists move easily across the virtual and physical, national and international, and sectoral boundaries that often demarcated the identities of traditional INGOs. (Bush & Hadden, 2019, p. 1145)

The Transnational Dimensions of Digital Advocacy

A rich and sophisticated literature has explored the ways that national protest can become internationalised and the dynamic relationship between national and internationally targeted collective action (Sikkink, 2005; Tarrow, 2005; Tarrow & della Porta, 2005; Tarrow & McAdam, 2005).12 In the 1990s, many scholars suggested we would see the emergence of a global civil society united by common values, norms and professional practices. Globalisation and new communication technologies would facilitate the formation of transnational advocacy networks united around common causes and values. Keck and Sikkink, for example, writing in 1998, highlighted the global spread of communications technology (namely fax, radio, telephone and email), which would enable activists to communicate, share

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information and campaign more easily (Keck & Sikkink, 1998). Since then, major developments in technology (including wireless internet, smartphones and social media) have meant many of us are constantly online. Given the low cost and relative ease of communication across borders, we could expect to enable more transnational advocacy. Some IR scholars have even argued that the internet would lead to a new global civil society (Germain & Kenny, 1998; Gordenker & Weiss, 1995). In his prize-winning book, Warkentin argues that ‘the internet facilitates global civil society’ (Warkentin, 2001, p. 33).13 In Warkentin’s view, the fact that people could communicate much more quickly and for less cost using the internet meant they would ‘establish and maintain [transnational] social relationships that are the basis of global civil society’ (p.  33). Scholte (1999) suggested that much ‘civic activism has become global through the internet’ (Scholte, 1999, p. 16). This has led to new forms of global identity as ‘many transborder civic activists regard themselves as world citizens in addition to (or even more than) national-state citizens’ (Scholte, 1999, p. 16). More recently, the sociologist Manuel Castells has argued that ‘Movements spread by contagion in a world networked by wireless internet and marked by fast, viral diffusion of images and ideas’ (Castells, 2012, p. 12). However, IR scholars have not closely examined and tested these claims (Keck & Sikkink, 1998, p. 33).14 Does the internet really facilitate transnational advocacy, or a global civil society? And if so, how and in what ways? I tackle these questions by looking at three dimensions of transnational ­advocacy, which are often elided in IR scholarship. First, activists can target international institutions such as the World Bank, or the World Trade Organization. Second, they may operate within a transnational advocacy network and coordinate with NGOs and norm entrepreneurs in other countries. Third, they may campaign on a transnational issue, such as climate change, trade policy, war, or refugee rights. Often, these three dimensions go hand in hand. The campaigns to achieve an international ban on land mines were driven by a transnational network that targeted international negotiations on an issue which touched many countries (Price, 1998). But this is not always the case. Activists can work on an international issue but target a domestic actor, and work within a national advocacy network. Activists generally have greater power and leverage over their own domestic institutions, particularly in democratic states (Sikkink, 2005). It is possible that they will concentrate their attention first on changing their own states’ domestic policies or legislation on a transnational issue before turning to the international level. Indeed, liberal IR scholars have long emphasised the role of domestic (interest) groups in shaping states’ foreign policy before international negotiations (Milner, 1991; Moravcsik, 1997; Putnam, 1988; Risse-Kappen, 1995). IR scholars need to tease out the implications of the digital era for each of these three dimensions of transnational advocacy, following the lead of social movement scholarship (Rucht, 1999).15 In particular, they should examine whether

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digital technologies: (a) enable the formation of more (and stronger) transnational advocacy networks; (b) encourage advocacy organisations to target international institutions more frequently; and (c) lead advocacy organisations to campaign on transnational issues. This is important because scholars often assume the internet will transform political engagement, but have not examined the precise causal mechanisms involved (Farrell, 2012).16 Digital Campaigning During COVID

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 dramatically changed most peoples’ lives around the globe. Between March and May 2020, many governments declared nation-wide lockdowns, closed borders and restricted people to working from home.17 Digital advocacy organisations were well-placed to adapt to this new environment, given the online nature of their work and the fact that staff were used to working remotely and on Zoom. In addition, these organisations were able to quickly switch the focus of their campaigns and initiate campaigns that addressed the unfolding COVID-19 crisis. This is consistent with the internal structure of these transnational advocacy organisations. Staff are constantly scanning the news, and analysing what their members and the public deem the most salient issue of the day (Hall, 2019a). Research Methods

I employ qualitative case study research methods and a quantitative study of campaign actions. I focus on four of the largest digital advocacy organisations: MoveOn (USA), Campact (Germany), 38 Degrees (UK) and GetUp! (Australia). I worked with a research assistant to collect data on all their campaigns over a three-month period (1 March 2020 – 1 June 2020).18 This period was of particular interest since it marked the first stage of the COVID-19 pandemic when most countries went into lockdown and protest activities could only be conducted online in most countries (although this of course changed in the US summer with the large Black Lives Matters protests around the world, as well as the anti-COVID-19 regulation rallies). This period allows us to focus in on the strengths – and weaknesses – of digital advocacy networks, given the extremely restricted opportunities to network in person. We used the Facebook pages of each organisation to collate and code all of the campaign actions undertaken by these four organisations during this three-month period.19 We focused on Facebook as it is the most popular social media site for all these organisations, although they also use Twitter, and increasingly Instagram. Any campaign posted there would also be posted on Twitter, Instagram and the organisations’ own websites. We did not include posts which were re-postings of: news items (e.g. a Guardian article about climate change or refugees) or other NGOs campaigns (e.g. there were many reposts of #Friday for Futures in

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2018/2019). We included all the different types of campaign actions (e.g. reports, online petitions, demonstrations). For each campaign, we listed: the estimated date of the post, the date it was last publicised, where it was posted, the name of the campaign, the URL page, the issue, the target of the campaign and the issue being pursued by the campaign. We collected a total of 153 campaign actions which were posted on Facebook between 1 March 2020 and 30 June 2020. Each campaign action was coded according to whether it was: (1) COVID-related (yes/no); (2) the target was international (e.g. an international organisation, an international business, or an international politician); (3) the campaign was conducted in collaboration with other international NGOs; and (4) whether the issue was transnational.20 Identifying whether a campaign had a transnational target or partnered with an international NGO was straightforward, however, identifying whether campaigns focused on transitional issues was more difficult. We coded any campaign as ‘transnational’ when it was targeting a transnational issue if it addressed a global public good (e.g. climate change) or an issue which traverses international borders (e.g. international trade), even if the campaigners only targeted national decision-makers.21 Importantly, we coded all campaigns relating to COVID-19 as transnational, on the basis that some specific issues might be framed as national in nature (such as economic recovery post-COVID or the salaries of healthcare workers), but they are related to a transnational phenomenon COVID-19. In addition to collecting data on campaign actions, I also conducted interviews with OPEN staff in 2020 and 2021.22 The sample is relatively small and hence cannot be generalised for all digital advocacy organisations, let alone other advocacy actors. However, this analysis offers insights into if and how digitally native organisations campaign transnationally, and replicates the findings of a larger study of digital advocacy organisations (Hall, 2022). Rapid-Response Digital Advocacy

In March 2020, digital advocacy organisations rapidly launched COVID-19 campaigns. On 5 March 2020, the UK-based 38 Degrees initiated an online petition demanding that then Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduce ‘new emergency measures’ so that anyone who needed to could self-isolate without losing income or employment.23 On Friday 13 March 2020, Campact launched a campaign encouraging Germans to sign up and commit to stay at home and ‘flatten the curve’, given the alarming news of the pandemic in Italy.24 Campact subsequently ran an online calling for healthcare workers to be paid more.25 In the United States, MoveOn launched an online petition demanding that President Trump and Mike Pence provide healthcare workers with protective equipment, which gathered over 163,000 signatures.26 In Australia, meanwhile, GetUp! launched a #viralkindness campaign and offered tips for how to connect with other people in their community, and provided links to ‘community care postcards’ and how to set up a ‘community

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care group’.27 These early COVID-19 campaigns targeted national governments and members’ behaviours: encouraging them to stay at home, to ‘flatten the curve’, or help out their neighbours. All four organisations rapidly switched their focus on the COVID-19 crisis between mid-March and early-June as Figure 6.1 demonstrates. In the weeks preceding the COVID-19 crisis, these organisations had been campaigning on a wide range of issues not related to health: in the United Kingdom, 38 Degrees had been campaigning to improve the compensations scheme for Windrush survivors; Campact petitioned the German Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy to ‘save windpower’; and GetUp! in Australia called for the Government to expand and extend funding to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).28 Digital advocacy organisations can quickly respond to sudden crises, precisely because they use the internet to campaign. There are low costs of starting up a new on-line petition and contacting thousands of members. They can test out new causes and messaging using digital analytics to predict which issues will be most successful with their members (on the use of Big Data for prediction, see also Aradau, Chapter Nine). Datafication, speed and pervasiveness have enabled this new model of advocacy organisation to emerge. Figure 6.1 is an aggregate of 38 Degrees, MoveOn, GetUp! and Campact campaign actions between 1 March 2020 and 1 June 2020. It illustrates how all four organisations focused increasingly on COVID from late February onwards. Over the course of March and April, their COVID campaigns outnumbered campaigns on all other issue areas. Notably, this shifted again in early June 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests and other issues were more numerous than COVID campaign actions.

FIGURE 6.1  Proportion

of digital advocacy organisations’ campaigns relating to COVID (1 January – 1 June 2020).

(Author’s creation)

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FIGURE 6.2 Overall

proportion of campaigns that were COVID-19 related (1 March – 1 June 2020).

(Author’s creation)

Transnational Issue

If we categorise COVID-19 as a ‘transnational’ issue, we see that a majority of their campaigns had a transnational dimension. There are good reasons for coding COVID-19 as transnational: it is a global pandemic, which spread rapidly during 2020, and had massive health, economic and societal implications for the entire world. International institutions including the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization have all been involved in coordinating states’ response and trying to find collective solutions to ensure all countries receive sufficient health and financial support to cope with COVID’s impacts.29 However, we should note that digital advocacy organisations focused almost exclusively on the domestic aspects of COVID-19 (e.g. support and solidarity for healthcare workers,) as we will see in the following section.30 During this same period, GetUp, Campact and 38 Degrees ran campaigns on transnational issues which were not COVID related. Campact, for example, asked their members to: ‘Boycott Bolsanaro’ the Brazilian President; to buy buttons to demonstrate solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests, and urge the German Interior Minister to accept 1,000 children from Greek island refugee camps.31 GetUp! urged its members to sign a #BlackLivesMatter global statement of solidarity.32 38 Degrees demanded the British Secretary of State, Liz Truss, and Prime

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FIGURE 6.3 Digital

advocacy organisations’ campaigns that dealt with a transnational issue (1 March – 1 June 2020).

(Author’s creation)

Minister Boris Johnson not to sign ‘bad trade deals, that threaten our food & animal welfare standards and NHS’ (National Health Service).33 Figure 6.3 illustrates some variation across the network, with 38 Degrees reporting the most campaign actions on a transnational issue (42), and MoveOn the least (18). Campaign actions which related to a non-COVID-related transnational issue amount to 38.5% of Campact’s campaigns; 15.7% of GetUp!’s; and 8.3% of 38 Degrees’; and zero percent of MoveOn. In this chapter, I do not seek to explain variation in issue selection although I do elsewhere (Hall, 2019a). International Targets

Campaign actions, whether online petitions or offline demonstrations, target an institution or decision-maker. In Figure 6.4, we see that digital advocacy organisations almost never targeted an international actor. Rather, these organisations mobilised national members to apply pressure on their respective national governments. We identified only one case of an international target: GetUp!’s #BLM solidarity statement called on ‘elected leaders around the globe to end the war against Black people’.34 In short, digital advocacy organisations’ almost always targeted national decision-makers, even if they focused on transnational issues.

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FIGURE 6.4  Number

of digital advocacy organisations’ campaigns with an international target (1 March – 1 June 2020).

(Author’s creation)

International Allies

Digital advocacy organisations may choose to work alone or team up with other NGOs and civil society organisations. The choice of ally will depend on the nature of the campaign and the issue at hand. Although all the organisations in this study are nationally based, we might expect them to frequently campaign with other digital advocacy organisations, given the strength of the OPEN network. Yet this was not the case: the organisations did not name any other OPEN organisations as partners (see Figure 6.5). Beyond the digital sphere, digital advocacy organisations did collaborate to crowdsource an advertisement in the New York Times in support of the BLM protests on 16 June 2020. However, this action was outside of our data collection timeframe, hence not included in the figures in this chapter. At the same time, frequent exchanges did occur within the OPEN network during the first phase of COVID. One OPEN staffer reported to me that Executive Directors across the network were talking more regularly during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic than they ever had before. These conversations enabled groups to share ideas and lessons about how to campaign during COVID across countries. OPEN hired a ‘network technology support advisor’ specifically to help OPEN groups develop and coordinate COVID-related campaigns.35 OPEN groups were active domestically and shared their tactics, strategies and actions transnationally, but did not work on a collective, transnational campaign to challenge the global response to COVID-19 during the first phase of the pandemic.

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FIGURE 6.5 

Number of campaigns with an international partner.

(Author’s creation)

Explaining the Lack of Transnational Advocacy

IR scholars have long predicted that the digital era would enable more frequent transnational advocacy. After all, the costs of communication have declined, making it easier for activists to forge bonds across borders, develop common campaigns and mobilise people online. Digital advocacy organisations should be an easy case for transnational advocacy, given these organisations predominantly use email, and social media to campaign, and hence can quickly share campaign content. Moreover, the world faced a common external crisis in 2020, COVID, which dramatically re-shaped the lives of people all around the world. Why then did the OPEN network not enable transnational campaigns on COVID during this time of global crisis? One reason is that digital advocacy organisations have a particular theory of change, ingrained in their organisational model. They see the state as the most important locus of power state in international politics (Hall, 2022). One activist from the OPEN network explained that: ‘there is no strong reliable actors that we can target [at the international level], international institutions they usually perceive as toothless’.36 Another digital activist explained that targeting international bodies is not a ‘strong theory of change’ because citizens have little leverage over decision-makers in these institutions.37 Another staff member explained that other, traditional NGOs are better placed to engage in insider advocacy at the international level. As they stated: ‘The people who trawl the halls of international institutions are people who use different kind of tactics, they’re writing lobby papers, it can be very academic, it’s very much influence

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from the inside’.38 Traditional NGOs, such as Oxfam or Human Rights Watch, have a very different theory of change. They hire expert staff who then choose and run campaigns, and members fund these campaigns. In contrast, digital advocacy organisations almost exclusively use outsider tactics, or what they call ‘people power’. Rather than focusing on international institutions (such as the UN, WHO, World Bank, or G7), or working with international NGOs, they mobilised citizens to put pressure on their respective governments’ positions. Precisely because their power comes from mobilising citizens nationally to put pressure on domestic decision-makers. They rarely engage in transnational collaborations or focus on international targets even though staff in these organisations activists have cosmopolitan views: they believe in solidarity with BLM; assistance for refugees, and in assisting those worst affected by climate change and COVID19. Rather digital advocacy organisations look for targets that are much closer ‘visible to our members’. This is because when a ‘target or an issue is very far-removed from a domestic, urgent issue, it’s very hard to make a case’ that their members should get involved in the campaign.39 In sum, their organisational form influenced their choice of national over international targets. Precisely because they are member-driven, and because their members come from national constituencies, they framed their campaigns in national terms. Digital advocacy organisations need to choose campaigns, and tactics, which their members will get behind. This often means choosing campaigns which directly affect them. This explains why they rarely campaigned on important international issues during this period which had no direct link to their members (e.g. protests in Hong Kong which were ongoing, and discussions about debt forgiveness for the Global South). Political opportunity structures and access to international institutions are only part of the explanation. Digital networks do enable advocacy organisations to share information, tactics and messages but do not automatically lead to a coordinated transnational campaign, even in the presence of high-trust network. Overall, this study suggests that whether an advocacy organisation is member-driven or staff-driven tells us more about if and how they will campaign, than whether they use digital platforms or not. Conclusion

We live in an increasingly globalised world where issues spill over borders, beyond the oversight of national governments. The digital advocacy organisations I examined in this chapter have formed dense international networks and regularly to share tactics, messaging and strategies. There is a high degree of trust within the OPEN network, and they all share progressive values. Most notably, they all follow the same digitally enabled mode of advocacy. Given these similarities, we might expect them to frequently campaign transnationally. Instead, digital advocacy organisations rarely partnered with each other, or with other international NGOs. While they campaign frequently on transnational issues

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such as COVID-19, they did so through a national lens, mobilising their members to put pressure on their national decision-makers. In the face of a massive global pandemic with international ramifications – closure of international borders and controversy over the role of the World Health Organization – these digital advocacy organisations stuck to the state. We did not see the emergence of a new digitally connected global civil society, or even more frequent instances of digitally enhanced, transnationally coordinated campaigns (Scholte, 1999; Wapner, 1995). More research is needed to unpack patterns of transnational advocacy in the digital era. It would be useful to expand this study to other digital advocacy organisations such as Avaaz, WeMove and SumOfUs as well as traditional NGOs, such as Oxfam, Amnesty International or Greenpeace. We might find that the latter adopted digital tactics, but that there is no overall increase in the frequency of transnational advocacy. Further research should also examine the limits of this new digital advocacy organisation – why are there so few organisations in the global south? And why are there no organisations operating in authoritarian regimes? In sum, IR scholars should not assume that digital technology – and in particular speed, pervasiveness and datafication – will transform all dimensions of transnational advocacy as the nation-state remains a central target for advocacy. Notes 1 A survey of 4,908 NGOs from around the world found that 92% have a website; 71% regularly send email updates to donors and supporters; and 72% of NGOs use Twitter, 55% YouTube, 39% Instagram and 16% WhatsApp. Eighty-eight percent of NGOs surveyed view social media as effective for creating social change. Although, the survey does not investigate if or how social media is effective (Nonprofit Tech for Good, 2017) 2 There is, however, a large literature of political communication scholarship on this topic; see for example Dennis and Hall (2020); Karpf (2012); Tufekci (2017). 3 Political scientists have also studied the emergence of digital political parties (Gerbaudo, 2018). These parties feed off member-engagement, like the big tech companies, and have lowered the cost of entry by making membership free. Rather than organising their members in traditional party structures with physical headquarters and regular in-person meetings, they engage their members online. 4 Scholars have demonstrated that organisations with bureaucracy and clearly divisions of labour are more effective at digital outreach and engagement than horizontal, networks or movements (Schradie, 2019). 5 They defined covert power as ‘indirect power that allows them to effect change and influence the overtly powerful. The overtly powerful was a list of people who derived power from their positions or standing – and was a list of the most senior politicians in Australia with the Prime Minister at number one (Australian Associated Press, 2017). 6 IR scholars often treat transnational advocacy networks as the primary unit of analysis, rather than the organisations that comprise these networks (Busby, 2010; Keck & Sikkink, 1998). They also focus on how transnational advocacy networks form around a common issue (women’s rights, human rights, deforestation, debt relief, the International Criminal Court, HIV-AIDS, or climate change), not around a common mode of advocacy. 7 Note that both Black Lives Matter and FridaysforFuture now have organisational structures. However, they both opt for distributed campaigns, in which local chapters have a high degree of autonomy to determine their campaigns (Chotiner, 2020).

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8 It is more accurate to refer to the digital eras in plural, rather than as a singular digital era given how different the internet of 2020 is from the internet of 1990 (Karpf, 2020). 9 This is not an exhaustive or representative list of new political actors and includes mostly Western-based organisations. 10 Although there have been attempts to replicate the MoveOn model by political actors on the right, they have not been successful (Karpf, 2016 for possible explanations). 11 Some digital advocacy organisations do focus on specific issues: 350.org which focuses on climate change, and All Out which focuses on gay rights. 12 Alongside the IR scholarship, social movement scholars have identified various ways in which national (or local) advocacy and social movements may: diffuse ideas and practices internationally; shift scale and externalise their campaigns to an international organisation; or engage in ‘transnational collective action’, defined as ‘coordinated international campaigns on the part of networks of activists against international actors, other states or international institutions’ (della Porta & Tarrow, 2005, p. 3). Tarrow and McAdam emphasise that international protest doesn’t just emerge from ‘global consciousness or economic integration’ (Tarrow & McAdam, 2005, p. 145) but must be built up through coalitions. Furthermore, a domestic movement that shifts in scale to the international level is not automatically a transnational or a global movement (Tarrow & McAdam, 2005, p. 146). Notably, this work has focused more on social movements rather than advocacy organisations. 13 The book was the first winner of the ISA Chadwick Alger prize, which recognises the best scholarship in ISA’s International Organization Section. 14 Keck and Sikkink argued in 1998 that ‘we lack convincing studies of the sustained and specific processes though which individuals and organizations create (or resist the creation of ) something resembling a global civil society’. I would argue this is still the case with regards to transnational advocacy in the digital era. 15 Rucht (1999), a social movement scholar, suggests that the transnational aspect of a movement may refer to four different dimensions: issues, targets, mobilisation and organisation. 16 Farrell (2012) argues that future research will not be ‘internet’ researchers as the internet will be so integrated into political processes that we cannot disentangle the online from the offline. 17 There was variation in how strict these lockdowns were, how long they lasted and how effective they were. Furthermore, restrictions and lockdowns were reimposed in many countries later in 2020 and 2021. For more on government’s responses to COVID, see Oxford Blavatnik School of Government (2021). 18 Thanks to Charlie Lawrie who produced all the charts for this chapter and provided insightful feedback. 19 Separately, collecting campaign data from organisational websites also posed methodological challenges, since websites change rapidly, past campaigns may no longer be listed and organisations rarely if ever archive their campaign activities. 20 One important caveat: data recorded for MoveOn only extends to 19 June and any campaigns posted between 19 June and 30 June are missing from the dataset. This is because the final data recording resumed in October 2020, at which point accessing data on the MoveOn Facebook page became technically challenging. 21 Some issues are clearly local (e.g., increasing state support for a local library; or funding for victims of sexual violence) and some were clearly international (e.g., campaigns against international trade agreements). There were a large number of campaigns which targeted a transnational issue (e.g., climate change) but were framed in national terms (e.g., stopping the Adani coal mine in Australia). Many of the campaigns coded as targeting a ‘transnational’ issue also included a reference to the transnational dimensions in the campaign material (i.e., report, petition or demonstration announcement). However, it was not imperative for the campaign material to mention a transnational dimension to be mentioned to be included in this category.

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22 This is part of a broader book project ‘Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Thinking Global, Acting Local’ (Hall, 2022) which draws on over 100 interviews with digitalactivists in the OPEN network between August 2015 and March 2021. 23 38 Degrees, https://speakout.38degrees.org.uk/campaigns/7199 (accessed 15 October 2020) 24 Campact, ‘Coronal Kollaps’ https://blog.campact.de/2020/03/corona-kollaps-verhindern/ (accessed 15 October 2020). 25 Campact, ‘Klinik Personal’, https://aktion.campact.de/klinikpersonal/appell/teilnehmen (accessed 15 October 2020) 26 MoveOn, ‘Health care workers need protective equipment now’ https://sign.moveon. org/petitions/healthcare-workers-need-protective-equipment-now?source=mo.social (accessed 15 October 2020) 27 GetUp!, ‘Viral Kindness’, https://viralkindness.org.au/ (accessed 15 October 2020) 28 GetUp! ‘Stand up for Renewable Energy’, https://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/climatejustice/stand-up-for-renewable-energy-16092bd0-9468-4ca2-b5aa-710207afdf7a/ stand-up-for-renewable-energy (accessed 15 October 2020). 29 During the first phase of the pandemic, there were massive shortages of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers, as well as ventilators and other medical supplies needed to help those most severely hit by COVID. There were also calls for a global ‘debt’ jubilee for all developing countries who could not finance the costs of COVID alongside servicing their regular debt. Avaaz, for example, ran a campaign on with the Jubilee Debt Campaign. Avaaz, ‘Coronavirus debt relief’, https://secure.avaaz.org/cam paign/en/coronavirus_debt_relief_loc/ (accessed 15 October 2020). 30 Interestingly, even when they did campaign on international institutions and dimensions of COVID-19 they did so by targeting national governments. For instance, in early 2021 several OPEN affiliated organisations campaigned for a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights for the COVID vaccine at the World Trade Organization. There were petitions on the websites of: Amandla.Mobi (South Africa), Le Mouvement (France), Uplift (Ireland), Akcja Demokrajca (Poland) and also ActionStation (New Zealand). Disclaimer: the author was involved in the New Zealand campaign and helped to facilitate the petition on the ActionStation website. ActionStation, ‘Support Vaccines for People Not Profit’, https://our.actionstation.org.nz/petitions/support-vaccines-forpeople-not-for-profit (accessed 19 March 2021). 31 Campact, https://aktion.campact.de/campact/blacklivesmatter/feedback (accessed 15 October 2020). 32 GetUp https://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/decarceration-justice/blacklivesmatter-globalstatement-of-solidarity/blacklivesmatter-global-statement-of-solidarity(accessed15October 2020) 33 38 Degrees, https://speakout.38degrees.org.uk/campaigns/liztruss-welcome (accessed 15 October 2020). 34 GetUp!, ‘Black Lives Matter Global Statement of Solidarity’, https://www.getup.org. au/campaigns/decarceration-justice/blacklivesmatter-global-statement-of-solidarity/ blacklivesmatter-global-statement-of-solidarity (accessed 15 October 2020). 35 OPEN. 2020. ‘Network Support Advisor: COVID-19’, The Idealist, available at https://www.idealist.org/en/nonprofit-job/3425310e6b12450fae47c5e263701c7fnetwork-support-advisor-covid-19-online-progressive-engagement-network-newyork?utm_campaign=visitorshare&utm_medium=social&utm_source=email (accessed 8 June 2020) 36 Discussion with OPEN Activists, 16 February 2021. 37 Discussion with OPEN Activists, 16 February 2021. 38 Discussion with OPEN Activists, 16 February 2021. 39 Discussion with OPEN Activists, 16 February 2021.

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References Australian Associated Press. (2017, October 6). Australia’s top 20 power-brokers. Australian Associated Press. URL: http://www.news.com.au/national/breaking-news/australiastop-20-powerbrokers/news-story/1befd0a99d89672707750b56a81c7c14 (last accessed 10 October 2017). Ayoub, P., & Stoeckl, K. (Forthcoming). Global Resistances to SOGI Rights, Actors, Claims, and Venues of Contestation. New York: New York University Press. Bauer, M. (2016). The political power of evoking fear: The shining example of Germany’s anti-TTIP campaign movement. European View, 15(2), 193–212. Bennett, P. W. L., & Segerberg, D. A. (2013). The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bimber, B., Flanagin, A., & Stohl, C. (2012). Collective Action in Organizations. Cambridge University Press. URL: http://www.cambridge.org/es/academic/subjects/politicsinternational-relations/american-government-politics-and-policy/collective-actionorganizations-interaction-and-engagement-era-technological-change. Bond, B.,  & Exley, Z. (2016). Rules for Revolutionaries. White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing. Busby, J. (2010). Moral Movements and Foreign Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bush, S., & Hadden, J. (2019). Density and decline in founding of INGOs in the United States. International Studies Quarterly, 63, 113–1146. Castells, M. (2012). Networks of Outrage and Hope. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chadwick, A., & Dennis, J. (2016). Social Media, professional media and mobilisation in contemporary Britain: Explaining the strengths and weaknesses of the citizens’ movement 38 Degrees. Political Studies, 65(1), 42–60. Chotiner, I. (2020, June  3). A  Black Lives Matter co-founder explains why this time is different. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-black-livesmatter-co-founder-explains-why-this-time-is-different. della Porta, D., & Tarrow, S. (2005). Transnational Protest and Global Activism. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Dennis, J. (2019). Beyond Slacktivism – Political Participation on Social Media. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dennis, J., & Hall, N. (2020). Innovation and adaptation in advocacy organizations throughout the digital eras. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 17(2), 79–86. Farrell, H. (2012). The consequences of the internet for politics. Annual Review of Political Science, 15(1), 35–52. Fisher, D. R. (2019). American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave. New York: Columbia University Press. Fung, A., Russon Gilman, H., & Shkabatur, J. (2013). Six models for the Internet + politics. International Studies Review, 15(1), 30–47. Gerbaudo, P. (2012). Tweets on the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto Press. Gerbaudo, P. (2018). The Digital Party. London: Pluto Press. Germain, R. D., & Kenny, M. (1998). Engaging Gramsci: International relations theory and the new Gramscians. Review of International Studies, 24(1), 3–21. Gladwell, M. (2010, September 27). Small change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted. The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/smallchange-malcolm-gladwell.

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Gordenker, L., & Weiss, T. G. (1995). Pluralising global governance: Analytical approaches and dimensions. Third World Quarterly, 16(3), 357–387. Hall, N. (2019a). When do refugees matter? The importance of issue salience for digital advocacy organizations. Journal of Interest Groups and Advocacy, 8(3), 333–355. Hall, N. (2019b). Norm contestation in the digital era: Campaigning for refugee rights. International Affairs, 95(3), 575–595. Hall, N. (2022). Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, N., & Ireland, P. (2016, July 6). Transforming activism: Digital era advocacy organizations. Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR). URL: http://ssir.org/articles/entry/ transforming_activism_digital_era_advocacy_organizations. Hall, N., Schmitz, H. P.,  & Dedmon, J. M. (2020, March). Transnational advocacy and NGOs in the digital era: New forms of networked power. International Studies Quarterly, 64(1), 159–167 Han, H. (2014). How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Heaney, M. T., & Rojas, F. (2007). Partisans, nonpartisans, and the antiwar movement in the United States. American Politics Research, 35(4), 431–464. Juris, J. S. (2005). The new digital media and activist networking within anti-corporate globalization movements. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 597, 189–208. Jurkovich, M. (2020). Feeding the Hungry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Karpf, D. (2012). The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy. New York: Oxford University Press. Karpf, D. (2013. October 16). Netroots goes global. The Nation. URL: https://www.thenation.com/article/netroots-goes-global/. Karpf, D. (2016). Analytic Activism. New York: Oxford University Press. Karpf, D. (2020). Two provocations for the study of digital politics in time. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 17(2), 87–96. Keck, M. E., & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Margetts, H., John, P., Hale, S.,  & Yasseri, T. (2015). Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Medie, P. A. (2020). Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa. New York: Oxford University Press. Milner, H. (1991). The assumption of anarchy in international relations theory: A critique. Review of International Studies, 17(1), 67–85. Moravcsik, A. (1997). Taking preferences seriously: A liberal theory of international politics. International Organization, 51(4), 513–553. Nonprofit Tech for Good. (2017). 2017 Global NGO technology report. URL: http://techre port.ngo/. Owen, T. (2015). Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age. New York: Oxford University Press. Oxford Blavatnik School of Government. (2021). Coronavirus government response tracker. URL: https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/coronavirus-governmentresponse-tracker (last accessed 15 October 2020). Pallas, C., & Bloodgood, E. (Eds.). (2022). Beyond the Boomerang, From Transnational Advocacy Networks to Transcalar Advocacy in International Politics. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.

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Price, R. (1998). Reversing the gun sights: Transnational civil society targets land mines. International Organization, 52(3), 613–644. Price, R. (2003). Transnational civil society and advocacy in world politics. World Politics, 55(4), 579–606. Putnam, R. D. (1988). Diplomacy and domestic politics: The logic of two-level games. International Organization, 42(3), 427–460. Risse-Kappen, T. (1995). Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures and International Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rucht, D. (1999). The transnationalization of social movements: Trends, causes, problems. In H. P. Kriesi, D. Rucht, & D. della Porte (Eds.), Social Movements in a Globalizing World (pp. 206–222). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Scholte, J. A. (1999). Global Civil Society: Changing the World? CSGR Working Papers Series No. 31/99. Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (CSGR). University of Warwick. URL: https://ideas.repec.org/p/wck/wckewp/31-99.html Schradie, J. (2019). The Revolution That Wasn’t. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. London: Allen Lane. Sikkink, K. (2005). Patterns of dynamic multilevel governance. In D. Della Porte & S. Tarrow (Eds.), Transnational Protest and Global Activism (pp. 151–174). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Silberman, M. (2017, February 17). Five years of building people power at Greenpeace. Mobilisation Lab. URL: https://mobilisationlab.org/burning-platform-building-people-power/. Simmons, B. (2013). Preface: International relationships in the information age. International Studies Review, 15, 1–4. Smith, J. (2022). Power shifts, paradigm shifts, and transnational advocacy systems, Chapter 5. In Beyond the Boomerang, From Transnational Advocacy Networks to Transcalar Advocacy in International Politics (pp. 81–96). Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. Tarrow, S. (2005). The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tarrow, S., & della Porta, D. (2005). Conclusion: ‘Globalization’, Complex Internationalism and Transnational Contention. In S. Tarrow & D. della Porta (Eds.), Transnational Protest and Global Activism (pp. 227–246). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Tarrow, S., & McAdam, D. (2005). Scale shift and transnational contention. In S. Tarrow & D. della Porta (Eds.), Transnational Protest and Global Activism (pp. 121–150). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and Tear Gas. London: Oxford University Press. Vromen, A. (2017). Digital Citizenship and Political Engagement, The challenge from online campaigning. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wapner, P. (1995). Politics beyond the state: Environmental activism and world civic politics. World Politics, 47(3), 311–340. Warkentin, C. (2001). Reshaping World Politics: NGOs, the Internet, and Global Civil Society. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

PART III

Ordering Processes

7 ALGORITHMIC SECURITY AND CONFLICT IN A DATAFIED WORLD Claudia Aradau

Introduction: ‘Waze for war’

In 2018, the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for security and warfare became publicly debated, as an open letter by Google employees addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai was published on the New York Times website. The letter starts by stating: ‘We believe that Google should not be in the business of war’ (Menegus, 2018). Through the letter and its public circulation, the Google employees staged a protest against Google’s involvement in the US Department of Defense Project Maven, which promised to use AI to identify objects in video streams from aerial drones and thus support drone targeting. While there are many definitions of AI, the contemporary resurgence of interest and research on AI can be understood as comprising ‘a constellation of technologies, including machine learning, perception, reasoning, and natural language processing’ (Crawford & Whittaker, 2016, p. 2). The letter argued against the ‘weaponization of AI’ and asked Google to withdraw from Project Maven. Its initial version received wide coverage and was followed by a supporting letter endorsed by over 700 researchers and published in The Guardian. Led by three Science and Technology Studies academics, Lucy Suchman, Lilly Irani and Peter Asaro, the letter highlights the dangers of AI technologies, which ‘are poised to automate the process of identifying targets, including people and directing weapons to attack them’ (Suchman et al., 2018). Much of this debate focused on the question of using AI for security and warfare, of militarising or weaponising AI. In international relations (IR), novel digital technologies have raised questions about norms and ethics, human and non-human agency, global governance and legal regulation (e.g. Bode & Huelss, 2018; Hoijtink & Leese, 2019). As Corneliu Bjola and Markus Kornprobst outline in the Introduction to this volume, digital DOI: 10.4324/9781003437963-11

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international relations refer to the ‘interplay of digital technologies and power structures in global politics’, which transform human and non-human agency, and ordering processes. Concepts of technology, power, agency and order are highly contested, and they gain different meanings depending on the theoretical prism through which they are approached. This chapter proposes a micropolitical and sociotechnical lens for the analysis of how digital technologies transform practices of conflict and security. A micropolitical perspective entails attention to the mundane aspects of already existing digital technologies, the technologies that are embedded in the everyday lives of people and institutions, in order to trace the effects of digital disruption for international interactions, practices and institutions. It is thus distanced from work that casts technology as spectacular, exceptional, macropolitical and deterministic. A sociopolitical perspective understands technology as emergent through power relations rather than pre-given and either subordinated to powerful humans and institutions or enabling power over humans and institutions. The lenses proposed here are not just theoretical, inspired by ongoing conversations between IR and Science and Technology Studies (STS) (see Bellanova et al., 2021; Bousquet, 2018; Hoijtink & Leese, 2019), but are also reflected in security practices. As the Head of the US Joint Artificial Intelligence Center has commented, ‘[i]t is not a vision for killer robots deciding who lives and doesn’t. It’s more like Waze, but for war’ (Groll, 2019). Waze is a navigation application, which can provide drivers with real-time traffic update, fastest route and other navigation information. It is similar to many of the apps that can be accessed through smartphone interfaces. Waze was acquired by Google in 2013. The metaphor of ‘Waze for war’ captures the various elements of micropolitical and sociotechnical transformations: banal technologies, entanglements of publicprivate actors and the imbrication of security with everyday life. What happens when the same technologies we use to monitor traffic, consume news or access our phones are deployed for the purposes of war? In the introduction to their ‘AI Next’ program the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) also highlights this more mundane character of digital security technologies: ‘Rather, the machines DARPA envisions will function more as colleagues than as tools. Towards this end, DARPA research and development in human-machine symbiosis sets a goal to partner with machines’ (DARPA, 2020). Similarly, The US Department of Defense has highlighted the role of AI as augmenting rather than replacing humans: AI will be used with the objective of reducing the time spent on highly manual, repetitive, and frequent tasks. By enabling humans to supervise automated tasks, AI has the potential to reduce the number and costs of mistakes, increase throughput and agility, and promote the allocation of DoD resources to highervalue activities and emerging mission priorities. (Department of Defense, 2019, p. 11)

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Rather than killer robots and automated lethal weapons, which wrest agency and power from humans, Groll, DARPA and the Department of Defense (DoD) speak about augmented technologies and mundane Waze-like apps. Yet, it is the discourse of technology as taking control and of non-human agency as effacing humans that have attracted most public attention. The reason for the discrepancy between these discourses might be, partly, the obscure and abstract language of digital technologies; and, partly, it might be the public and cultural imaginaries of intelligent machines taking over. The terminologies associated with the internet and digital technologies are multiple and varied: Big Data, algorithms, machine learning, automated decision-making, deep learning, AI and many more. These varied terms indicate novel and often opaque technologies. We use apps on our phones to read newspapers, check social media accounts, track our route on a map or find a restaurant nearby. The interfaces through which we access them tell us little about the algorithms, data flows and infrastructures that underpin the selection and targeting of information. Moreover, these mundane devices at first sight seem to have little to do with international relations, security and conflict. Yet, they share techniques of data extraction, algorithmic processing and prediction with many security practices. In a datafied world, security actors rely on infrastructures developed by the big tech companies, while computer scientists become security experts and data flows transform relations between public and private actors. What kinds of security practices emerge through the algorithmic processing of large swathes of data or what has come to be known as ‘big data’? What are the implications of developing a ‘Waze for war’? I explore three transformations that these technologies entail for security and conflict, which can be analysed along three analytical dimensions: knowledge (prediction), othering (anomaly) and power (targeting). First, algorithms intensify the ‘predictive technoscience’ of security (Suchman, Follis, & Weber, 2017). Big Data and algorithms promise new powers of prediction to not just ‘connect the dots’, but also find the ‘needle in a haystack’. This knowledge of prediction now supplements logics of prevention and pre-emption analysed by IR scholars. Second, algorithmic security is increasingly not directly about enemies, but about anomalies (Aradau & Blanke, 2018, 2022). I explain how machine learning algorithms ‘hunt’ for anomalies in masses of data. Third, I argue that imaginaries of conflict and security need to be understood within a broader transformation towards ‘targeted societies’ (Chamayou, 2015). While targeting has been a key aspect of military practice, ‘targeted societies’ draw their practical and imaginary resources from both computer science and marketing. In conclusion, I outline several implications that these transformations have for the study of digital international relations as data relations. Digital/Data/Algorithms

Given the novelty of the various terms used to describe digital technologies, a few terminological clarifications are in order. The term ‘digital’ has led to many

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disciplinary reframings such as ‘digital humanities’, ‘digital sociology’, ‘digital geography’, ‘digital STS [science and technology studies]’, ‘digital anthropology’ and so on. The digital has become an overarching concept, which encompasses and renders a wide range of technological transformations. For many disciplines that have adopted the moniker of the digital, it has largely superseded that of ‘virtual’ and ‘cyber’, even as cyber continues to be used in widely circulated terms such as cybersecurity or cybercrime. As sociologist Richard Rogers has pointed out, the digital has superseded the problematic distinction ‘virtual/real’ in Internet research (Rogers, 2013). IR scholars have cautioned against the use of ‘the digital’ as indicative of epochal change and propose to approach it as ‘a vantage point to speak about its various affordances and the situated relationship it entertains with politics’ (Kaufmann & Jeandesboz, 2017, p. 310). Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier have formulated the concept of datafication as ‘taking all aspects of life and turning them into data’ (MayerSchönberger & Cukier, 2013). Datafication means that digital objects and traces can be processed computationally. For instance, scanning a book does not mean that the book can be read by a computer. It can be digitised, but it is not necessarily searchable. Additional processing is required for the book to become datafied. Or in an example closer to security issues, the use of CCTV cameras is an example of digitisation, while facial recognition entails the supplementary datafication of images so that they can be processed computationally instead of having a human watch long hours of CCTV recordings. Datafication is often used in conjunction with Big Data, which stands for the massive volumes of data produced about all aspects of our lives, which comes in a variety of forms, from books and images to social media data and location data on our mobile phones, and with increased velocity, given the ubiquity of sensors and mobile devices that generate data at speed. An algorithm is ‘a procedure or set of steps or rules to accomplish a task’ (Schutt & O’Neil, 2013). In this formulation, algorithms – like data – have a long history. However, what distinguishes algorithms today is their combination with Big Data and machine learning. According to data scientists Rachel Schutt and Cathy O’Neill (2013), machine learning algorithms are the basis of AI and are used for the purposes of prediction rather than modelling. Given that algorithms process data, they have become a shorthand for the concentration of power and fears about technology, particularly given the performance and imagined efficiency of machine learning algorithms such as neural networks. Algorithms are more generally operations that transform an input into an output, while also being specific operations on data. Sociologist Tarleton Gillespie has argued that we can think of ‘computers, then, fundamentally as algorithm machines – designed to store and read data, apply mathematical procedures to it in a controlled fashion, and offer new information as the output’ (Gillespie, 2014, p. 167). In this chapter, I use algorithms to refer not to ‘autonomous technical objects’, but to ‘complex sociotechnical systems’ (Seaver, 2018, p. 378). As complex sociotechnical systems, algorithms are entangled with data, knowledge, people, devices

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and infrastructures. This relational understanding of algorithms allows us to trace the dispersed and everyday transformations of security and conflict. Algorithms do not work without data, which needs to be extracted, cleaned, and stored in order to be rendered computationally processable. These processes require infrastructures of extraction and circulation, as well as particular forms of knowledge and networks of experts. They are also dependent on subjects whose data is extracted, either knowingly or unknowingly, either consensually or by stealth. A relational understanding of algorithms avoids the language of ‘autonomy’ used now in international law and IR in relation to ‘lethal autonomous weapon systems’ and AI. Technologies are rarely autonomous, even when algorithmic decisions might appear to elude human understanding. Rather, as Matthias Leese and Marijn Hoijtink (2019, p. 2) remind us, ‘most technologies are, in fact, rather working with humans than in the place of humans. They assist, pre-structure, point out and make suggestions’. As these vocabularies become stabilised as they circulate in public debates, it is important to attend to the assumptions that undergird the vocabularies that we deploy in our analyses. While at times data is privileged over algorithms and vice versa, digital over cyber, AI over machine learning, autonomy appears to be the least adequate term to describe these new technologies, as it assumes a separation of humans and machines. As this chapter argues, digital international relations are about heterogenous and asymmetric human-data-algorithmic relations. Anticipatory Security: Prevention, Pre-emption, Prediction

Big data and machine learning algorithms have amplified the promise of anticipatory security to detect unknown dangers and intervene before these dangers could materialise. Scholarship in IR has shown that security governance has become increasingly anticipatory and has traced the transformations of probabilistic and possibilistic knowledge in the governance of risks and uncertainties. Whether it is through urgency and the immediacy of threat or anticipation of catastrophes to come, security professionals and their practices have been turned towards the future. This anticipatory orientation has been translated through the languages of risk or uncertainty, and the associated practices of prevention, pre-emption, preparedness or resilience (e.g. Amoore, 2014; Anderson, 2010; Aradau & van Munster, 2011; Kessler & Werner, 2008; Leander, 2011; O’Malley, 2010). While there are many distinctions between how these practices entwine risk and uncertainty, probability and conjecture, their temporal aspect has been paramount. The concept of risk has shifted the analytical focus from securitising utterances about imminent threats and exceptional measures to the technologies and strategies by means of which the future is produced as calculable. An unknown future is ‘tamed’ through statistical knowledge and preventive interventions. Didier Bigo has analysed how risk emerges in the practices of ‘managers of unease’ – the police, intelligence services, military or private security agencies – who used

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the ‘authority of statistics’ to classify and prioritise risks (Bigo, 2004). When the police make use of insurance knowledge, statistics and profiling for the purposes of prevention, security takes on the language and rationale of risk. For instance, Frontex, the EU border agency publishes quarterly Risk Analysis Reports based on numbers of migrant nationalities, so that different risk profiles and trends emerge. More recently, scholars have highlighted how Frontex’s risk analysis reports are ‘gendering and racializing migrants, their motivations, behavior, and choices and assign differential value, rights, and agency on the basis of perceived dichotomies between masculinity/femininity, (non)/European, (non-)white, rational/irrational, civilized/chaotic, active/passive’ (Stachowitsch & Sachseder, 2019, p. 119). Moving beyond risk, other literatures have shown that radical uncertainty has fractured the statistical and probabilistic approach to risk, giving rise to different techniques and modes of knowledge (Samimian-Darash & Rabinow, 2015). Faced with the possibility of the ‘next terrorist attack’, the model of preventive calculation reaches its limit. Although security professionals, intelligence agencies and the insurance industry continue to develop models to calculate or estimate the risk of a terrorist attack, they also recognise that today’s challenge comes from what former United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, infamously referred to as ‘unknown unknowns’ – things we do not know we do not know. In the face of catastrophes to come, the technologies and rationalities of governance have been changing as they ‘favour instead the rendering of pre-emptive decisions that do not calculate probability based on past evidence, but rather on the horizon of what may happen in the future’ (Amoore, 2008, p. 850). Scenario planning, foresight and emergency exercises, psychological profiling or resilience training purport to render the contingency of the future governable. Louise Amoore has noted a shift from probability to possibility in security practices (2014), while others have traced similarities between financial speculation and speculative security (Cooper, 2008; de Goede, 2012), or new modes of reasoning that are ‘conjectural’ in their reliance on clues and insignificant details that might reveal something about the future (Aradau & van Munster, 2011). From ‘connecting the dots’ and finding ‘the needle in the haystack’ to predictive policing and data mining for counterinsurgency, security professionals have increasingly adopted the language and methods of computing for the purposes of prediction. In so doing, they have taken inspiration from other Big Data applications in the corporate world and have deployed practices of working with Big Data. Big Data seems to invite practices of hyper-speculation by making infinite correlations and associations possible. danah boyd and Kate Crawford caution against the possibilities of ‘apophenia’ in vast masses of data: ‘seeing patterns where none actually exist, simply because massive quantities of data can offer connections that radiate in all directions’ (boyd & Crawford, 2012, p. 668). Computer scientists and practitioners concur in emphasising the predictive logics of Big Data more

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generally, not just for the purposes of security: ‘Prediction is the hallmark of Big Data’ (Ekbia et al., 2015, p. 7). As in everyday language prediction captures an orientation towards the future and its control, there has been less attention to how machine learning and predictive analytics in particular work differently from other future-oriented security technologies. Predictive analytics as the ‘process of discovering interesting and meaningful patterns in data’ (Abbott, 2014, p. 3) has been key to security professionals’ dream of acceding to the future and interrupting the emergence of potential dangers before they can become full-fledged and potentially catastrophic events. While predictive analytics resonates with the practices of pre-emption as ‘the attempt to project the past into a simulated future that can be acted upon in the present’ (Andrejevic, Dencik, & Treré, 2020, p. 1530), there are also subtle differences. Prediction has been perhaps most closely associated with new technologies of predictive policing, even as similar algorithmic methods for predictive analysis are used across many security-related fields. In the United States, where predictive analytics has been extensively deployed for the purposes of policing, there have been many public and academic controversies over its discriminatory effects. While demographic categories have long been used for the purposes of policing, predictive policing now uses Big Data and algorithms to make decisions about who and where to police (Brayne, 2018). As sociologist Sarah Brayne explains, the use of historical crime data risks creating a ‘self-fulfilling statistical prophecy in which crime rates increasingly reflect enforcement practices’ (Brayne, 2018, p. 297). At the same time, algorithmic prediction is different from statistical methods used on large datasets of criminal offending rates in order to determine the different levels of offending associated with a group or with one or more group traits and, on the basis of those correlations, to predict the past, present, or future criminal behaviour of a particular person and to administer a criminal justice outcome for that individual. (Harcourt, 2008, p. 16) Demographic or other groups traits are key to statistical profiling and the preventive logic of risk management. Unlike statistics, machine learning algorithms for prediction work with large numbers of data points from a variety of digital devices and data sources. The first challenge for predictive policing is to gather more and more data in order to find new patterns in this data. Moreover, predictive algorithms need not use (only) demographic data. PredPol is one of the major predictive policing technologies, which has been at the heart of intense public controversies over discriminatory effects again black populations (Lum & Isaac, 2016). In response to intense public and academic controversy, PredPol purports to clarify that it ‘does not collect, upload, analyse or in any way involve any information about individuals or

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populations and their characteristics’ (Rey, 2020). This does not mean that PredPol does not have discriminatory effects, given the way that algorithms for prediction work, as we will see further down. Yet, PredPol, renamed as Geolitica in 2021, continues to emphasise its use of ‘where’ and ‘when’ rather than ‘who’ of crime data to elude accusations of racial discrimination. One of the founders of HunchLab, another major digital system using Big Data to forecast crime, rejects public representations of predictive policing as akin to ‘Minority Report’: This was not Minority Report; we could not predict what people would do. But we could use a combination of historical crime data and other data (time of year, day of the week, proximity to bars, lighting, weather, etc.) to generate a forecast of the locations where a crime is somewhat more likely to occur on a given day of the week or time of the day. (Cheetham, 2019) HunchLab uses a variety of data, not just historic crime data, which had been key for risk profiling. Time, weather, lighting and so on become features that of a data object – ‘crime’. By representing these different data points, HunchLab could use algorithmically derived patterns out of the data, as presentation material for the company outlines: ‘The system automatically learns what is important for each crime type and provides recommendations of where to focus the resources that you have available’ (Azavea, 2015). While there are many differences between the types of software used, the amount and variety of data, and the types of algorithms, what is key here is the production of predictions. Unlike other companies producing predictive policing software, HunchLab has provided information about their processes through blogs, online papers and videos. The company explains why they don’t rely just on past crime data, but combine it with other types of data to produce predictive models: Our belief is that the use of non-crime data sets as variables within a crime prediction system is important, because variables based solely upon crime data become skewed as predictions are used operationally. For instance, as crimes are prevented in mission areas due to police response, the only variables identifying areas as high risk are skewed in other systems. By including other data sets, our system is more robust against this issue. (Azavea, 2015, p. 12) As we have seen, recent technologies process Big Data with machine learning algorithms. These algorithms plot data as points/dots in multi-dimensional spaces called ‘feature spaces’, where a feature is a measurable attribute that can be represented as a dimension in this space. Each dot is defined by how much abstract space

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there is in-between it and the other dots in the same space or how distant they are from each other (Blanke, 2018). Different geometrical measures and distances can be used, so that any object can be represented as a data point through a combination of features (Provost & Fawcett, 2013). To predict, machine learning algorithms measure all the distances between all the data ‘dots’ in this artificial space. Geometric distance is read in inverse relation to how similar these dots are. Prediction is enacted through calculations of what Tobias Blanke and I have previously called ‘between-ness’ or the calculation of distances between anything mapped onto the geometry of the feature space (Aradau & Blanke, 2017, 2022). These calculations of between-ness divide feature spaces between similar and dissimilar sub-spaces. These calculations of distance in a geometric space differentiate algorithmic prediction from pre-emptive logics in subtle ways. Anything that can be represented as data points in a feature space becomes predictable. The sub-spaces of dense or proximate points will then be translated onto a geographical map and become the target of police attention and intervention. However, the translations between the feature space to the geographical space are not always intelligible and can be difficult to question. While the geographical map is the result of the feature space, how the feature space was partitioned and how the data points were translated geographically remains obscure. Given the proprietary nature of the software, these would also be unknown to the police officers themselves. Based on field research with police forces in Germany and Switzerland, Simon Egbert and Matthias Leese (2021, p. 207) conclude that the use of predictive policing software is ‘aggravating already problematic police practices with regard to the production of deviance and suspicion – while at the same time cloaking discrimination and profiling in alleged rationalization and algorithmic opacity’. Alongside the insertion of ‘prediction’ as a form of knowledge that can supplement prevention and pre-emption, research on predictive policing indicates two further transformations of security practices, actors and institutions. First, security actors become Big Data actors, as their work needs to increasingly incorporate the extraction and processing of Big Data, and it is shaped by the demands of collecting and working with this data. While security actors have historically collected data as part of making populations legible and governable, data storage and processing still raised many difficulties given physical limits to physical or computational capabilities. With machine learning algorithms and Big Data, there is in principle no limit to the number of features that can be used in an artificial space. Feature spaces can have hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands of features and dimensions, depending on how much computers can process. It is this feature space, which drives the (big) data needs in machine learning. Data scientist Dean Abbott (2014, p. 153) explains that, ‘[a]s the number of inputs increases, the number of data points needed to fill the space comparably increases exponentially’, because the number of inputs corresponds to the number

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of features. The more features there are in an abstract information space, the more space there is to fill in with data. Security institutions can thus be seen as Big Data organisations, in the sense that their activities are increasingly shaped by the need to collect, store and process data. Security practices have become Big Data practices. As NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden noted in his memoir Permanent Record, digital technologies redefined what intelligence was: ‘it was not about clandestine meetings or dead drops, but about data’ (Snowden, 2019, Loc 62). Second, the same machine learning algorithms that power apps, social media personalisation and recommendation engines are used across social fields. The types of algorithms used by Netflix, Google, Waze or Facebook are also used by security actors. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that, unlike data, algorithms are limited. On the other, machine learning requires expert skills, which security actors often acquire by sub-contracting work to tech companies. Given that the big tech companies have the infrastructures and computational power needed to run machine learning algorithms on different types of data, security actors are increasingly reliant on these companies and their infrastructures. In a datafied world, all security practices tend to become commercial security practices. Even as these effects are unequally felt across the world, as security actors in the Global North have access to data and resources to access infrastructures and expertise for its processing, Big Data and algorithmic security are increasingly used globally. As Daniel Edler Duarte (2021, p. 212) has shown in his analysis of the making of the CrimeRadar app in Rio de Janeiro, ‘however much favelas may be seen as the epitome of dangerous places in security imaginaries, they do not produce enough inputs to be identified by CrimeRadar’s algorithms as high-risk areas’. Therefore, decisions on which data counts, how to collect it, which features to select, and which algorithms to deploy are deeply entangled with political contexts of (in)security and violence. The predictive knowledge that machine-learning algorithms promise enables the production of new self/other relations. Through prediction, distance becomes an indicator of risk and danger. It makes possible the drawing of lines between geographical zones and populations who inhabit these spaces. Prediction also enables the selection and targeting of enemies, to which the next section turns. Datafying Dangerous Others: Distance and Density

In the introduction to a special issue on ‘The faces of enmity in international relations’, Mathias Delori and Vron Ware distinguish the representation of the enemy in the military field from other social fields. They argue that ‘military practices can also produce original representations of the enemy, which then leak out of the military sphere’ (Delori & Ware, 2019, p. 300). Delori and Ware contrast enemy figures produced in the military sphere from other social and political representations of enmity. In so doing, they echo the philosopher of science Peter Galison’s article on ‘The ontology of the enemy’, which placed the novelty of enemy figures

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not within transformations in military practices, but scientific advances and their intersections with military thought and practice. Galison outlines the production of different figures of enmity in different social fields: Enemies were not all alike. In the killing frenzy of World War II, one version of the Enemy Other (not Wiener’s) was barely human; to the Americans, British, and Australians, the Japanese soldiers were often thought of as lice, ants, or vermin to be eradicated. These monstrous, racialized images of hate certainly presented one version of the World War II enemy, but it was by no means the only one. Another and distinct Allied vision held the enemy to be not the racialized version of a dreaded opponent but rather the more anonymous target of air raids. This enemy’s humanity was compromised not by being subhuman, vicious, abnormal, or primitive but by occupying physical and moral distance. Viewed from afar, from the icy heights of thirty thousand feet, a city in Germany looked small, and individual people appeared to be invisible, partially shorn of their likeness to the bomber. (Galison, 1994, p. 230) If a dehumanised enemy emerged in public representation and discourse, the military practice of air targeting produced another figure of the enemy, one which was deprived of human characteristics through the massification that distance produced. To these versions of the enemy, Galison opposes one version emerging at the intersection of cybernetics, operations research and game theory. The cybernetic enemy (Wiener’s this time) was similar to machines, its status blurred with that of the machine. Neither subhuman nor objectified by physical distance, the cybernetic enemy seemed to efface the racialised hierarchies of humanity. It was a ‘cold-blooded, machinelike opponent’ (Galison, 1994, p. 231). While these versions of the enemy appear to exist in separate fields of practice, they inevitably circulate and contaminate each other, as Delori and Ware highlight. How do machine learning algorithms translate the feature space into versions of the enemy when deployed by military and security actors? Are algorithms replicating the figure of the anonymous, monstrous or machinic enemy? The previous section has outlined how the increasing use of data and machine learning algorithms recasts our lives as data points, which are more or less distant or more or less proximate, in an abstract geometric space. Predictive policing focuses on partitioning the feature space depending on proximity and density of data points, which are then translated according to criminological assumptions about the spatio-temporal density and co-occurrence of crime. Police interventions can then be focused on certain areas of crime density. Yet, transformations of security have increasingly raised questions about ‘unknown unknowns’ or what has come to be formulated as the ‘needle in the haystack’ in the language of many security practitioners (Aradau & Blanke, 2018; Logan, 2017; ReichbornKjennerud, 2022).

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In 2010, DARPA issued a funding call for Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scale, which was formulated as responding to the predictive questions raised by the shooting at the Soldier Readiness Center at Fort Hood, Texas (DARPA, 2010). A year earlier, Army Major Nidal Hasan had opened fire at the Centre and killed 13 soldiers and injured other 32. The question that funding applications needed to address was one of prediction and its limits. How is it possible to know when an insider ‘turns’ and becomes an outside/an enemy? The insider is thus not the outsider inside, as representations of the ‘internal enemy’ have long suggested. Rather, an outlier is meant to capture the threshold between insider/outsider, the ‘unknown unknowns’ or the unknown ‘needles’. Outliers render the problem of becoming dangerous rather than being dangerous: Each time we see an incident like a soldier in good mental health becoming homicidal or suicidal or an innocent insider becoming malicious we wonder why we didn’t see it coming. When we look through the evidence after the fact, we often find a trail – some-times even an ‘obvious’ one. The question is can we pick up the trail before the fact giving us time to intervene and prevent an incident? Why is that so hard? Because we generally need to look through an enormous amount of data and don’t know where to look or what to look for. In particular, we generally don’t have a good understanding of normal versus anomalous behaviors and how these manifest themselves in the data. (DARPA, 2010) Raytheon was one of the companies awarded funding under the DARPA call. Their program SureView was meant to trail through masses of data in order to find signs of anomalous behavior, from ‘Web browsing, removable media, MS Office applications, file activity, email, MS Windows registry, peer-to-peer applications, log on/log off activity, keystroke logging and clipboard functions, use of printers, use of Windows terminal services, instant messaging, command line operations and use of encryption’ (Raytheon, 2011). The focus on data came in response to problems highlighted by the investigations into the practices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The lack of connectivity, limited search capabilities, lack of training and an explosion of data were some of the diagnoses of the FBI’s failure. The Webster Commission’s report on Fort Hood recommended that the FBI evaluate and, if appropriate, acquire and implement advanced and automated search, filtering, retrieval, and management technologies to assist Agents, Analysts, TFOs, and other personnel in reviewing and managing data . . .. These tools are an important means by which the FBI can hope to master the everexpanding amount of electronic data in its possession. (William H. Webster Commission, 2012)

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A Senate Report for the Committee on Homeland Security arrived at similar conclusions concerning the processing and analysis of electronic communications. One of their key diagnoses was that Major Hasan’s various communications were never linked and particularly they were not connected with his ‘public displays of radicalization’ (Lieberman, 2011, p. 51). This was due to inter-institutional strife, but also to errors and glitches that exchanging and interpreting data entail: for instance, DoD staff had misread the abbreviation ‘comm. Officer’ as communications officer rather than commissioned officer and therefore misread the content of Hasan’s communications (Lieberman, 2011, p. 35). A decade ago, these recommendations were still far away from Raytheon’s Big Data dream. As Raytheon indicated, the mass of data is seen as hiding anomalies. With machine learning algorithms, becoming dangerous can be deciphered in the mass of data by calculating anomalies through the analysis of distance and density. Data points that are close or clustered together in the feature space are assumed to be similar. Data points that are sparse or at a distance from most other data points are considered dissimilar – these can become outliers or anomalies. In a patent for outlier detection in high-dimensional data spaces, computer scientists Charu Aggarwal and Philip Shi-lung Yu note that outliers are ‘an aside-product of clustering algorithms’ (Aggarwal & Yu, 2011). Outliers emerge at a distance from the denser and sub-spaces of a feature space. A data point becomes an outlier if it is ‘present in a local region of abnormally low density’, where this low density cannot be explained by randomness (Aggarwal & Yu, 2011). Former Director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), John Launchbury (2017) used the concept of ‘data manifolds’ as a way of differentiating data clusters in a topological space. Outliers or anomalies have become particularly important for all security practices, from tracing fraud and abnormal financial transactions to anticipating criminality or terrorist activity (for a discussion, see Aradau & Blanke, 2018). Outliers are neither individuals nor populations. The dangerous other as an outlier or anomaly helps nuance arguments about the ‘individualization of war’, the shift from sovereign states and collective responsibility towards ‘individual protection, liability and accountability’ (Welsh, 2019). As this section has shown, it is difficult to speak about an increased focus on the individual as such in security practices. Conflicts are not becoming individualised manhunts, even as manhunting can be a spectacular aspect of contemporary conflicts (Chamayou, 2012). The dangerous other emerges through clusters of data points that are at a distance from more proximate data points in a defined space. In the topological space of data manifolds, anything can become an outlier through often banal, but potentially infinite combinations of data points. The production of dangerous others as an anomalous data manifold is indicative of another transformation of security practices. The anomaly does not immediately appear as a racialised figure of the enemy. This does not mean that racialised constructions of a dehumanised or subhuman other disappear, but they emerge in more

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opaque and illegible ways. An outlier can be distinguished by a combination of many features, none of which necessarily relies on group traits or even on proxies for race. Yet, it is this combination that renders some into ‘targetable, killable bodies in drone assemblages’ (Wilcox, 2017, p. 15) and it does so potentially indefinite. Targeting is the form that the power to kill takes in a datafied world. The next section explores the circulation of targeting between marketing and security practices. From Risk Societies to Targeted Societies

Best known for his Theory of the Drone, philosopher Grégoire Chamayou (2015) suggested in a brief article that we now entering ‘targeted societies’. Building on Chamayou’s suggestion, this section argues that targeting as a form of power in a datafied world has emerged through entanglements between the worlds of marketing, data science and security. In international relations, targeting is a military practice par excellence, but one which has been transformed sociotechnically and digitally. As Antoine Bousquet has aptly put it, targeting is ‘an emergent modality of military violence that is characterized not only by the planetary scale of its operations but also by a granularity that scales all the way down to the bodies of single individuals’ (Bousquet, 2018, p. 3). Targeting seems to have given rise to global manhunting, made possible through the fusion of intelligence and military operations (Reichborn-Kjennerud, 2022). Erik Reichborn-Kjennerud has analysed targeting as a ‘martial epistemology’ through which ‘everything and everyone, everywhere and all the time are not only potential targets for action, but have already been targeted and are constantly retargeted as new data and reconfigurations engender new relations that makes the world measurable, indexed, intelligible and actionable’ (2022). Oliver Kessler and Wouter Werner (2008) have approached targeting in the context of the ‘war on terror’ as techniques of risk management aiming at an unpredictable and unknown enemy. As a result, ‘[s]uspected terrorists are targeted, not because of their formal status as such, but rather because they are believed to be guilty of terrorist attacks in the past and believed to constitute a mortal threat in the future’ (Kessler & Werner, 2008, p. 305). Targeting is present in many different forms in our societies: from warfare to marketing and elections. Chamayou speaks of ‘targeted societies’ exactly given the commonalities of targeting among the military, policing and marketing (Chamayou, 2015). He sees a shift away from individuals to be policed and statistical calculations of risk profiles. In that sense, the algorithmic processing of data is indicative of a transformation from risk-governed societies to targeting-governed ones. ‘Risk society’ was formulated by sociologist Ulrich Beck to name the limits to insurable risk, which could be calculated statistically in industrial societies, to risks that have become unbounded and uncontrollable. According to Beck, such large-scale threats can ‘neither be adequately confirmed nor attributed, nor compensated, nor (preventively) managed in accordance with prevailing legal, scientific and political principles’ (Beck, 2009, p. 30). As IR scholars have shown, such catastrophic risks

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are nonetheless the object of governing strategies and taming uncertainty, as we have seen in the first section. Prevention and pre-emption have been supplemented by algorithmic prediction techniques that do not foretell the future; they project everything onto a data space so that everything can become related. The spatialisation of data points through calculations of distance and density makes possible predictions of similarity and dissimilarity, of regularity and irregularity. As Big Data and associated algorithmic techniques circulate between different social worlds, targeting as a form of power becomes reconfigured at the intersection of marketing and security. A report by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which considered the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning for US national security and defense, takes marketing knowledge as a blueprint of security knowledge and practice: ‘Potential adversaries will recognize that every advertiser and social media company knows: AI is a powerful targeting tool. Just as AI-powered analytics has transformed the relationship between companies and consumers, now they are transforming the relation between governments and individuals’ (National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, 2020, p. 11). Indeed, ‘target the right people’ has long been a motto of the marketing industry, which had adopted the metaphor of ‘marketing as warfare’ and worked through corporate bureaucracies ‘structurally organized in a manner analogous to military units’ (Rindfleisch, 1996, p. 6). Marketing has started to mobilise Big Data and machine learning algorithms for the purposes of producing surplus value. A textbook on predictive marketing, aimed at explaining the advantages of predictive analytics techniques to managers, is eerily similar to policing and war techniques discussed in the previous sections. The authors distinguish algorithmic methods of customer clustering from earlier techniques of segmentation. Like risk profiling, segmentation was the process of ‘manually putting customers into groups based on similarities’, while clustering is ‘a method to automatically discover segments in your customer base by using already known factors about your customers’ (Artun & Levin, 2015, p. 26). While segmentation used one or two factors, clustering can use many data features, leading to a key distinction between segmentation and clustering: ‘When you segment you know whom to target ahead of time; when you cluster you discover whom to target’ (Artun & Levin, 2015, p. 26). We are not all targeted equally and not everyone is targeted all the time, even as all the data makes segmentation possible. Companies would focus on different clusters of customers who share some similarities: for instance, those who buy sportswear and sunglasses, as in one example offered by the authors of Predictive Marketing. New groups to be targeted do not depend on shared epistemic assumptions about marketing such as targeting highvalue customers or trying to extend one’s customer basis by targeting new demographic categories. Targeting is about representing data in ways that reveal new and unexpected groups, which then require different forms of intervention. Targeting is enabled through personalisation or, more precisely, ‘mass personalization’

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understood as ‘algorithmic processes in which the precise adjustment of prediction to unique individuals involves the computation of massive datasets, compiling the behaviors of very large populations’ (Kotras, 2020, p. 2). By attending to how marketing makes use of Big Data and predictive analysis to target consumers, we can understand how targeting as a form of power shapes societies and circulates across borders. Critical military and security studies have argued that military thinking and technology are diffused into other spheres of social, economic and political life. At the same time, machine learning and marketing techniques are infusing practices of security and conflict in ways that are both mundane and often invisible, shaped by computational knowledge and marketing practices. As machine learning expertise circulates across social worlds, through the mediation of tech companies and start-ups, these entanglements need to be traced in practice. Thus, it is thus not surprising that the Chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence was Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and subsequently technical adviser at Alphabet Inc. until 2020. Following the controversy surrounding Project Maven, with which this chapter has started, more recent disclosures have shown that Google used gig economy workers in countries of the Global South to label images gathered from drone surveillance (Fang, 2019). The so-called data labellers needed to distinguish between different elements in an image to create training data upon which algorithms could then be tested and models developed. In order for algorithms to find new patterns, they need to be first ‘trained’ on a set of data. For instance, a video stream would contain a range of elements – human and non-human – that would need to be labelled by a human in order to produce a dataset for training algorithms. Rather than autonomous or automated, machine learning algorithms rely on extensive invisible labour both in the Global South and in de-industrialised regions of the Global North (Casilli, 2019). If targeting has become a planetary practice, as IR scholars have shown, it has been animated by the demands for more and more data to continually produce new relations of personalisation that cut across individuals and populations. Personalisation is not about individuals, but about the granularity of clusters made possible by the mass of data and machine learning algorithms. Clusters, Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert (2020) have suggested, are ‘intermediary objects of government between bodies and populations that a new form of power enacts and governs through sensory assemblage’. This also means that all security practices, like marketing practices, are first and foremost data practices that enable personalisation for targeting. Conclusion

This chapter has outlined some of the transformations of security and conflict in a datafied world. Not only are more and more aspects of our lives transformed into digital data, but this data can be increasingly processed in quasi real-time to

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disclose patterns, associations and anomalies. By taking ‘algorithms’ as a shorthand for complex sociotechnical systems that encompass data, knowledge, people, devices and infrastructures, I have attended to how algorithmic security does not emerge through the separation of humans and computers, but through mundane practices that have entangled datafication, machine learning algorithms and security. While military and computer technologies have been long interconnected, here I have focused on transformations of knowledge (prediction), othering (anomaly) and power (targeting). Starting from an analysis of predictive policing, the chapter has shown that anticipatory security now relies on machine learning algorithms which establish similarities through a calculation of distances between data points. Unlike prevention and pre-emption, which have been articulated in relation to future events, prediction is spatial, working through representations of data points in an abstract ‘feature space’. The second transformation concerns the figure of the enemy which is now the result of a similar set of predictive calculations. Rather than produced through dichotomies of self/other, identity/difference, the dangerous other is an anomaly or an outlier, anything that is set at a distance from other data points in an abstract geometrical space. Third, if targeting has been seen as specific to military practices, Big Data and predictive analytics have transformed it through marketing techniques of personalisation. Unlike risk societies, where insurable and catastrophic risks required the classification of populations into risk groups through profiling, targeting through personalisation produced a massified individual, a cluster that is neither individual nor population. These transformations challenge the binaries through which agency and order are approached in international relations: private versus public, state versus markets, mass versus individual, self versus other, inside versus outside. These are not oppositional concepts and processes but are entanglements that can only be analysed in practice, through materialisations, failures, controversies and glitches. Many of the terms introduced in this chapter have not been commonly employed in IR. While Big Data and AI have started to be used in analyses of security and conflict, IR scholars need to engage with the concepts and methods developed in computer and data science, as these intersect with other vocabularies and practices, for instance in marketing. Digital IR, like other social science disciplines, can only address the specificities of the digital through interdisciplinary inquiry. In a datafied world, international relations are also data relations. Starting with these relations rather than the pregiven categories of the discipline – state/non-state, private/ public, domestic/international – alerts us to the changing contours of a digital and datafied world (cf. Kello in this volume). Finally, digital international relations need to revisit the unevenness of the international and racialising hierarchies that digital technologies intensify, reproduce or amplify. On the one hand, data incorporates racisms that are both reproduced and rendered invisible in the masses of data and the separation of data manifolds. On the other, international relations as data relations depend upon

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many invisible forms of labour and workers who are dispersed around the world. Digital IR entails the study of both complex sociotechnical systems and the data work that sustains them. Acknowledgements

This work was supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (SECURITY FLOWS, Grant Agreement No. 819213). This chapter draws on ideas developed in collaboration with Tobias Blanke in Algorithmic Reason: The New Government of Self and Other (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). References Abbott, D. (2014). Applied Predictive Analytics: Principles and Techniques for the Professional Data Analyst. London: John Wiley & Sons. Aggarwal, C. C., & Yu, P. S.-l. (2011). Methods and apparatus for outlier detection for high dimensional data sets. U.S. Patent No US7395250B1. Amoore, L. (2008). Risk before justice: When the law contests its own suspension. Leiden Journal of International Law, 21(4), 847–861. Amoore, L. (2014). The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability. Durham: Duke University Press. Anderson, B. (2010). Preemption, precaution, preparedness: Anticipatory action and future geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 34(6), 777–798. Andrejevic, M., Dencik, L., & Treré, E. (2020). From pre-emption to slowness: Assessing the contrasting temporalities of data-driven predictive policing. New Media & Society, 22(9), 1528–1544. Aradau, C., & Blanke, T. (2017). Politics of prediction: Security and the time/space of governmentality in the age of big data. European Journal of Social Theory, 20(3), 373–391. Aradau, C., & Blanke, T. (2018). Governing others: Anomaly and the algorithmic subject of security. European Journal of International Security, 2(1), 1–21. Aradau, C., & Blanke, T. (2022), Algorithmic Reason: The New Government of Self and Other. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aradau, C., & van Munster, R. (2011). Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown. Abingdon: Routledge. Artun, O., & Levin, D. (2015). Predictive Marketing: Easy Ways Every Marketer Can Use Customer analytics and Big Data. Hoboken: Wiley. Azavea. (2015). HunchLab: Under the hood. URL: https://cdn.azavea.com/pdfs/hunchlab/ HunchLab-Under-the-Hood.pdf (accessed 28 September 2020). Beck, U. (2009). World at Risk. Cambridge: Polity. Bellanova, R., Irion, K., Jacobsen, K. J., Ragazzi, F., Saugmann, R., & Suchman, L. (2021). Toward a critique of algorithmic violence. International Political Sociology, 15(1), 121–150. Bigo, D. (2004). Global (in)security: The field of the professionals of unease management and the Ban-opticon. In J. Solomon & N. Sakai (Eds.), Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory (No. 4, pp. 34–87). Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press.

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8 THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE DIGITAL (REVOLUTION) Miguel Otero-Iglesias

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to illustrate the impact of the ‘digital revolution’ on the power structures of the international political economy (IPE). To do so, it will apply Susan Strange’s (1994) quintessential IPE ‘structural power’ framework developed in States and Markets. The main strength of this approach is its versatility and capacity to capture both economic and political, and material and ideational, phenomena in a way that produces a comprehensive understanding of power in interstate, and non-state actor, relations in the global economy. The focus will be on the distribution of power between the United States, China and the European Union, as the three main locus of influence in world affairs. For Strange the most important question in IPE was (and is) ‘cui bono’, who benefits and who pays? And who gets new opportunities? She would take the analysis beyond the narrow exercise of coercion product of state agency (which would fall under the rubric of relational power), and rather concern herself with the arrangements and bargains between different actors regarding the allocation of different benefits, costs, rights, risks and opportunities, understood in a broad sense. Her attention to how these arrangements came to be leads to a broader understanding of power, as the ability to shape frameworks of interaction and ranges of choices for the actors in the world economy. Thus, in her own words, ‘structural power’ can be defined as ‘the power to shape and determine the structures of the global political economy within which other states, their political institutions, their economic enterprises and (not least) their scientists and other professional people have to operate’ (Strange, 1994, pp. 24–25). Thus, Strange’s broad conceptual framework covers both the hard and soft power distinction established by Joseph Nye (2009), but also the more comprehensive DOI: 10.4324/9781003437963-12

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three faces of power (decision-making, agenda-setting and preference-shaping) framework developed by Steven Lukes (2004). As it is well known, her analysis is built on four main structures: security, production, finance and knowledge, and this gives the researcher the opportunity to focus on both the material and the ideational sources of power. She would also emphasise that while IR scholars are mostly concerned with relational power, and political scientists focus predominantly on the institutional settings at the national level, international political economists specialise on the power structures of the world economy, not least because (international) economists tend to avoid these questions. Her focus on structures does not mean, however, that she neglected agency in her analysis. To the contrary, she was one of the first IPE scholars who insisted on incorporating non-state actors, especially corporate ones, in power analyses, as well as dominant discourses and ideas. Hence, her conceptual framework fits well with the technological, agential and ordering processes outlined by the editors of this volume. Her four structures are, therefore, ‘liquid’. They overlap and influence each other in feedback loops, and they cover both the direct interactions between actors but also the social (including the institutional) relations through which they are constituted. In this regard, Strange´s framework is capable to achieve both. Analyse the power transformations in the key fields of basic human needs such as security, production, finance and knowledge (which could be categorised as the vertical dimension of power) but also capture the four types of power: compulsory, institutional, structural and productive – as developed by Barnet and Duvall (2005)– and which go from direct coercion to more diffuse aspects of influence (and hence can be labelled as the horizontal dimension of power). This breadth and depth in the approach allows to grasp the material and ideational aspects of power, but also how at certain points in history, one of the vertical structures might become more salient, and influential, over the other three. Arguably, in today’s digital era this is precisely the case of the knowledge structure, which is transforming the ‘background’ of the world order, as conceptualised in this volume. Strange, due to her journalistic background, was both eclectic and visionary, and this is why her conceptual framework – developed even before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War – remains prescient today. As Haggart (2017, p. 165) has noted, ‘it is no exaggeration to state that, if anything, the extent of the potentially transformative nature of the information revolution is significantly understudied within the mainstream of International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship’. A survey of what has been published over the past few years in the Review of International Political Economy (RIPE), the flagship journal in the discipline, proves this. With very few exceptions (Rafi Atal, 2020), the IPE literature has not covered sufficiently the impact of digital disruptions upon the power structures of the world economy. Most of the analysis is done by specialists in the specific fields of communication and technology studies and has only a niche appearance in IPE journals.

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This neglect ‘leads to an underestimation of the extent to which the control over knowledge itself, rather than finance and production, is becoming (or more cautiously, has the potential to become) the foundation of economic power’ (Haggart, 2017, p. 165). Incidentally, to fill this gap, and examine the impact of the knowledge economy on the other structures, Haggart and his co-authors, in a special issue in the Journal of Information Policy, built precisely on a ‘strangean’ framework due to its comprehensiveness and liquidity. The digital transformations we are witnessing today, shaped by the datafication, speed and pervasiveness conceptualised in the introduction of this volume, emanate from the knowledge structure, but they spill over to the other structures and by doing so have the potential to change the balance of power and influence in all of them (see also Chapters 3 and 10 in this volume). To analyse these digital disruptions, which are transforming both agential and ordering processes, an IPE approach needs to be necessarily interdisciplinary. Hence, a ‘strangean’ approach to power comes with a few features. First, the concept of security needs to be analysed beyond its traditional and narrower focus on state actors, highlighting how the authority of the state can be undermined by the rise of not only other states but also mighty corporations with their own private authority. It is also important to stress that, from a historical perspective, not only rising but also declining powers can bring instability to the international order. This is especially relevant today when analysing US-China geopolitical rivalry. Another aspect to consider is that geography, culture and different historical circumstances can change intersubjective perceptions on security. Every society aspires to the values of security, wealth, justice, and freedom, but their prioritisation and hierarchical ordering differs depending on specific values and conditions. Again, from a contemporary perspective, we can see that domestically while China has traditionally put security and stability first, the United States and the European Union have chosen to prioritise freedom, albeit through the pursuit of wealth in the former, and through the quest for justice in the latter. The socioeconomic models and attitudes, which arise from the specific configuration and prioritisation of these values, determine the attitude towards new technologies. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic, where the use of high tech was ubiquitous in China, and other parts of East Asia, has shown this very clearly. Whether it will change the hierarchical order in the West and put security first is one of the big questions of our time. Here it is also important to consider issues around social security, and how its provision by the state could be undermined by corporate tax evasion and elusion. In the aftermath of the pandemic, and its impact on inequality, this topic is more relevant today than ever. When looking at the productive and financial structures, today power is increasingly intangible and resides in the hands (or better in the minds) of those that have access to information rather than to capital. Digital capital dominates. Strange already foresaw the accumulation of power in the financial sector, precisely because of this access to information, and she indicated already how geopolitical rivalries would pivot not so much on the fight for land and resources but rather on the technological race. This is precisely what we are seeing today between the

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United States, China and the European Union in the new digital battles around Big Data, semiconductors, 5G and artificial intelligence, with the threat of a decoupling between China and the West quite present. Here it is important to highlight that powerful actors are not only those who have access to information, but also those that can deny this access to others. China stands out here as being able to deny access to its market to many Western high tech and media companies. This leads us to the debates on transformational disruptions. Usually, the monetary (and therefore credit) system, due to its importance for the economy, tends to suffer even less revolutions than the political system. However, new innovations usually distribute new cards to compete at the international level, and hence produce new winners and losers (the rise of Silicon Valley in the past 30 years is a good example). As mentioned, the knowledge structure sometimes is so strong that affects the finance structure pervasively: digitalisation has indeed fostered financialisation. But, from a ‘strangean’ perspective, ultimately it is not new technologies that bring great transformations in the distribution of power, but rather changes in the beliefs system. The ideational changes the material. Whether the rise of China will bring this normative change, be it because its socioeconomic model becomes more attractive, or because the United States and the European Union manage to improve theirs in response, is another of the big questions of our time. This will determine whether we are in an era of changes or a change of era, and therefore closer to a revolution. The rest of the chapter is organised as follows: the next four sections will analyse how digital technology is changing power relations in the four structures of power: security, production, finance and knowledge. These are evidently divided for analytical purposes, but there are many overlaps and spill-overs, and digital technologies cut across them. The last section presents the conclusions. The overall argument of the chapter, within the framework provided by the editors of this volume, is that new digital technologies (new knowledge) have changed the structural order and that this has modified agential processes to the point that a new re-ordering of the structures is taking place. The digital era brought globalisation and financialisation, but with it also the Global Financial Crisis, the Great Recession, geopolitical rivalry and global populism. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic (which can be linked to climate change, but is outside the scope of this chapter given that other contributors cover this topic) and in the midst of the War in Ukraine it is likely that we will have more states and less markets (going back to Susan Strange’s book title) in the international political economy. Whether this will bring a more embedded liberalism (Ruggie, 1982) or an authoritarian order (Diamond, Plattner, & Walker, 2016) is to be seen. Security Structure

In the realm of security, understood here in a broad sense, perhaps the main impact of the digital revolution has been the explosion of cyber warfare and surveillance

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activity. It is not within the scope of this analysis to cover this area (other chapters in this volume, see Chapter 7), but from an IPE perspective (in terms of understanding better who has access to information and who not) it is relevant to study the field of cyber corporate or industrial espionage (Hou & Wang, 2020). Gathering economic intelligence to gain a competitive advantage is a practice as old as international trade, but remote access via the internet to the communication and storage devices of any company has increased the possibility of accessing sensitive information, and therefore the vulnerability of most of them. The digital element, and the easiness to remain anonymous in cyberspace, makes it also more difficult to identify those guilty of stealing intellectual property and trade secrets. But in general, there is a strong consensus that Russia and China are particularly active in this field. In 2011, for example, the software security firm McAfee revealed Operation Shady Rat (Alperovitch, 2011) which up to then was considered the largest computer hacking operation ever initiated. Over the span of five years, what appeared to be Chinese state-sponsored operatives had targeted 70 institutions in the United States and other 13 countries, and by doing so achieved ‘the biggest transfer of wealth in terms of intellectual property in history’, according to Dmitri Alperovitch (2011, p. 2), vice president of threat research at McAfee. He then coined the phrase that one could divide the ‘Fortune Global 2000 firms into two categories: those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know’. Facts and figures about cyber espionage have traditionally been hard to access, because states and companies have been afraid to compromise their reputation by revealing they had been hacked. However, ever since Jamie Metlz (2011), former official in the US National Security Council, rang the alarm bell on this subject a decade ago the topic has become mainstream. The Center for Strategic & International Studies (2021), for instance has a timeline record since 2006 of all major cyberattacks on ‘Government agencies, defence and high-tech companies, or economic crimes with losses of more than a million dollars’ and other US think tanks have covered this topic in depth (Laskai & Segal, 2018; Levite & Jinghua, 2019; Lieberthal & Singer, 2012). Experts in the field believe that 80% of all industrial espionage is done by Chinese hackers and that they include stealing trade secrets, manufacturing capabilities, material development techniques and data, consumer market data, source code, software, among others (Eftimiades, 2018). The annual costs of these attacks are estimated at around $320 billion for the US economy and €60 billion for the European Union, although these figures might be conservative given that most companies do not reveal (or do not know) that they have been compromised. A recent study by PwC (2018) for the European Commission estimates that 20% of all European companies have suffered a breach. Nonetheless, Russia and China are not the only countries where state intelligence or military units collude with national corporate champions to enhance the competitiveness of their economies. The United States (Kirschbaum, 2014) and France (France 24, 2011), in particular, have been accused of gathering this type of

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illegal economic intelligence too. What is clear is that ‘while traditional national security intelligence gathering was focused on hard security matters, over the past 20 years national and economic security have become indivisible’ (Pellegrino, 2015, p. 1). This is related to the debate around surveillance systems. The power of corporate tech giants like Google and Facebook, based precisely on datafication, speed and pervasiveness as explained by the editors of this volume in the introduction, has been denounced by Shoshana Zuboff in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). Although in principle this topic could be the object of the next section of this chapter dedicated to the production field, this is a good example of overlaps and spill-overs. The reality is that access to our personal data has gone beyond commercial activity to know our preferences and desires for advertisement purposes to encroach on our personal freedoms. We have moved from economies of scale to economies of action able to change human behaviour through digital instrumentation. Zuboff argues, this instrumentarian power will not threaten you with terror or murder. No soldiers will appear to drag you to the gulag or the camp. This new species of power works remotely, engineering subliminal cues, social comparison dynamics, rewards and punishments, and varieties of enforcers to shape behaviour that aligns with its commercial interests. (Zuboff, 2020) In this sense we might be confronting a socioeconomic revolution. The same way that industrial capitalism intensified the means of production, surveillance capitalism is doing the same with the means of behavioural modification. The Cambridge Analytica alliance with Facebook to influence the 2016 Brexit referendum vote in the United Kingdom is a good example (Scott, 2019). This new phenomenon threatens personal freedoms and therefore needs to be classified as a (human) security threat because it is undermining the social stability of liberal democracies from both the top and the bottom. It creates important societal inequalities in wealth and access to knowledge, and therefore in power; and polarises and makes toxic contemporary political debates, which in the United States in early 2021 have led to the assault to the Capitol. Surveillance systems are even more ubiquitous in non-democratic regimes like the Chinese one, and here the changes have been profound. Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent or Baidu have a similar, or even greater, instrumentarian power than their Western equivalents, and their increasingly tight cooperation with the government makes them even more effective in shaping the behaviour of Chinese citizens. The Internet and social media were welcomed by many technoutopians for their emancipatory potential, and to some extent, it is true that they have helped many Chinese netizens voice their grievances, and even organise to

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fight for common causes such as less pollution and corruption; simultaneously however, the intense surveillance of these communication channels by the Government has intensified its authoritarian grip on society (Khalil, 2020). The army of Internet watchers deployed by the Chinese state to monitor the public debate and censor any criticisms that could put the legitimacy of the Communist party in danger now has the capacity to capture the sentiment of the population, allow grievances to be voiced as a pressure valve, but also suffocate any attempt of dissent and insurrection. Here the sticks of ‘forcing’ are certainly in use. These surveillance methods, which range from communication censorship to face-recognition, have been used both against human rights activists throughout Mainland China and for the massive repression of ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang. Nonetheless, they have also been very effective in tackling crime and impeding social unrest, which is why Chinese firms, through ‘enticing’ and ‘winning over’, export these surveillance technologies to the rest of Asia, and to Latin America and Africa (Mozur, Kessel, & Chan, 2019). Here it is important to highlight that all big hightech firms in China, no matter whether public or private, collaborate with and are supported by the Chinese state (Blanchette, 2021). By doing so, they also export China’s illiberal model of capitalism, which brings us back to the four main values described by Strange. Specifically, in the Chinese case, it represents how security is prioritised over other values, something shared by other authoritarian regimes that are eager to follow in its tracks. In turn, this is accelerating the formation of an international market for surveillance tech, which may well end up being dominated by China (Feldstein, 2019). It is also likely that the value of security will increase in many other parts of the world in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the War in Ukraine, especially in (Eastern) Europe. East Asian countries, including not only China but also South Korea and Taiwan, have been highly effective in fighting the virus thanks to the use of new technologies such as location apps. In the West, these technologies have not been used for fear that they would be too intrusive in the private sphere of citizens, but the debate has not been closed and many in the West have advocated for granting this type of information gathering powers to the state in order to protect public health (Whitelaw, Mamas, Topol, & Van Spall, 2020). China’s much-criticised social credit (better translated as social reputation) system (although systems in plural is a better description of the phenomenon) is based precisely on the premise that it makes a more harmonious society (MacSithigh & Siems, 2019). By classifying consumption and social life habits, in principle a neutral algorithm punishes illegal and unethical behaviour and rewards law and moral abiding citizens. This techno-authoritarianism not only fosters social peace, but it also makes China’s socioeconomic model extremely competitive (Meissner, 2017). The gathering, storage and processing of Big Data and then transforming them into artificial intelligence (datafication) makes the exercise of central planning much more effective. One factor that made the Soviet Union economically inefficient was the lack of information from the different parts of the

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system which made the allocation of resources faulty (see the ‘economic calculation problem’ prominent in Austrian economics, particularly von Mises (1990) and Hayek (1945)). China’s state capitalism could overcome this problem by gathering information from its citizens, pervasively and at high speed, through their mobile devices, and even more so if it can force millions of companies to share their data. If this is done in an effective way the Chinese economy has the potential to become extremely competitive, with its model becoming a prominent rival to those of the West, not least because when it comes to experimenting and testing in artificial intelligence China has different ethical attitudes than many Westerns societies (Blanchette, 2021). In this regard, we can safely say that surveillance capitalism both in the West and in China is transforming agential and ordering processes and they feed each other. The likely outcome is a more pervasive state. This is obvious in China with the reinforcement of its state capitalism under Xi Jinping, but also in the United States and the European Union where calls for more regulation and state intervention have become louder. Production Structure

Digitalisation has transformed the production structure of the world economy. As Richard Baldwin (2016) has explained, over the past 30 years, in what could be labelled as the fourth industrial revolution, global value chains have become the central networks of our economies and have created a ‘great convergence’ between developed and developing countries. Multinational corporations have not only outsourced labour-intensive work. In order to keep manufacturing processes in sync across the world, and thanks to the development and massive deployment of information and communications technology, they have also outsourced higher valueadded activities related to areas of design, marketing and managerial and technical know-how. This has been beneficial for developing countries because, without having to set up the whole production structure from scratch, they can specialise in certain processes, and create and retain more wealth. As Branko Milanovic (2016) has pointed out, this has generated new middle classes in emerging markets, especially in Asia. It has also been very profitable for the shareholders of the multinational companies involved in these chains, because they have become more cost-effective (Deloitte, 2008), and for the top professionals in the best-paid jobs, which usually are linked to the knowledge economy. The losers, however, for both Baldwin and Milanovic, have been the middle classes in the West which have seen how digital technology has undermined their job prospects, either through the automation of process at home or through outsourcing of ever more managerial activity abroad. This has generated more inequality and concentration of power. In the Great Reversal Thomas Philippon (2019) explains, for instance, how competition has been curtailed in many sectors of the US economy and how this has generated a downward spiral of lower investment, productivity and growth, and consequently

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lower wages and higher income inequality. As a matter of fact, over the past 30 years, productivity growth has been lowering in the developed OECD economies and, on top of that, there has been a substantial decoupling between productivity and wages (OECD, 2018). Ever bigger companies not only are able to take over their smaller competitors due to their wealth and power but can also have a legal and regulatory framework that fits their interests due to their lobbying efforts. In this regard, the European Union, with the European Commission’s insistence on competition law, has performed better than the United States despite a common perception to the contrary. The digital revolution has brought higher productivity, but these increases have been concentrated in big tech firms, without trickling down the production pyramid to SMEs, which conform the greatest bulk of any economy. Qureshi (2020), for example, points to the differences in productivity growth from 2001 and 2013 in OECD countries, with leading tech firms experiencing a 35% increase in labour productivity, in contrast to the 5% increase experienced in smaller firms. This lack of dissemination, highlighted also by Andy Haldane (2018), explains why despite the advancements in digital technology the overall productivity levels in OECD countries remain relatively low. Before the global financial crisis, and for several decades, corporate power laid within big (investment) banks such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, today the top spots, and the influence and power associated with them, belong to the big tech companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Tesla, which combined represent now close to 25% of the S&P 500 stock exchange; this is a ratio never seen before, not even during the dot com bubble of the turn of the century. It is no surprise therefore that both European and recently US authorities are starting to apply anti-trust legislation against these companies. Even in China

FIGURE 8.1 

Labour productivity and real average and real median compensation.

(Author’s creation)

Evolution of US concentration, profits, labour shares and investment.

Source: Covarrubias, Gutiérrez, and Philippon (2019)

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FIGURE 8.2 

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Jack Ma’s Alibaba, which wanted to combine its tech innovation with financial activities, has become so powerful that the Communist Party has seen it as a threat and curtailed its ambitions (Bloomberg News, 2021). The power of these companies is reflected in their capacity to elude taxes. The OECD (2015, 2021) calculates that around $240 billion are lost to tax avoidance by multinational companies every year and that this trend can be partly attributed to the development of the digital economy, which exacerbates the risk of base erosion and profit shifting. This is a major concern, already denounced by Susan Strange almost 30  years ago, which has only become more prominent after the Great Recession and the even more virulent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is most evidently seen in the revenues of these companies shooting through the roof while public debt, corporate bankruptcies and unemployment rates follow a worrying upward trend (Oxfam, 2020). The work of Gabriel Zucman (2021) has been particularly informative in showing how through profit shifting via tax havens, multinational corporations avoid paying their due taxes. In this global battle the EU, while losing in total around 170€ billion in tax evasion, is split into two camps: on the one hand, there are countries like Belgium, Luxembourg and Ireland, which act as prominent tax havens within the Union and who benefit from companies seeking loopholes to pay less taxes; on the other, the biggest economies bear the brunt of the losses, with Germany and France, respectively, losing 26% and 22% of their potential tax revenues. China, by contrast, only loses 3% (Zucman, 2021). The reality is that the American GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon), as well as smaller firms like Netflix, Uber or Airbnb, benefit from operating in large

FIGURE 8.3 

Tax revenue lost due to profit shifting.

(Author’s creation)

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and mature markets, but pay a smaller fraction of their revenues than what they should according to the corresponding tax laws. This is highly problematic because, if we bring back Baldwin’s analysis, and that of others such as Lonergan and Blyth (2020) and Martin Sandbu (2020), the only way to preserve globalisation and avoid social unrest and protectionist instincts is via a redistributive, and even an entrepreneurial (Mazzucato, 2018), state. A state that can provide the skills and education needed so that the children of today’s anxious middle classes can remain competitive and have meaningful jobs; steer the green transformation that is necessary to have more sustainable growth; the means, strategy and direction to improve the rural and former industrial areas which have seen a decline over the past 30 years; the public funding required to invest in innovation and research to remain at the cutting edge of technological progress, and on top of that perhaps the funding for universal basic income schemes for those who are not able to find new jobs or those who work in the gig economy of the digital age but do not earn enough to have a dignified life. Both the OECD and the World Bank have done some valuable analysis on these fronts (Ramos, 2017; Gentilini, Grosh, Rigolini, & Yemtsov, 2020). In order to engage in all of these tasks the state will need to increase its revenues, and this necessarily implies higher taxes for the well-off, who will not accept this lightly, therefore making political compromises in an already polarised society even more difficult. Research shows that higher earners in developed economies are increasingly more disenfranchised with democracy, in part because of their fear of higher taxes down the road, and this means that the appeal of having an authoritarian regime, similar to that of China, might be greater than previously thought in Western liberal democracies (Foa, Klassen, Slade, Rand, & Collins, 2020) In a way we could be in front of what some have labelled the ‘latinamericanisation’ of the West: societies characterised by higher inequality, crime and social unrest, more populist politicians, and weaker institutions. This would make Dani Rodrik´s (2012) prediction right that hyper-globalisation is incompatible with both national sovereignty and pluralist democracy. Others, however, like Martin Sandbu (2020), insist that a social-democratic capitalism is still compatible with globalisation, of which the highly competitive European Nordic countries remain a good example. Germany, on the other hand, in spite of being the European Union’s industrial powerhouse, is lagging behind in digitalisation as acknowledged by its former Minister of Economy, Peter Altmaier (2019). In his view, in every industrial revolution, there were key technologies that were fundamental to compete with other countries and increase the living standards of the population. In the first industrial revolution it was the steam engine and the railway, in the second, electricity and the combustion engine (Germany did particularly well in this one with its car industry); the third featured computers and the internet; and the current one is based on digital platforms and artificial intelligence, with both Germany and the European Union as a whole are trailing behind the United States and China. This, in his view, is extremely problematic because the lack of access to data might undermine

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European sovereignty, and the lack of competitiveness in AI is likely to accelerate the decline in living standards in the old continent. He goes so far as to even say that if Europe does not catch up quickly, the stability of the up-to-now quite successful Rhenish social market economy model might be undermined, and with it the democratic institutions that underpin it. Overall, then this relates to the power asymmetry that exists between the United States – which has a state apparatus able to enforce, entice and winning-over – and the European Union, which traditionally has refrained from integrating its economic policy ambitions with its geopolitical goals (Farrell & Newman, 2019; Leonard et al., 2019). Germany and other parts of central and northern Europe still have a strong competitive advantage in specialised, high-precision manufacturing. The Mittelstand is the backbone of this economic muscle, and with the concept of Industry 4.0 (which incorporates new technologies like 3D printing) there is a strong willingness to digitalise it (Santos, Mehrsai, Barros, Araújo, & Ares, 2017). It is here where the debate around 5G and the internet of things comes into the discussion. Europe can ‘servitise’ its manufacturing capacity and also start collecting data, hence, improving its computing and artificial intelligence development. As a matter of fact, there are two European companies (Nokia and Ericsson) which are at the cutting-edge of 5G technology. In this field Europe does not perform badly, while China with Huawei is at the forefront of the race, and with the United States lacking a company that can compete in their terms. But there are certain aspects that put China, other parts of East Asia (like South Korea), and the United States in an advantage. First, the deployment of 5G networks is more advanced in China and the United States than in Europe. Second, European networks rely to a great extent on Chinese technology from Huawei, therefore being exposed to the security risks that this may entail. Finally, while European companies are still competitive in hardware (as mentioned in the cases of Nokia and Ericsson), the real monetisation of the 5G networks will be done via software, and in this area, Silicon Valley and China’s big tech companies are investing much more than their European peers (Ortega, 2020). Therefore, with 5G or even 6G, what may happen is what occurred with internet access in the 1990s and 2000s. The European communication operators were the leaders in the field, but the monetisation was achieved by American digital platforms such as Google, Facebook or Amazon. This is worrying for the European Union and explains why there is a big push now to increase strategic autonomy beyond the security field and reach greater economic sovereignty, including, and above all, in the digital sphere. With the aim to reduce the dependency on third countries, especially the United States, there are first attempts to create pan-European industrial projects like the cloud services Gaia X or advanced semiconductors; and there are also talks on how to make personal data (the ‘new oil’) more easily accessible and transferable, to foster competition and reduce the power of the United States and Chinese tech giants (EP, 2020). Ultimately, this is likely to lead to more protectionism and deeper geopolitical rivalries, with a greater role for the

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state, and to a distancing from the free trade and free competition era that was so dominant before the global financial crisis. The aftermath of the pandemic, the War in Ukraine, and increased US-China rivalry will only accelerate this trend, and in this regard, given the change of norms and values, we might be in front of a new revolution. Finance Structure

Digitalisation has helped in the ‘financialisation’ of many developed economies. This was a trend that worried Susan Strange (1997[1986]) already in the mid-1980s and has since become an even bigger concern. As the former chair of the UK financial services authority, Adair Turner (2015), has denounced, the swollen finances that the world has experienced have had serious negative effects. As Strange warned in the early 1990s, a sophisticated financial system is absolutely necessary for a developed economy, but when it grows too big, complex and deregulated it becomes highly destabilising and prone to crises (the most recent example is the 2008–2009 global financial crisis) and generates income and wealth inequalities that lead to social and political instability. Finance is fundamental to connect borrowers (entrepreneurs) and creditors (investors), and thus bring about potential future wealth to be enjoyed and made productive in the present. Additionally, it also provides a series of hedging and insurance mechanisms (derivatives) to buffer present and future risks. But when ‘financialisation’ is done in excess – and digitalisation has reinforced this process – it can generate serious negative political, economic and social disruptions (Currie & Lagoarde-Segot, 2017; Lagoarde-Segot & Currie, 2018). The ratio of global (public and private) debt to GDP was already quite high in the run-up to the global financial crisis, continued to grow during the Great Recession, and has the potential to become dramatic as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, because, yet again, a lot of the private debt will become public debt. At the end of 2020, the overall debt (this is both public and private debt) reached an all-time high of 277 trillion, which is the equivalent of 365% of world GDP (Wheatley, 2020). This figure is even more dramatic for advanced economies, which have a debt-to-GDP ratio of 432%. These levels – never seen in modern history – are so high that the possibility to limit the creation of money through the fractional banking system is now openly discussed by mainstream economists such as the former chair of the Bank of England, Mervyn King (2016). The truth is that in all areas one can look finance has swollen. The value of the US stock exchange, as mentioned before due in great part to the digital high-tech companies, is at a record high and represents the equivalent of 150% of the US GDP. According to data from the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the foreign exchange daily market turnover (even with trade not growing at the same rate than in the high days of hyper-globalisation) has reached in 2019 the record figure of $6.6 trillion (BIS, 2019a). This means that the value of currencies exchanged

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every day is now ten times bigger than in 1989 and is the equivalent of the annual GDP of Germany and the United Kingdom combined. The derivates market, for its part, has come down from the peak of over $700 trillion in 2013, but by 2020 it was still at over $600 trillion worth of transactions (BIS, 2021), which is four times the world’s annual GDP. All these activities, which continue to have New York and London as the global financial centres, have of course been accelerated by financial innovations such as structured debt instruments, high-frequency trading, and increased computational power. Algorithms are now in charge of increasing amounts of trades in fractions of a second, which has created a whole industry, traditionally dominated by the Bloomberg terminal, focused on sharing market information as fast as possible (Popper, 2015). Datafication, speed and pervasiveness appear here again. Having access to these data and to this level of computational and operative speed is expensive and therefore creates barriers for retail investors. Furthermore, the speed of the transactions has increased even more the speculative dimension of modern finance, leading to criticisms about how this trading activity does not reflect market fundamentals and is increasingly negative for society (Bernards & Campbell-Verduyn, 2019; Currie & Lagoarde-Segot, 2017). While sometimes it is presented as the most advanced stage of efficient markets and rational expectations, high-frequency trading (HFT) continues to be driven by information asymmetries and herding effects, as evidenced by the numerous flash crashes experienced over the past years (Bellia, Christensen, Kolokolov, Pelizzon, & Renò, 2020). Nonetheless, the arrival of new technologies has also facilitated new market players. According to the Financial Stability Board (2020), over the past decade, the non-bank financial intermediation sector (or also called shadow banking) has grown more than the traditional, and more regulated, banking sector, and represents now almost half of the global financial system. The main drivers have been collective investment vehicles such as hedge funds, money market funds, and other investment funds. All of these new players do not collect savings deposits protected by law in most jurisdictions in the case of a default, and therefore they are considered systemically less risky and are under less stringent regulation. However, their sudden growth has started to worry many regulators and has drawn complaints from traditional banks, including European giants like Banco Santander, who feel that the level playing field is now tilted against them. The new players, emboldened by advances in fintech, are now providing almost all financial services traditionally offered by banks but with less regulatory constraints. In principle, the disadvantage of non-banking intermediaries is that they do not have access to the emergency lending window of central banks. However after a decade of quantitative easing, extremely low interest rates and as a result, a generalised desperate search for yield by investors, there was no shortage of liquidity (except in the cases where the reputation of the intermediary is seriously questioned, or where there is major instability in markets as in March 2020, when COVID-19 made its global appearance) until the FED started to raise interests in 2022

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Shadow banking has particularly increased in the euro area. Its global share is now larger than that of the United States, with jurisdictions such as Luxemburg, Ireland and the Netherlands functioning as intermediation channels for global investment funds (Doyle, Hermans, Molitor, & Weistroffer, 2016). However, the fintech revolution has impacted European banks less than American ones because of the latter’s market dominance and scale (they are more capable of buying fintech start-ups), and a near monopoly on customer data and key services such as foreign exchange and payments. But this is likely to change in the future, with the arrival of open banking directives and new data-sharing plans between banks and fintech firms at the request of customers (Seru, 2019). The global fintech hubs coincide with traditional financial centres: New York, London and Singapore feature high on the rankings, but there are new cities making inroads such as San Francisco, Berlin or Mumbai. As a fintech ecosystems index highlights, ‘eight of the world’s 20 most important financial centres do not feature in the world’s 20 biggest fintech hubs. And of the world’s top 100 leading fintech cities, almost half are in emerging markets’ (Findexable, 2020). This is a good example of how new technologies change the distribution of power. China’s big tech giants, like Alibaba and Tencent, stand out here as they have slowly moved from being e-commerce and social media providers, to mobile payments facilitators and suppliers of non-banking financial services. They are part of a bigger trend over the past decade of increased shadow banking in China, which has triggered alarm bells in Beijing and forced a regulatory crackdown due to latent systemic risks associated with exposures to cumulative non-performing loans (CGTN, 2020). Whether similar concerns will bring tighter regulation in the European Union and the United States is to be seen. Events such as the GameStop battle between short-selling hedge funds and coordinated retail investors via the platform Reddit might indicate that we are close to the peak of the bubble, or mania territory in the Kindlebergian sense, which usually precedes the panic and the crash (Cassidy, 2021). The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse in 2023 might just be the first victims. The arrival of new technologies like blockchain has also transformed the currency world. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have received considerable attention and have generated new discussions on whether they can be considered money or simply an investment commodity like gold. In many ways, Bitcoin has reminiscences of the gold standard. Its promoters claim that one of its stabilising features is that it is difficult to produce (miners need to have enormous computational power to generate new coins), and its supply is limited to 21 million (Aratani, 2021). This is in stark contrast to the current fiat money regime of sovereign currencies which, for many, is prone to be mismanaged and misused by political interference and is prone to monetary instability. One can dismiss Bitcoin as the new fetish of gold bugs, ultra-libertarians and cunning speculators (its value has quadrupled in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic reaching over $40,000), but its attractiveness points to socioeconomic tensions in our societies. Historically, the emergence of private ‘near’ monies has always coincided with periods where the legitimacy of

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the public authorities was questioned. There is a stark correlation between political and monetary instability (Martin, 2014). The last decade possesses all of the symptoms of a tumultuous time: the global financial crisis, the great recession, the euro crisis, the rise of populism, Brexit, the arrival of Trump to the White House, the intensification of the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China, the asymmetric impact of COVID-19 and the War in Ukraine have shaken the structures of the international political economy, and presage a time of great transformations which again can make this a revolutionary era. If Bitcoin has raised eyebrows in the most powerful central banks, Facebook’s attempt to launch its own currency Libra has generated fierce resistance. With 2.8 billion active monthly users worldwide, Facebook has the potential to rival, or at least seriously undermine, the authority of the most powerful sovereigns in monetary affairs. This is the reason why the G7 has quickly convened a working group of top financial policymakers and regulators to study the project, and have come up with a report critical with the initiative that points to its destabilising potential (BIS, 2019b). Faced with this wave of criticism, Facebook has now scaled down the project and reduced it to a mere payments system like PayPal (if it comes to fruition at all), but the debate around Libra, or Diem, has accelerated the race to start issuing sovereign cryptocurrencies. The first central bank to study the introduction of a digital currency, which happens to be the world’s oldest, was the Swedish one, but the one more advanced in its implementation is the People’s Bank of China, which has already launched a few pilot tests (Bray & Tudor-Ackroyd, 2020). This has propelled Niall Ferguson (2019) to suggest that China’s progress in global payments systems – for customers and companies through platforms such as Alibaba, WeChat or UnionPay, but also for interbank transactions via the newly created Cross-border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), rival to SWIFT – has the potential to rival the dominance of the dollar in the international monetary system. This trend might accelerate with the War in Ukraine and the sanctions regime against Russia. Perhaps for the same reason, the European Central Bank has also accelerated the modernisation of its own payments systems and is seriously thinking of launching a digital euro too. These trends suggest that we will soon have different, and competing, digital currency areas between the US dollar, the euro and the yuan (Brunnermeier, James, & Landau, 2019). Again, in this structure, digital disruptions are at play. Digitalisation has spurred financialisation, and this in turn has increased the levels of credit to a destabilising level. Debt is the other side of credit and where there is a liability, there is an asset. But when credit is increasingly in the hands of a few ‘haves’ and the increased debt burdens the majority of the ‘have-nots’, then it becomes a source of instability. The financial structure is the most rigid one and does not undergo big revolutions, but in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the War in Ukraine, this might change. Overcoming the crisis and its unequal impact, dealing with climate change, and increased geopolitical rivalry are likely to augment public debt in the developed world over the next years. This might imply the definitive end of the

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neoliberal era, and the arrival of a more state-centred regime. How the debt will eventually be re-paid is another matter. Knowledge Structure

This is the power structure where there is the fiercest competition because, as an analysis of the European Commission (2019, p. 1) succinctly put it, ‘those who control digital technologies are increasingly able to influence economic, societal and political outcomes’. Here is also where the different power structures come together. The advances in digital technology, in both hardware and software, have clear effects on security, production and finance, as previously elucidated. There is also a pyramid effect: the collection of data (which is labelled the new oil, but it is something else entirely because it can be used multiple times for many different purposes) is the first layer, and for this physical 5G networks (covered in the production structure), but especially digital platforms, offering all sort of web services, are a fundamental technology. Both the United States and China are strong in this field of ‘datafication’ and ‘pervasiveness’, with parallel (and increasingly diverting) ecosystems, while the European Union is falling behind, although it could use its competitive advantage in industrial machines (including robotics) to shape the Internet of Things (IoT). Then there is the capacity to process Big Data, and for this one needs strong computational power. China is investing more than any other actor on quantum computing, and this is worrying both for the United States and for the European Union because it has implications for the security structure. As the same Commission document (2019, p. 5) warns, advances in quantum computing are already posing fundamental challenges to information security, as this next generation of computers will be able to break traditional encryption methods near instantaneously compared with the billions of years of processing that would be needed using conventional computers. This computational capacity is key for the next stage: artificial intelligence, where China has arguably already overtaken the European Union and is catching up with the United States (Castro, McLaughlin, & Chivot, 2019). However, there is one area where China is still far behind the United States: the production of semiconductors. The import bill of semiconductors is greater than that of oil for the former, and its vulnerabilities have been shown in the trade and tech war with the United States, with its tech giants Huawei and ZTE worrying about being cut off from vital supplies. The Chinese government has realised this fragility and is now pouring substantial amounts of funds to establish its own indigenous semiconductors technology around Shenzhen (Hodiak & Harold, 2020). This strategy has also included the purchase of foreign semiconductor producers, but for now progress is slow, and the vulnerabilities persist (Lim, 2020).

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Nonetheless, given the nationalist spirit that is driving China’s ambitions to be at the same level than the United States in multiple key sectors (the Made in China 2025 strategy is a good reflection of this, see Zenglein & Holzmann, 2019) the most likely outcome is that it will achieve dominance in semiconductors one day too. The level of both public and private investment (China is in the top three for venture capital investment in key digital technologies, see Woetzel et al. (2017), and the amount of patents and STEM research and graduates (approximately 4.7 million in 2016, therefore becoming the country with most STEM graduates, see McCarthy, 2017) that China produces every day foresee a formidable potential into the future. Interestingly, and this is also valid for China’s state capitalist model, the realisation is that while, in the past new inventions in the security arena would be key to have a competitive edge in the production field, in this digital revolution it might be the opposite. Increasingly, knowledge and new technologies produced in the civilian realm are transposed into the security field (European Commission, 2019), and if this trend is confirmed, it would signify a historic watershed. When it comes to the generation and dissemination of knowledge the United States is still in the lead, and this is why it is increasingly curtailing the export of key technology to China. Its Ivy League universities top the global best universities rankings, and the influence that American-based scholars have in most sciences (natural and social) is second to none. Wealthy Chinese, if they can, still prefer to send their kids to study in the United States, but it is also true that Chinese universities have gained greater reputation. The traditional rote learning in Chinese education has given way to more problem-solving-based teaching, at least in the best universities, and this is making a difference. The dominant idea in the West, supported by Acemoglu and Robinson (2013) among others, that innovation is incompatible with authoritarian political structures is increasingly questioned. China is innovating despite having an authoritarian regime, and some might even go as far as saying that in certain fields, like AI, it is innovating more than some Western countries precisely because of its techno-authoritarianism and the state’s capacity to gather data from 1.4 billion citizens. This level of scale makes China the most powerful competitor to US dominance in world affairs since its rise as the economic powerhouse in the 19th century (Woetzel et al., 2017). The European Union, on the other hand, has a relatively fragmented single market, especially in services, and it struggles to commercialise and monetise its knowledge. This does not mean that the European Union does not generate knowledge, as it still does in many areas. It has less universities in the top 20, but the average level is arguably higher than in China and the United States, and great efforts are made to guide the Union towards more technical and incremental, rather than disruptive, innovation. Indeed, the leading EU countries (the Nordics and German-speaking ones, for instance) provide better skills to the average student and worker than the United States and China (WEF, 2019).

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Where the United States specifically, and the anglosphere in general, is still very dominant is in media networks. Outlets such as The Economist, The Financial Times and The New York Times, and agencies such as Reuters, shape the global conversation. This level of influence in ‘agenda-setting’ and ‘preference-shaping’ is a key asset in the digital age and has been met with fierce resistance by Russia and China. In the Russian case its activity in counter-information and fake news to destabilise the West has been well documented (Giles, 2017), while China has focused more on censoring or even banning Western media outlets. Except for the FT, which has an exceedingly high, almost prohibitive, subscription fee and therefore is less of a threat, all major Western media with critical coverage of China’s Communist Party are inaccessible for the average Chinese citizen, unless she or he uses an illegal VPN. The same is true for Western, mostly US, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Google and its services (including the search engine and Google maps) are also banned. This digital Chinese ‘Great Firewall’ is a good example of how power is the capacity not only to generate knowledge but also to limit access to it. By keeping Western digital players outside its market, China has been able to generate its own, more autonomous, digital ecosystem, which is supervised by the Party and which is a powerful source to grasp the social mood, working as a pressure valve to express discontent, but also as an effective tool to identify dissent and supress it. Again, here the European Union is in a weak position. It does not have its own social media platforms, and its fragmented nature (27 countries with distinct cultures and languages), forces its elites to read non-EUbased newspapers such as the Financial Times to follow the current affairs of their own union. China, on the other hand, is increasing its media presence around the world (Cook, 2021). Where the European Union still has considerable power in regulating economic activity. The size and purchasing power of its internal market make it an indispensable target for any international company, and this attractiveness gives the European Union enormous leverage, to the point of being able to confront the digital tech giants of the United States and China. Microsoft was one of the first American companies which had to phase EU competition law in the 1990s, and since then the tension between US market power and EU market regulation has only increased, with Apple and Google, Amazon and Facebook being today the new targets of the European Commission. This ‘Brussels Effect’, as coined by Anu Bradford (2020), has in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) its most vivid incarnation. The GDPR has not only changed the digital space in the European Union: given that it is obligatory for every company that operates in the European market to subject itself to it, (and as mentioned, all multinationals do), its tentacles have spread to other jurisdictions, especially in emerging markets, which do not want to burden their companies with different norms and standards in their market (Bradford, 2020). Even the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) borrows to a great extent the spirit and letter of the

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GDPR, showing that in this terrain the European Union still has considerable normative power. The same can be said for environmental, social and industrial standards. The influence of Europeans in regulatory and standard-setting international bodies is to a certain extent even higher than that of the United States. Germany’s industrial prowess has played an important role in setting global technical standards, a field which until recently was considered as non-politicised, at least from a Western perspective. This has changed in recent years, with the intensification of the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China. The latter’s economic and technological might has also changed the landscape. By being able to produce a higher quantity of high-end products, it has also aimed to influence the new standards. While still considerably behind Germany, the US, France, the United Kingdom and Japan, China is gaining more and more of the influential secretariat positions on Technical Committees, Subcommittees and Working Groups in the International Standardization Organization (ISO) the International Electrotechnical Committee (IEC) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). (Rühling, 2021, p. 7) The ambitious project of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is also enhancing China’s standard-setting capacity, not only in hard infrastructure and machinery, where China has developed a competitive edge, but also in the digital sphere, with the 5G and 6G networks being the new frontier of knowledge and standards (Pop, Hua, & Michaels, 2021). Whatever is agreed for these ‘central nervous systems’ will have effects on the standards and ethics established for the research and use of artificial intelligence. Importantly, in this area geopolitical rivalry will likely increase, and the likelihood of fragmented and competing digital spheres (which implies more decoupling) is quite high, and will probably lead to a more de-globalised world. Interestingly, to avoid this Germany has increased its collaboration with China in setting the new high-tech standards for Industry 4.0 so that it can continue to ride the ‘Chinese dragon’, both in its domestic market and in its BRI ambitions. In this final, and dominant structure, it is perhaps where the technological, agential and ordering processes are most visible. Although US tech giants like Google have presented themselves as decentralised systems which democratise access to knowledge the reality is that through ‘winning-over’ and ‘habitualising’ they are centralising enormous amounts of knowledge, and therefore, power (Atal, 2020). The response by China to this has been to develop its own techno-authoritarianism, led by the state, which, in turn, has triggered a rethink both in the United States and in the European Union, with more state intervention, either by limiting the access to Western technology by China or by increasing public investment to compete with the emerging superpower in the East.

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Conclusion

After analysing how digital technologies have impacted the four power structures (security, production, finance and knowledge) of the international political economy, the picture that emerges is the following. The digital age has distributed a new set of cards, as Susan Strange would put it, and this has generated new winners and losers. From the perspective of non-state actors, power has shifted from the financial sector concentrated in New York to the tech giants in Silicon Valley in the West and in China, from industrial workers in the West to the new middle classes in (East) Asia and from the unskilled to high-skilled all over the world. From a geopolitical and state-centric perspective China has become the biggest winner, the United States is in relative decline but still dominant, while the European Union is falling behind, although it retains some relative strengths in the industrial realm. Datafication, speed and pervasiveness have transformed both agential and ordering process in the global economy. In the security sphere, the digital age has given Chinese competitors more opportunities for corporate espionage and has helped accelerate China’s technological catch-up with the West. These technological advances have had transformative effects on the other structures: China is now capable of generating indigenous knowledge, and can increasingly compete with the United States and the European Union, especially in the production sphere, but also progressively in the financial one, which is historically more resilient to changes, and which is still dominated by the United States and the dollar. This shows how all foreground and background structures are interconnected and how digital technology, emanating from the knowledge structure, cuts across them. Improvements and innovations in the civilian sphere are increasingly being incorporated in the security one, not only to generate new weapons, but also to improve internal security. While traditionally this has been the biggest obsession of the Chinese Communist Party, it is climbing the values hierarchy in the West, which had to overcome a global pandemic that has triggered the deepest economic recession since the Second World War, with predictably dire political and social consequences, and now is facing a protracted War in Ukraine, which will also bring winners and losers, with the European Union ever more dependent on the United States for its own security and energy supply and Russia being more dependent on China for its economic survival. Do all these disruptions signify a ‘revolution’? From an international political economy perspective, the structural changes in the distribution of power remain limited. The United States remains the predominant power in the military sphere, the security guarantor for many countries, and the most important shipping lanes of the world economy. The United States also has the most innovative companies on earth, with Google in the lead. New York is the most important financial centre, and the US dollar is by far the most used international currency. But the tectonic plates of power are shifting. A series of major geopolitical events (the Iraq War, the

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Global Financial Crisis, the Great Recession and its socioeconomic effects, the four years of Trump in the White House, including his mishandling of the pandemic and the rejection of the Global South to follow the US lead in sanctioning Russia) has dented US hegemony and has pushed the Western-led liberal order to precarious state. The power shifts in the digital sphere covered in this chapter have just reflected, and to some extent accelerated, this deeper structural evolution. Indeed, as mentioned before, instabilities can be triggered not only by the rising power but also by the declining one (Kirshner, 2021). Whether these structural changes are enough to transform the world’s dominant beliefs system, or in other words, the rules and norms of the international order, so that we can talk of a true revolution, is perhaps too soon to tell. The jury is still out on it. Nonetheless, there are certain signals that point in this direction. The balance between how much influence the market and how much the state should have seems to be tilting back in favour of the latter. If the third industrial revolution, that of the computer and internet, triggered the neoliberal era of individualism, the fourth, based on digital innovation and artificial intelligence, might bring a more collectivist age. In certain regions this will strengthen authoritarian regimes (especially in Asia and Africa), in others it will empower illiberal democracies like Orbán’s Hungary, and in others, including the United States and the European Union, it will bring a more active state in the workings of the economy. This comes with its dangers. Already there are more non-democracies than democracies in the world, and the support for democracy is dropping even in some established democracies (Freedom House, 2021). In the West this has triggered alarms and has led to the realisation that if domestic tensions are not addressed, it will be difficult to compete with the Chinese model, which, according to Angus Deaton (2021), has managed the COVID-19 pandemic well despite the social costs of the lockdowns. These changes have favoured increased geopolitical tensions between the United States and China, and the digital sphere will perhaps be the most important battle ground. It is likely that in the next years, the United States and China will build two different digital ecosystems, which will affect all four power structures, and will become very zealous of how much their rival is able to penetrate their own domestic ecosystem. Xi Jinping has already talked about a dual circulation, which differentiates clearly between the Chinese market and the rest of the world. Joe Biden has also embraced the ‘Buy American’ spirit and signalled that it will continue to have a tough stand towards China with export controls and even the banning of Chinese tech and media outlets in the American market. For the European Union and the rest of the regions and countries in the world, this emerging ‘Tech Cold War’ will be difficult to manage. US pressure to not use Chinese tech in the 5G networks is just the first of many trade-offs. The European Union aspires to develop a third power pole and increase its strategic autonomy in all four structures of power. By doing so it would update the European model, more focused on justice than security or freedom, and therefore a more regulated and ethical, in other words, a more embedded liberalism, for the digital age. Whether

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9 THE SOCIAL MEDIA REVOLUTION AND SHIFTS IN THE CLIMATE CHANGE DISCOURSE Alena Drieschova

Introduction

Social media have eroded the traditional role of legacy media to function as gatekeepers for the dissemination of messages to large sections of the population. Today anyone can, in theory, disseminate his or her messages widely and thus obtain a public hearing of their cause. Social media ‘provide a voice to the voiceless’ (Gerbaudo, 2018, p. 746), so that hitherto unprecedented numbers of people can express themselves publicly and reach large crowds. This fundamental change has had an impact on politics. Social media helped revolutionaries organise themselves in authoritarian regimes (Jurgenson, 2012; Ratto  & Boler, 2014; Tufekci, 2013), authoritarian regimes themselves have changed their messaging strategies and no longer fully rely on controlling public opinion (Deibert, Rohozinski, & Crete-Nishihata, 2012; Gunitsky, 2015), and social media have contributed to the rise of populist movements (Adler & Drieschova, 2021). This chapter addresses the question whether the increasing usage of social media has also led to a change in the climate change discourse in the North Atlantic region. Two new kinds of actors in particular could gain leverage with the erosion of traditional gatekeepers: populist climate sceptics on the one hand, and broadbased mass social movements seeking radical change to address global warming on the other hand. The chapter analyses the strategies these two groups of actors have deployed on social media to raise awareness for their cause. While in theory anybody can reach large crowds on social media, only a small percentage of people actually do (Anger & Kittl, 2011). Messages spread widely if they get shared, liked, retweeted frequently. They need to provoke a reaction in their audience that leads the audience to actively respond to the messages, be it only with a mouse click. Social media provide specific affordances, concrete DOI: 10.4324/9781003437963-13

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possibilities for action, that users need to seize upon in order to disseminate messages widely. Some users automatically have a large followership as a result of their offline position in the real world, others gain attention capital through their social media presence and become networked microcelebrities. They can use this capital to advocate for specific causes. Users who succeed in generating emotionally arousing content provoke faster responses and thus larger followership. Creating content that others can relate to and potentially adapt to have it shape their own online identity matters as well. This can be achieved through memes, imagery and videos that can be modified to provide an outlet for personal expression and creative and witty play. The individualisation goes hand in glove with a community forming dimension. Social media permit the lonely crowds to gather in the virtual space, express shared allegiance, and form a collective. Coordinated activities become cheaper, faster and easier. Successful social media usage generates a logic of connective action that replaces the traditional logic of collective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). In a logic of connective action individualised and personal expressions matter over the expression of the collective; messages spread among peers in a horizontal network structure. Climate sceptics have so far been unable to harness the affordances social media provide effectively and generate a logic of connective action. The most popular climate sceptic accounts have not obtained more than 50,000 followers; their best posts receive a few hundred likes. By contrast, Greta Thunberg has 10.5 million followers on Instagram, 4.4 million followers on Twitter, and her posts obtain thousands of likes. These observations are in line with earlier quantitative studies on Twitter, which found that climate sceptic hashtags like agw and climaterealists were included in 1.4% of climate change Tweets, whereas 97.7% of the collected tweets contained the hashtags climate, climate change and global warming (Williams, McMurray, Kurz, & Lambert, 2015). It is quite surprising that climate sceptics generate very little user engagement on the main social media sites, notably Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, given that populists, with whom climate sceptics are closely affiliated, have been extraordinarily effective in social media mobilisation.1 Yet climate sceptics have relied in their social media strategy primarily on imitating the scientific discourse, which has not resulted in large levels of social media popularity, although this strategy has been previously successful for climate sceptics to obtain a hearing in legacy media outlets, notably in Anglophone countries. We could potentially see an increase of climate sceptic voices on social media in the future, as part of larger populist discourses, but so far climate scepticism has not plaid a prominent role in populist social media presence. By contrast, the climate strike movement has been highly successful on social media, and one person, namely Greta Thunberg, particularly so. She has been able to use her youth, her vulnerability, and her emotionality coupled with a peculiar

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aesthetics that highlights the ordinariness, the everyday, and the unimportance of her persona to convey the message that even the least powerful person can make a significant contribution to combatting global warming. We see here a paradoxical phenomenon that digitisation cannot just lead to the empowerment of tech savvy individuals (see Giacomello and Eriksson, this volume), but also to the empowerment of relatively vulnerable people with minimal technological knowledge and skills. Greta Thunberg is the most prominent, but by far not the only young woman who has been able to utilise her vulnerability, combined with a specific aesthetics and emotionality to generate social media user engagement, become a networked micro-celebrity (Tufekci, 2013), and use this position to advocate for major political change. Thunberg’s specific personal style is quite unique though and has so far not been imitated by any of the other microcelebrities in the climate strike movement. The mainstream climate change discourse has followed the geophysical sciences and portrayed climate change as a universal, predictable, apolitical and precisely measurable phenomenon that can be reduced to temperature increases to quantify it, and CO2 emissions to combat it. This mainstream discourse remains intact in many regards, and the climate strike movement has not sought to fundamentally undermine it. Yet, the movement has succeeded in shifting the discourse slightly along three major lines. First, the movement has highlighted the urgency of the problem and framed it in terms of a climate crisis that requires radical and uncompromising action. Second, it has introduced a significant normative dimension to the debate and emphasises the importance of intergenerational responsibility that parents hold towards their children. Third, the climate strike movement has shown that the problem is not so big that only the entire globe can solve it in a concerted effort or not at all, but that every individual carries responsibility and can provoke change in his/her everyday acts, not just as a consumer, but as an active and political citizen. Political elites in the European Union are seizing upon the momentum that has been established and are using it, discursively, as well as politically, to advocate for changes in climate policies. Their discursive support further feeds into the movement’s legitimacy. We can see herein that social media has changed agential processes (see Bjola & Kornprobst in the introduction of this book). Social media are digital technologies that are changing ‘the ontological foundations of agency’ (Ibid.), which, in turn, have shifted the background ordering layers on which the climate change regime rests. First, because of their speed and pervasiveness, social media have empowered new kinds of actors, who had previously been more marginal. Second, social media have led to a change in successful messaging strategies from what used to be common previously. Technology has impacted mechanisms of ‘winning over’, that is the discursive strategies that have the potential to convince other actors of what the right thing to do is, and thus shape societal discourse more generally. Through these changes the distribution of power in the climate change order

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has shifted. Social movements advocating for urgent climate change action have become more powerful, and they have supported a discursive shift that promotes more radical and immediate climate action. There is a real potential for the order itself to change, and hence for the policies that get adopted in that order to change as well. Social media are a source of digital disruption that, for now, appears to be positively impacting climate change mitigation efforts. Yet, as with any source of disruption the ultimate outcome is unpredictable, and positive trends might well be reversed in the future. The chapter first highlights the specific action potentials social media provide that allow for a wide dissemination of messages online. The next section describes the mainstream climate change discourse, which the climate strike movement as well as climate sceptics seek to challenge. Third I provide an overview of the findings from previous studies, mainly quantitative studies on Twitter, of how climate change has been tackled in social media. From these studies, it appears that the overwhelming majority of social media posts imitate the mainstream climate change discourse. The fourth section explains the methodology I used for this study, which is a qualitative study of individual accounts of climate sceptics and the climate strike movement on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The last section highlights the differences in the approaches to social media communication the two movements have adopted. Social Media Affordances, Microcelebrities and the Logic of Connective Action

Social media disruption can change which agents become meaningful in shaping societal discourses, and how those agents can change the discourses. Social media are digital technologies that can influence actors’ strategies of winning over, or select out specific strategies of winning over, which will then impact the background ordering layers. Social media hold specific affordances, that is they ‘enable[s] and constrain[s] the tasks users can possibly perform with’ them (Adler-Nissen & Drieschova, 2019, p. 531). Affordances highlight the action potentials that are inherent in technologies. Technologies can be used in multiple ways, and users can come up with new ways of using technologies, of which the technologies’ designers have not previously thought. Yet, these possibilities have to be inherent in the technologies (Evans, Pearce, Vitak, & Treem, 2017). To determine the particular societal effects a technology will have, it is therefore key to study the technology in the social environment into which it is located. What matters is the interaction between people and the technologies they use, a phenomenon Orilikowski, Yates, Okamura, and Fujimoto (1995) have termed ‘technology-in-use’. From an affordances perspective, social media have several characteristics that hitherto marginalised actors can seize upon to enhance their visibility. Most importantly, of course, social media significantly decrease the costs for circulating messages, as they allow individuals and groups to sidestep legacy media when seeking

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to communicate with a larger audience (Gurevitch, Coleman, & Blumler, 2009, p. 168; Pearce, Niederer, Oezkula, & Sanchez Querubin, 2018, p. 1) The barriers for participating in debates in the public sphere have been significantly lowered. A large portion of the population obtains their news from social media (in the United States between 47% and 62% according to opinion polls) (Shearer, 2017; Silverman, 2016), so messages circulated through this means of communication have the potential to spread widely, they are pervasive, and they can easily and at high speed travel across national boundaries as well. Social media are platforms designed for the free flow of messages, where algorithms favour those messages that obtain speedy reactions in the form of sharing, liking and commenting. The gatekeeping role traditional media performed in terms of checking in on the accuracy of messages in line with the ideals of journalism risks eroding. With hindsight, social media platforms are increasingly monitoring the content on their sites and at times blocking specific accounts. However, these appear ad hoc, and not yet fully systematised activities that are not fundamentally undermining the primary logic of requiring quick and frequent reactions on messages to ensure their wide spread, even as these activities raise thorny questions about free speech and the regulation of social media sites. It remains true that ‘timeline algorithms tend to favour instantly popular content – those posts that attract a high number of reactions in the few seconds and minutes since their publication’ (Gerbuado, 2018, p. 751). Users who have more followers, that is users who are more famous for one reason or another, will have their posts seen by a larger number of people, and therefore a larger number of people is likely to react to them (Duncombe, 2019, p. 413). Yet, this basic rule can be counteracted as well. Some people have become famous because of their social media presence, not vice versa. In an attention economy, they have succeeded to garner sufficiently many followers to acquire the respective capital and become influential. Networked microcelebrities can use the popularity they obtain on social media to promote specific causes. Networked microcelebrity activism refers to politically motivated non-­ institutional actors who use affordances of social media to engage in presentation of their political and personal selves to garner public attention to their cause, usually through a combination of testimony, advocacy, and citizen journalism. (Tufekci, 2013, p. 850) These microcelebrities gain a high status on social media by managing its affordances effectively, measurable in the number of followers they have. In a positive loophole effect, mass media appearances, granted to micro-celebrities because of their high followers, further increase their followership. Tufekci studies activists who contributed to the toppling of authoritarian regimes. Yet, her definition of microcelebrities can be adapted to apply to populist and far-right actors as well.

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Thus, next to tech-savvy individuals (Giacomello and Eriksson, this volume), states and big tech corporations (Baines, this volume), digital technologies can unexpectedly empower individuals, who had been comparatively marginalised previously. These individuals and movements are becoming important actors in cyberspace. What makes these actors powerful is their ability to generate content that is emotionally arousing and provokes fast responses. Especially negative affect plays a key role in speedy dissemination (Veltri & Atanasova, 2017, p. 724). The importance of propagating emotionally arousing content to ensure its wide spread has been underlined by a 2018 study, which evaluated all news stories on Twitter since the site’s launch, and concluded that false news stories disseminate significantly more quickly and widely than accurate news stories. The same study also found that these news stories provoked emotional responses of ‘fear disgust and surprise’ (Vosoughi, Roy, & Aral, 2018, p. 1146). Fake news can be more sensationalist and might even get fabricated with the purpose to elicit emotional reactions and therefore disseminate more widely on social media. Another affordance of social media is that they provide an online space for the ‘lonely crowds’ to gather and create a virtual community (Gerbaudo, 2018, p. 750). Dispersed individuals can meet and organise in cyberspace (Van den Bulck & Hyzen, 2020). In this virtual space they can orchestrate collective actions and become politically active (Farrell, 2012). The Alt-right for example regularly engages in trolling tactics online and selects specific targets, like celebrities, or a computer game to collectively attack them using the #hashtag and reposting functions (Duncombe, 2019). Social movements can deploy these functions to raise general awareness about specific issues. The opportunity costs in this virtual space are not as high. People can post, comment, and like from the comfort of their living room with the press of a button. They are not required to spend days outside potentially in adverse weather conditions (Bakardjieva, 2015, p. 985), risking arrest or physical harm, although it is worth noting that combining online and offline presence can be highly effective. Thus many social media microcelebrities in the Arab spring gained their status by reporting about and in the midst of highly personally charged situations (Tufekci, 2013). At the same time, social media are based on user personalisation. This means that they afford individual users fast and cheap ways to develop and curate their online identity, express themselves, and get involved. Users can change their profile pictures and convey their allegiance to a particular community or cause within seconds, although they can just as quickly reverse the act (Gerbaudo, 2015). This personal identity-forming dimension, and its reinforcement through positive feedback, keeps users engaged. Social media’s affordances to diffuse, manipulate and individualise imagery and video further enhance the curation of personal online identities. While photographs have always been important for expressing broader universal conditions through specifically tangible individual circumstances, social media afford to

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circulate infinite variations of the same image and thus individualise it and adapt it to specific circumstances. In this sense, they also serve as an outlet for creativity. It is possible to make cartoons of the image, use reaction photoshop and add things to the original image, place elements from the original image into a new context, or re-enact the image with different people posing like the composition of the original photograph (Olesen, 2018). Individuals can publicly display their own personal engagement and forms of self-expression and thus develop ownership over the messages they emit. The performance of the individual’s self is key. Social media afford this personalisation, so that individuals can filter their participation in specific movements through their lifestyles and forms of self-expression. When organisations and movements afford more room for the personalisation of the key messages, they experience higher levels of user engagement (Bennett & Segerberg, 2011). Social media are the ideal environment for the spread of memes. A meme is a symbolic packet that travels easily across large and diverse populations because it is easy to imitate, adapt personally, and share broadly with others. Memes are network building and bridging units of social information transmission similar to genes in the biological sphere (Dawkins, 1989). They travel through personal appropriation, and then by imitation and personalized expression via social sharing in ways that help others appropriate, imitate, and share in turn. (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, p. 745) Memes are the perfect tools in the social media environment to express group cohesion, while simultaneously allowing for individual expression through the use of imagery that provokes fast reactions, and therefore ensures widespread dissemination. If collective activities on social media become successful and use these affordances effectively, they generate a logic of connective action that is distinct from the typical logic of collective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). In a logic of connective action information spreads in peer-to-peer networks through personal sharing among friends. ‘Group ties are being replaced by large-scale, fluid social networks’ (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, p. 748). Hierarchical organisational structures matter significantly less. People maintain their own personal identities and express allegiance to different causes, but without establishing a collective identity with others (Papacharissi, 2016). The politics of identity gets replaced with a ‘politics of visibility’ that generates ‘individuals-in-the-group’, rather than societal collectives (Milan, 2015). Through these dynamics established societal discourses can get disrupted, but it is significantly less clear whether these disruptions will lead to long-lasting change. They first of all introduce alternative viewpoints. The power these networks generate is of a transient nature, and they can dismantle as quickly as they emerged.

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The logic of connective action differs from the other logics of action IR scholars have introduced into the discipline. The logic of consequences suggests that people’s actions are based on means-ends calculations; the logic of appropriateness (March & Olsen, 1998) indicates that people act in line with socially recognised moral standards and norms; the logic of arguing (Risse, 2000) is based on reasonbased argumentation and collective discussions, in which the better argument leads the way; the logic of practicality focuses on subconscious and embodied ways of acting (Pouliot, 2008). Different from all of these logics, the logic of connective action depends on a specific technology, and it functions only through the medium of that technology. It is a performative logic based on self-presentation and external recognition of that self-presentation, that then spreads non-hierarchically through different nodal points in a network and gets adapted and modified in the process to allow for self-presentation and external recognition of that self-presentation in every step along the way. The collective discourse emerges in a decentralised mechanism through the sum and spread of these instances of self-presentation and their external recognition. While each of the four logics of action identified in IR can be part of the logic of connective action, the logic of connective action is irreducible to these other logics. Social media have already left a mark on the structure of societal discourses. To some extent digital technology has disrupted social orders by shaping mechanisms of ‘winning over’, that is mechanisms of how societal discourses develop. Social media have notably led to more emotionally charged messaging and less rationalised argumentation. This feature, combines with individualised news feeds, that are resulting in an erosion of societally shared knowledge and social consensus (Adler & Drieschova, 2021). The consequence is polarised discursive communities among which there is little interaction, and less interaction is becoming possible. The analysis below demonstrates that this mechanism also partly occurs in the realm of climate change. There is very little interaction between climate activists and climate sceptics online; people within these communities tend to converse with like-minded peers. At the same time, however, there is a very strong consensus about the reality of climate change on social media and an expressed urgency to address it. Climate activists have been markedly more able to seize the affordances of social media to their advantage than climate sceptics. Climate activists have also been able to steer the discourse in a direction of more emotionality, more engagement and a higher degree of urgency. They have thus impacted the background layer of the climate change order. While social media share a set number of common characteristics, it is also worth noting that each platform provides slightly different affordances, and a somewhat different user culture animates each platform, which impacts the ways the platform works and on the kind of content that gets shared on it (Pearce, Niederer, Oezkula, & Sanchez Querubin, 2018, p. 2). Dissimilar platforms can for example give preference to distinct kinds of imagery. Thus, Instagram is known for aesthetically appealing photographs, whereas Tumblr users preferentially post screenshots,

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memes and GIFs. Observations from one platform can therefore not simply be extrapolated to other platforms, and it is also worth studying how these platforms interact with each other (Poell, 2014, p. 728). Social science scholars have focused their analyses on Twitter, because of Twitter’s easy and transparent access policies, and the simplicity with which Twitter’s textual content can be analysed quantitatively. Yet, Twitter is far from being the most popular social media site (317 million users), compared to Facebook (1,871 million users), YouTube (1,000 million users), Qzone (632 million users) or Instagram (600 million users) (Kemp, 2017 in Pearce et al., 2018, p. 3). The Mainstream Climate Change Discourse

Prior to the widespread use of social media, policy actors, natural scientists, economists, international organisations and NGOs had primarily influenced the climate change discourse (Allan, 2018; Bernstein, 2002; Litfin, 2000; Mitchell, 2013). Legacy media in most developed countries followed the discourse these actors instituted and reported on climate change primarily when natural disasters occurred, major international conferences took place, or important reports were published. This mainstream climate change discourse was established along universalising scientific and apolitical lines (Jasanoff, 2010; Methmann, 2013). Climate change as a phenomenon has been examined primarily as a geophysical occurrence, rather than as a biological, ecological and/or complex phenomenon. The US military provided financial support mostly to the geophysical sciences in the 1950s to study the climate in order to manipulate it (Allan, 2017a). This ensured that the geophysical sciences progressed more rapidly in climate change studies than other natural sciences, like biology or ecology. The geophysical sciences hence provided the discursive framework that shaped the understanding of climate change, and they portrayed a ‘gradualist, determinist, and predictable image of the climate’ (Allan, 2017a, p. 132). By contrast, other scientific approaches characterise the climate as ‘nonlinear, indefinite, and volatile’ (Allan, 2017a, p. 132). In a geophysical framework, the highly complex phenomenon of climate change has been reduced to the measurable figure of CO2 with the understanding that if CO2 levels are controlled, it is possible to precisely influence the climate (Lövbrand, Stripple, & Wiman, 2009; Weingart, Engels, & Pansegrau, 2000). The geophysical conception of the climate links up well with neoclassical economic models that equally promise controlling supply and demand on a market via the pricing mechanism (Allan, 2017b, p. 153). From 1972 onwards there has been a gradual convergence of norms of environmental protection and economic liberalism; Bernstein termed this nexus ‘liberal environmentalism’ (Bernstein, 2002). From the UN conference in Rio in 1992 onwards solutions to addressing climate change have been framed in terms of sustainable development. The principle of sustainable development, which formed a cornerstone of the climate change mitigation discourse emerged as a compromise solution between the North and the South,

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partly because the South did not want to forgo its opportunity for development (Bernstein, 2002; Mitchell, 2013). The primary focus was on ensuring economic growth, and economic growth and environmental protection have been conceived in zero-sum terms (Meckling & Allan, 2020). To address climate change policies sought to identify mechanisms to reduce CO2 on the basis of market principles, not through restrictive regulatory measures, as market mechanisms were thought to be cheaper (Flottum & Gjerstad, 2017). Following the 2008 financial crisis, the discourse changed and moved from sustainable development as its cornerstone to the notion of ‘green growth’. Scientific research has made it increasingly obvious that climate change is a reality and will necessitate widespread measures to mitigate it. At the same time the financial crisis required policies that enhance economic growth. Green growth suggests that environmental protection and economic growth are compatible, if economic growth is steered in the right direction with the help of state intervention and specific regulations (Meckling & Allan, 2020, p. 434). There has been one significant exception to this general discourse, primarily stemming from conservative think tanks and fossil fuel lobbies in the United States who sponsored contrarian scientists to sow uncertainty by challenging the findings of scientific researchers and questioning the occurrence of climate change, or its anthropogenic nature (Austin, 2002; Boussalis & Coan, 2015; Jacques, Dunlap, & Freeman, 2009; McCright & Dunlap, 2003; Oreskes, 2004; Pollack, 2003). This counter-discourse has been remarkably successful in the United States in particular, although to some extent also in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, but less so in other liberal democracies (Carvalho, 2005; Dispensa & Brulle, 2003; Kaiser & Puschmann, 2017; McManus, 2000). It has been promoted by legacy media and even wire and news service providers (Antilla, 2005), who in an effort to provide balanced reporting allocated more space to climate sceptics than scientific findings would warrant (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004; Harvey et al., 2018; Lewandowsky, Gignac, & Vaughan, 2013; Oreskes & Conway, 2010). They thus created an image of scientific controversy that has confused the public about the reality of climate change (Antilla, 2005; Carvalho, 2007; Zehr, 2000). Probably for that reason there is a ‘consensus gap’ between the overwhelming agreement of the scientific community that climate change is happening, that it is man-made, and that it will cause serious difficulties for our societies in the foreseeable future if nothing is done to mitigate it, and the general public opinion in the United States, which remains mostly unconvinced of climate change (Dunlap, 2013; Harvey et al., 2018). For example, only 36% of Americans believe that climate change is a serious concern, and only 48% that it is anthropogenic (Roxburgh et al., 2019). It is difficult for citizens to comprehend long-term trends that effect very large stretches of territory, but only have a small impact on people’s dayto-day lives in the present (Wilson, 2000). All the more populations rely on the media to portray climate change to them. The artificial sanctioning of fringe views about climate change in US media has fuelled the climate change scepticism in the

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American population and legitimised inaction in the face of climate change. The United States’ reluctance to adopt mitigation policies and adhere to international treaties has been directly linked to the prevalence of the climate sceptic discourse (Antilla, 2005; Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004; Jacques et al., 2009). Past research demonstrates that prior to the onset of social media NGOs as well as climate sceptics have already been quite successful in shaping the climate change discourse (Allan, 2020; Haas, 1992; Raustiala, 1997). NGOs were very successful at the international institutional level, which has been to some extent removed from domestic political pressures (Litfin, 2000; Mitchell, 2013). By contrast, climate sceptics operated through domestic politics, notably in the United States to sow confusion. The question now is whether through social media, broadbased social movements can influence the climate change discourse, and secondly climate sceptics can have even more power than they have had hitherto. An Overview of Climate Change Discussions on Social Media

Climate change is a popular topic on social media. A Pew Research Centre study demonstrates that sometimes climate change and global warming are among the top five keywords on all English-language blogs and in all tweets (Schaefer, 2012, p. 532). By contrast, ordinary citizens seem to be less engaged in climate change topics than they are on average on social media. Following opinion polls, 7% of American respondents share content related to climate change on social media, and 6% have commented on another post (Leiserowitz, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, Feinberg, & Howe, 2013). Although citizens are in general not very involved in climate change-related matters (Anderson & Huntington, 2017), ordinary citizens’ online conversations about climate change occur less frequently than their offline engagement; 35% of US respondents said they occasionally discuss global warming with relatives and friends (Leiserowitz, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, Feinburg, & Rosenthal, 2015; Anderson, 2017, p. 5). Thus, while climate change is a popular topic on social media, it is less captivating for ordinary citizens, perhaps due to the scientific nature of the conversation that takes place online. The overwhelming majority of studies that analyse how climate change has been represented in social media thus far are quantitative analyses focusing on Twitter. Overall legacy media strongly dominate the climate change discussions on Twitter, and those discussions follow the mainstream scientific climate change discourse. For example, in conjunction with the 2013 IPCC report, the most frequently occurring domain names on Twitter were from mainstream media (35%), new media (23%), science news (20%), governments or academia (12%) and advocacy groups (9%) (Newman, 2017). Furthermore, around 50% of climate change-related retweets are retweeting 0.4% of users, primarily mainstream media outlets (Kirilenko & Stepchenkova, 2014). Most web links in climate change tweets (67%) also refer to mainstream media, while 9% reference NGOs, and 8% non-­professional blogs (Veltri & Atanasova, 2017, p. 733; see also Poell, 2014).

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Climate sceptic blogs such as Watts Up With That and Climate Depot were each linked to 0.2% of climate change Tweets (Kirilenko & Stepchenkova, 2014). Yet, among the 100 most retweeted posts mentioning the 2013 IPCC report 35% came from non-elite users, and 17% from mainstream media. The top five tweets most frequently retweeted all came from elite users though, and the retweeting network was highly skewed towards the top (Newman, 2017). The data suggests that while mainstream media are the most influential tweeters, other users can garner attention on social media (Pearce et al., 2018). The content of tweets is in line with this general user and retweeting pattern. Veltri and Atanasova (2017) found that 78% of the tweets related to climate change were of a descriptive nature, and 22% called for action. Accordingly, most tweets had a neutral tone, followed by an equal amount of positive and negative tweets. Similarly, Anderson and Huntington (2017) found that climate change tweets contained low levels of incivility and sarcasm (around 3%), which were expressed mainly by ultra-right users. The qualitative analysis of climate sceptics on social media I conducted between September 2020 and January 2021 confirms previous quantitative studies that highlight the low success rate of climate sceptics in terms of user engagement on social media. The rather low performance of climate sceptics on social media is surprising, and goes against the overall trend of the ultra-right’s and populists’ success on social media, especially when compared to more mainstream political parties and movements (Adler & Drieschova, 2021). One partial explanation for this discrepancy could be that climate sceptics use a different set of hashtags and mainly congregate around the hashtags climaterealists and agw (Anderson, 2017, p. 9; Williams et al., 2015).2 Studies of climate change on Twitter might thus not capture their tweets, if those studies concentrate on more general hashtags like climatechange or global-warming. Yet, one study looked at the hashtags agw and climaterealists, which climate sceptics employ, alongside the hashtags climatechange and globalwarming, and found that climate sceptics have a significantly lower reach than ‘activists’ (Williams et al., 2015). The same study also found that a few activists had a very large number of followers, whereas the number of followers was more evenly distributed among sceptics (Williams et al., 2015, p. 134). Of the total number of tweets collected in the study, 97.7% contained the hashtags climate, climatechange, and globalwarming. In another study, the same authors found that #agw accounted for 1.4% of collected climate change tweets, and #climaterealists effectively seized being used (Williams et al., 2015). The study confirms that climate sceptics are not significantly influencing the climate change discourse on Twitter. Occasionally, in conjunction with specific events, such as extreme cold weather spills, or scandals, like the Climategate scandal, climate sceptic sources can experience a temporary spike in their popularity (Hollin & Pearce, 2015; Medhaug, Stolpe, Fischer, & Knutti, 2017; Roberts, Palmer, McNeall, & Collins, 2015; Roxburgh et al., 2019), otherwise the mainstream climate change discourse dominates Twitter. Surprisingly, on Twitter, there is less climate change scepticism, and

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more acknowledgement of the scientific consensus on climate change than in the mass media in the United States and the United Kingdom (Loercher & Taddicken, 2017; O’Neill, Williams, Kurz, Wiersma, & Boykoff, 2015). Yet, climate sceptics are comparatively successful in the blogosphere. The climate sceptical blog WattsUpWithThat.com for example has been nominated as the ‘Best Weblog of the Year’ in 2013, and the ‘Best Science Blog’ three times in a row (Elgesem, Steskal, & Diakopoulos, 2015), until the ‘Bloggies’ discontinued the science category in 2014, and the weblog awards themselves ended in 2015. Climate sceptic blogs have many visitors (around 300,000 per month) and are among the most popular blogs on climate change (Harvey et al., 2018; Schaefer, 2012). It is worth noting though that only around 7% of the population in the United States uses blogs (Dautrich & Barnes, 2005; Sharman, 2014). The major social media sites are significantly more popular. As I demonstrate later, climate sceptics have even lesser numbers of followers, shares, and likes on Facebook and Instagram than they have on Twitter. And alternative social media sites, such as 4Chan, Gab or Parler, have comparatively low user numbers. Methodology

The chapter’s focus is on those actors, who are typically marginalised in mass broadcasting media environments and acquire opportunities to voice themselves in the social media world. Given that social media are highly decentralised and informal, they provide new opportunities in particular for individuals and grassroots social movements, which function outside of the political mainstream (Castells, 2004; Kaiser & Puschmann, 2017). In addressing the question of whether social media have led to a change in the climate change discourse, the analysis focuses on these actors. I have therefore not studied the social media strategies of international organisations, government officials and institutions, legacy media, scientists and scientific institutions or traditional NGOs. Instead, I concentrated on not fully institutionalised social movements and on individual users in their positions as ordinary citizens. The study compares climate sceptics’ social media strategy with the climate strike’s social media strategy through a netnography (Costello, McDermott, & Wallace, 2017). Given that most existing analyses of climate change in social media have focused on Twitter and been text-based quantitative analyses of Big Data, I have headed Pearce et al.’s (2018, p. 1) advice, namely to ‘consider qualitative studies, visual communication and alternative social media platforms to Twitter’. Notably, I focus the analysis on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and on the interaction between these sites. I picked these three sites, because they are among the most popular social media sites in Western democracies with the largest numbers of active monthly users, namely 2.96 billion for Facebook, one billion for Instagram and 450 million for Twitter. These sites have thus the largest likelihood of influencing the mainstream climate change discourse in liberal democracies. Tik-tok’s

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number of users has dramatically increased to one billion, but its user numbers had not been as high when I conducted the empirical research for this chapter. I study texts as well as imagery. Studying the imagery of climate change on social media represents an empirical contribution, as the overwhelming majority of available studies do not account for imagery. Yet, imagery is especially important for provoking emotional reactions, and generating general appeal. How imagery gets used, how it is transformed, and how it circulates matters for the widespread dissemination of messages, perhaps more than the text itself. Different from most social media studies, which retrieve messages that contain specific hashtags, I have decided to follow individual user profiles to identify the social media strategies of specific users and their effectiveness. One individual, who is unlikely to have ever made the cut in a traditional broadcasting environment, stands out. Greta Thunberg was a 15-year-old teenager when she began going on school strikes to save the climate in August 2018. Her notoriety for addressing climate change appeared on social media first of all, but two years later she is coleading a wide social movement that has stepped out of the virtual on-screen world into real life. Her social media presence by far outperforms the social media presence of all climate sceptics combined. Greta Thunberg is also not the only female climate activist with a strong social media presence. She has been preceded as well as followed by numerous others, such as Luisa Neubauer, Xiye Bastida, Jamie Margolin and Alexandria Villaseñor. Second, I focused on a set number of climate sceptics. Picking the right climate sceptics was significantly less obvious, as they do not carry the same degree of notoriety. I selected climate sceptics on the basis of a secondary literature analysis, which has primarily mapped climate sceptic blogs (Metcalfe, 2020; Reed, 2016; Schmid-Petri, 2017; Sharman, 2014). Some of these blog owners also appear on social media, notably Twitter. I manually scrolled through the lists of people they followed to identify other climate sceptic Twitter users with large numbers of followers. Previous studies have already found that the followers of climate sceptics are more evenly distributed (Williams et al., 2015). I have certainly not captured all climate sceptics, and there might be some influential ones whom I missed. Yet, I included nine accounts in this analysis and studied 18; I assume that if there were influential trends that differ significantly from the ones I  identify, I  would have found some trace of them on the accounts of the climate sceptics I studied. Including more climate sceptics in the analysis is unlikely to have altered the findings dramatically. I define social media success on the basis of how many followers these actors have, and how often their most popular messages get liked, shared and commented on. I have identified these messages manually in the time period between September 2020 and January 2021. I describe and interpret the messages below in line with a netnographic approach (Costello et al., 2017), which applies ethnographic methods to the online environment. I traced the relevant messages and analysed what other users, who have picked the messages up, further did with them. I also studied

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how the messages travelled across different social media platforms, by identifying the direction of traffic based on the dates when posts appeared. Overall the qualitative analysis inductively identifies some specific and original strategies that can succeed on social media, and potentially lead to lasting change offline. Other strategies can already fail online and therefore do not even carry the potential for change in the real world. Other scholars might pick the strategies up, operationalise them, and test them quantitatively. A Qualitative Analysis of Climate Sceptics’ and the Climate Strike Movement’s Activities on Social Media

While Greta Thunberg has 10.5 million followers on Instagram, 4.4 million followers on Twitter and 3.2 million followers on Facebook, the most popular climate sceptics have between 30,000 and 70,000 followers on Twitter, and use Facebook and Instagram significantly less. Many do not have any public accounts on Facebook and Instagram; when they do, their follower numbers tend to be lower than on Twitter, with a maximum of around 40,000 followers. These very basic findings are surprising and warrant an explanation. Populists and the Alt-right, with whom climate sceptics are closely associated (although some populists are environmental preservationists), are otherwise very successful on social media. Why are climate sceptics not? Climate Sceptics’ Failed Social Media Strategy

Climate sceptics adopt two disparate strategies on social media. The first strategy entails imitating a scientific discourse to debunk the scientific consensus on climate change. Scholars studying climate sceptic conservative think tanks have consistently noted that they have not changed their discursive strategy of denying climate change science over time (Busch  & Judick, 2021). The second strategy consists of incorporating a critique of climate change science and climate change mitigation policies into a much larger societal and political discourse associated with the ultra-right agenda, the threats of socialism and the Making America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Here it is worth noting though, that the far-right is not unified in its approach to the environment. Many far-right groupings include the preservation of a pristine environment in their program (Forchtner, 2020). The accounts imitating a scientific discourse to delegitimise the scientific consensus on climate change are Watts Up With That (29.3K followers on Twitter), The Global Warming Policy Forum (12.8K followers on Twitter), Climate Realists (47.8K followers on Twitter), Judith Curry (28.2K followers on Twitter), Friends of Science (37.1K followers on Twitter) and JWSpry (19.4K followers on Twitter). These users rely on the image of science and seek to optically imitate science to undermine the scientific findings of climate change, a strategy that has already been noted by other scholars (Bloomfield  & Tillery, 2019; Boussalis  &

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Coan, 2015; Elgesem, Steskal, & Diakopoulos, 2015; Schmid-Petri, 2017; Sharman, 2014). Typically, they provide hyperlinks to their own blog posts, some do so almost exclusively, such as Watts Up With That, the Global Warming Policy Forum or Climate Realists. They use images that appear scientific, such as global maps with temperature measures, graphs of CO2 emissions and temperature rises, microscope photographs of microbes, hurricane imagery, diagrams or photographs of nature and animals. They list equations and supply data. For example, a Twitter post on Watts Up With That from 4 January 2021 shows a map of the United States with mean daily temperature changes from the period between 1981 and 1990 to the period between 2011 and 2020. According to the map the mid-west of the United States has cooled down, whereas temperatures in the Western United States have increased. The argument is that changes in temperature are due to changes in land-use patterns. Urbanisation leads to increases in temperature and temperature changes should be population weighted. Some of the sites also post information about events they host with alternative experts and contrarian scientists, such as webinars, or lectures. For example, the Global Policy Forum hosted a webinar on 17 November 2020 with Professor Richard Tol, Professor Ross McKitrick and Victoria Hewson on the effectiveness of carbon taxes. They then post videos of lecture recordings on their account. Other users, like Friends of Science post links to a variety of different sites. They can post web links to climate sceptic blogs like Watts Up With That or the Global Warming Policy Forum, alongside selective posts to more mainstream blogs, such as The Conversation, or mass media sites like The Times, if those sites contain articles with titles that appear to confirm their hypothesis that climate change is a hoax. The strategy is to provide alternative data that demonstrate the earth is not actually getting warmer, and extreme weather events occur more rarely rather than more frequently, or to provide alternative accounts for why global warming takes place, such as a heating of the sun. The accounts also seek to generate a general mistrust of climate scientists’ work. They criticize them by arguing that their findings are not scientifically valid, because they are based on incomplete data, or incorrect methods. For example, a Twitter post from the Global Warming Policy Forum from 29 December 2020 links to a post on the blog Science Under Attack, which argues that the ‘ancient climate was warmer than today’s’. The post summarises in detail two studies that have discovered these findings (including the methodologies they used) and includes graphs and maps, but no references to the studies in question. While climate sceptics imitate a scientific discourse on the surface, there are also some differences in linguistic form. Compared to the mainstream scientific discourse, as exemplified in the reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate sceptics express themselves with more certainty, less formality, and more emotionality, primarily in the form of anger (Medimorec & Pennycook, 2015). The tone of language becomes for example apparent from a Tweet by Watts Up With That from 2 January 2021. The Tweet introduces a blogpost with the words ‘Inconvenient Truth: Climate-related death risk down 99.6% over 100 years’.

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Perhaps because of the effort to imitate the scientific discourse Twitter appears to be the most popular social media site for climate sceptics among the ones I studied. Some of the users do not have Facebook accounts, the ones that do are likely to have less followers on Facebook than on Twitter, although Facebook has a significantly larger user base than Twitter. Climate sceptic Facebook accounts also tend to post less material than the same users post on Twitter. Typically, the material on Facebook is less original, and users rather rely on reposting weblog entries. It is very rare that climate sceptics imitating the scientific approach use Instagram at all. I could only identify one account, namely Friends of Science, which has 161 followers, and the posts are amateurish videos about climate change, which obtain around 10 likes. As a micro-blogging site Twitter perhaps also bears the highest resemblance to the web blogs, which many of these climate sceptics initially created. On their social media accounts they continue to apply the same strategies they used for their blogs. A scientific framing has been crucial for the positioning of the most important climate sceptic blogs. These central blogs [have been] key protagonists in a process of attempted expert knowledge delegitimisation and contestation, acting not only as translators between scientific research and lay audiences, but, in their reinterpretation of existing climate science knowledge claims, are acting themselves as alternative public sites of expertise for a climate sceptical audience. (Sharman, 2014, p. 159) Climate sceptics’ reliance on science is a purely performative act, based on the visualisation of the hyperlink and imagery that appears science-like, but lacks any substantive dimension. These users value ‘the appearance of objectivity and being aware of “scientific facts” that ordinary environmentalists are either unaware of or unable to process because they are “duped” by experts with nefarious motives’ (Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019, p. 28). Yet, the reliance on the optics of science might prevent this community from reaching a wider audience on social media, where fast, emotional reactions, identity-forming features, community-building dimensions, and particular but universalisable imagery are key affordances that can be exploited for success. The affordances of social media might not be the same as the affordances of blogs, and applying the same strategy for social media as for blog posts, might not lead to the desired results. Those social media posts that appear science-like tend not to receive many likes and shares; they typically reach somewhere between 10 and 30 likes for the less popular posts, and the most popular posts reach around 500 likes. This observation is in line with the finding that anticlimate change posts do not appear particularly credible (Samantray & Pin, 2019). By contrast, some of these users on occasion also post comics, memes, and sarcastic videos. These posts are more successful; particularly mocking Greta Thunberg reaches high levels of popularity. A comic posted on 2 December 2019

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on Facebook by I Love Carbon Dioxide shows mother nature with a sign ‘record breaking cold’. An angry Greta covered in snow is standing next to her saying ‘how dare you’ and holding a stop global warming sign in her hand. On 6 November 2019 the same user posted a meme on Facebook which contains a photograph of Greta Thunberg from her UN speech with a speech bubble saying ‘you have stolen my dreams and my childhood!’ Underneath it is the picture of a black boy in rough terrain saying, ‘Getting that Cobalt for your electric cars fast as I can Greta’. A video posted by I Love Carbon Dioxide of a teenage girl mocking Greta Thunberg in the style of stand-up comedians reached 1.9K likes on Facebook; it is the most popular video of this user. A second strategy climate sceptics have employed is to incorporate climate change scepticism in a significantly larger set of societal critiques following an ultra-right agenda. Thus Stephen McIntyre’s account is called Climate Audit (35.2K followers), but he does not post much about climate change on Twitter, despite the account’s name. Similarly, Marc Morano has as his Twitter username and profile picture Climate Depot (24.7K followers on Twitter). Yet his Twitter account only occasionally touches upon climate change-related issues and mainly focuses on day-to-day American politics expressing a strong support for Trump and Republicans. He provides links to a large set of news stories stemming from mainstream media as well as from more fringe sites. For example, he posted a story entitled ‘Up to Two Thirds of Serious Covid Infections are Caught in Hospital – Study’ from lockdownsceptics.org on 10 March 2021. On the same date, he also posted a news story from Reuters titled ‘China launches COVID-19 vaccination certificates for cross-border travel’, a story from the New York Post entitled ‘Disney+ prevents kids from watching “racist” classics including “Dumbo” ’, and a story from iceagenow.info entitled ‘US February was the coldest in 32 years’, among others. He also retweets an eclectic set of Tweets. Despite his extremely prolific Twitter activity his Tweets do not get liked or retweeted very frequently, mostly 10–20 times per Tweet. The Facebook account (with 6448 followers) mainly serves to promote the blog posts of Climate Depot, which critique climate change science and policy. The style does not imitate science, but rather journalism and news satire. A post from 21 April 2021 for example reads ‘Would you believe it? As one of our commentators predicted, Facebook is now suppressing a post about FB suppressing a post about FB suppression of the New York Post. Mr. Zuckerberg, tear down these algorithms!’ Another one from 19 July 2019 says ‘America’s Apollo Astronauts want NASA to knock off the climate propaganda and focus on hard science and space’. Photographs and comics are meant to draw readers in. One comic shows a green broken car that is close to falling apart with a license plate that says socialism. In the car are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, John Kerry, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris among others. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is holding a picture frame around them that has written ‘Green New Deal’ on it. The text above

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the image reads ‘How many times must socialism fail?’ Satirical comments of Greta Thunberg with the corresponding imagery are a comparatively popular item to generate user engagement with around 300 likes and 100 shares. One of those from 11 December 2019 shows the Times cover that announced Greta Thunberg as the Times person of the year; a text next to it reads ‘Contrary to what your parents told you, turns out skipping school and hysterical hissy fits was the way to go after all’. While the Twitter account is extraordinarily prolific with several dozens of Tweets and Retweets per day, the Facebook account typically receives one post every couple of months. Naomi Seibt, labelled the ‘anti-Greta’, and one of the most successful climate sceptics with 43.2K followers on Twitter does not actually tweet very much about climate change, and more about American politics, her support for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Many of her Tweets are acerbic comments on the dayto-day of American politics without any embedded links or pictures. For example, on 12 January  2021 she tweeted ‘Add #BlackLivesMatter to your Tweets for purge immunity’ in response to the shutting of several Facebook and Twitter accounts linked to the Capitol riots in support of Donald Trump on 6 January 2021. Two days later she tweeted as a commentary on the COVID-19 lockdown ‘Over 100,000 new migrants seeking asylum; during a heavy lockdown for the rest of us sheeple who are only allowed to move within a radius of 15km – “open borders” only goes one way’. Naomi is significantly less active on Facebook, where her account functioned as a personal account until early 2019, when she started to use her Facebook account primarily to circulate her self-made videos on a number of different political issues, such as critiques of Feminism, the need for free speech, critiques of migration policies, and climate change mitigation. The links received a few hundred to a thousand likes. A link to a Washington Post article that labelled Naomi Seibt as the anti-Greta obtained 5.3K likes. Naomi happily adopted the label and has been portraying herself along these lines. Her Instagram strategy is entirely different. Although her bio makes a reference to Greta Thunberg, when it states ‘I don’t want you to panic. I want you to think’, the account is quite apolitical. She mainly posts selfies in the gym or in a dance studio without much political commentary, but occasionally wears a Trump T-shirt. She has 7220 Followers on Instagram and her posts get liked around 1000–2000 times. Naomi’s videos and pictures come across as self-made and not very professional, but with a general effort to follow basic principles of composition in terms of colouring and positioning. Her bodily posture and facial expression are reminiscent of posing apparently imitating models. While the first social media strategy of climate sceptics entails emulating the pictorial and linguistic discourse of mainstream climate change science to delegitimise it, the second strategy focuses on embedding climate change scepticism into the broader agenda of the far right, and employing similar discursive strategies as the ultra-right employs on topics such as immigration, race, elite conspiracies,

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and vaccines (see also Kaiser & Puschmann, 2017; Lewandowsky, Gignac, & Oberauer, 2015). Neither of these two strategies is particularly successful on social media in terms of user engagement. The imitation of scientific discourse strategy worked extraordinarily well in the traditional media environment, in which the normative legitimacy of science carries a high currency. Yet, science appears boring and complicated from a social media perspective in which fast reactions are key, particularly so if account holders do not have any significant institutional backing that would ensure them high follower numbers. Science also does not make for good identity politics and forms of self-expression. The strategy does not use the affordances social media provide to their best effect, and this might explain its comparative lack of success in social media engagement. Climate sceptics have not managed to trigger the logic of connective action on social media. The second strategy of embedding climate scepticism into the far-right discourse has also not proven particularly successful so far. This could potentially change in the future, if the far-right decides to focus on climate scepticism and succeeds in framing it as a topic that can increase its followers and keep existing followers engaged. For now, this does not seem to be the case. Other topics such as migration, or vaccination yield far more user engagement than climate change. Climate sceptics’ lack of success on social media, despite their apparent potential, demonstrates how it depends upon agents to seize the affordances technologies provide. In this sense social media has changed which agents can become influential, and the mechanisms of how influence emerges, but this does not mean that all agents will realise the new opportunities available to them. How social orders will change depends on which agents get the upper hand, and how those agents realise the new possibilities that open up. A lone teenager, Greta Thunberg, has been highly successful in starting an entire climate strike movement. She has become the voice of the younger generation, based on her social media presence, and is now representing the youth in many prominent climate fora. She obtained a public voice, sometimes a seat at the table. Many other teenagers have followed in her footsteps and have become similar (if less successful) social media celebrities combating climate change. Accounting for Greta Thunberg’s Success on Social Media

Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager, provided the inspiration for the Fridays for Future and the Climate Strike movement. On 20 August 2018 Greta sat with a hand painted banner, which read ‘Skolstrekj för Klimatet’ alone in front of the Swedish parliament. She had a picture taken of herself and posted it on Twitter. Already on the second day other people joined her. Before long, her Twitter photographs went viral and inspired an entire movement. Fridays for Future was formed in The Hague on 4 September 2018, and on 14 September 2018 in Berlin. Greta gave her first public speech on 8 September at the Peoples’ Climate March in Stockholm. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times in a row (2019–2021),

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she obtained Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award, and the Geddes Environment Medal from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. She became Time’s person of the year. She spoke in front of the UN General Assembly, and in front of the European Parliament. She met with many prominent politicians, such as Angela Merkel, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ursula von der Leyen, and many celebrities have endorsed her. Greta Thunberg is the face that has provided a sense of urgency to the ‘climate crisis’, a call for action, and a sense of responsibility to the adult world. She has dramatically shifted the public discourse, and might provide the ammunition for lasting policy change to address climate change. It is worth noting that in the beginning was Twitter. Greta Thunberg’s notoriety emerged from her Twitter photographs going viral online. Without Twitter only a few passers-by would have noticed the lonely schoolgirl striking in front of the Swedish parliament. Even if legacy media had picked up on the story (unlikely), I will argue in the following, they would not have provided the affordances that led to Greta Thunberg becoming an inspiration for an entire, very powerful youth movement. The picture on the first day on which Greta went on strike obtained 1.8 K retweets and 6.8K likes on Twitter. Prior to this post from 20 August 2018, Greta had a few other posts on Twitter, which obtained the same number of retweets and likes as the posts of any person with a decent social media network of friends. Her posts on Facebook and Instagram are of a significantly later date. Her first picture on Facebook dates from 7 December 2018. Twitter was her launching site of choice, although she now has a significantly larger crowd of followers on Instagram and Facebook. The photograph from 20 August, her first day of climate striking, marks a drastic departure in Greta’s popularity. The picture captures the eye by its ordinariness. Greta sits on the pavement reclined against a stone wall. Her knees are a little elevated, leaning against each other and her hands are folded on top of them. She is slightly slumped. The body posture is unassuming, not imposing at all, a little shy perhaps, a bit innocent, but not apologetic. The face is the face of a child, but it has a certain dauntlessness and is slightly accusatory with sharpened eyes and pressed lips that won’t form into a smile. The composition does not follow the ideals of photography; her shoes are for example partly cut off from the image, and the angle is not the most flattering one. There is no attempt to pose and look good in front of the camera. The clothes are mismatched, and do not follow any fashion ideals. If anything, the image expresses a complete disregard for fashion; in fact, the image’s aesthetics expresses a complete disregard for form altogether. It highlights that the substance of the issue is what matters. In many ways the photograph goes against the culture of self-representation on social media. It provokes by its ordinariness and simplicity, and thus generates a sense of authenticity. The substance of the message is key, and there is no distracting from it through aesthetic effects, no luring into the image. Here is an ordinary, tiny, vulnerable teenager with no power in her hands, and she decides on her own to go on a school strike for the climate; to

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put her own personal future at risk, because, frankly, that personal future will not exist, if adults do not sort out the climate crisis. The child already serves as a symbol of the future (Adler-Nissen et al., 2019; Burman, 1994); a school strike does even more so. That the future of humanity is at stake is expressed very powerfully in this deceptively ordinary photograph. In this treacherous simplicity, anybody can imitate the photograph. It demonstrates the possibilities for ordinary everyday actions to address climate change, a topic that has hitherto been deemed so complex and grand that no individual could make a difference. Inspired by Greta Thunberg across social media people started posting pictures of themselves holding a hand painted banner expressing in different languages ‘Skolstrekj för Klimatet’. In this sense the photograph has become a meme into which other individuals can insert themselves with their own banners, and thus express their personal engagement for combating climate change, but also their personal identity, as well as their adherence to a diffuse online community that pursues the same objectives. Across three kinds of social media, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram Greta’s most frequent posts are photographs of herself with a hand painted banner on which is written ‘Skolstrekj för Klimatet’ behind various kinds of backgrounds, depending on where she was currently travelling. These photographs have become global icons, ‘images that circulate immediately to a worldwide audience generating an emotional response’ (Hansen, 2016, pp. 271–272). While photographic reinstallations of Greta Thunberg’s initial images of her climate strike are extraordinarily common across social media, other adaptations of her photographs are less common. On a few occasions, comics, memes and photographic collages appear that mock Greta, and those are among climate sceptics’ most popular posts, but their popularity still fades in the light of Greta’s photographs and their reinstallations. The one profile adaptation that went similarly viral on social media as the photographs themselves is the text ‘#FacetheClimateEmergency’, which people can superimpose on their profile picture. Just like the photographs with climate strike signs themselves, these profile adaptations allow users to express their personal identity, their allegiance to an online community that pursues the same cause, and become politically active without a very large time commitment. All the photographs collectively are raising an accusation, and a call for action. They are creating an urgency and an immediacy about a trend that forms the backdrop of people’s lives, but which for now allows almost everybody to continue uninhibited. In similar, yet different, ways as the photograph of the drowned child Allan Kurdi (Alder-Nissen, Andersen, & Hansen, 2020), they make an interpellation (Althusser, 2001). They address adults, and in particular political elites by calling them to responsibility and to action. If adults accept this interpellation, they are accepting the subject position of responsible adults who need to act decisively to mitigate climate change, or else carry the responsibility for the impending disaster. The difference to the Allan Kurdi photograph is that Allan Kurdi is a victim,

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and nothing but a victim, whereas the climate change kids are victims, who derive their agency and their strength from their victimhood. Allan Kurdi has been photographed, his image spread on social and mass media without him doing anything about it. His dead body is a passive object who happened to become the carrier of a message, unwittingly. Greta Thunberg and her followers are the active carriers of their own messages, they are voicing their victimhood, and demanding for action. Of course, the success of Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement is not limited to social media engagement, and if it stayed exclusively a social media phenomenon, it would not have reached the level of success, urgency and staying power, that is putting political leaders under pressure to do something to mitigate climate change. Mass rallies and protests were important; Greta Thunberg’s articulation skills, her unique charisma, and her ability to deliver trenching speeches in front of large crowds mattered for her to attain the high-level podia. And those speeches get recorded, and shared in videos on social media. Social media were the important launching pad that allowed this tiny, introverted and emotional teenager to reach the world stage, and they provide a feedback loop through which her and the movement’s messages can circulate and influence ever larger crowds. It was thanks to social media that an estimated 1.6 million children and teenagers in 125 countries across the world protested against climate change in mid-March 2019. According to a survey undertaken at the strike, social media was the most important information channel for participants to find out about the strike and decide to attend it (Wahlström et al., 2019, p. 14). Among of the school students who participated in the march 45% said that Greta Thunberg was a factor in their decision to join the climate strike (Wahlström et al., 2019, p. 5). On 20 September 2019 the probably largest climate protest in world history occurred (Marris, 2019). ‘It is drama, it is novelty, it is authenticity, and it is catastrophe’ (Nisbet in Marris, 2019, p. 472)– all those things that engender large user engagement on social media. Pictures of the protests circulate on social media and through a positive feedback loop generate larger followership. A quantitative analysis of Twitter and English-language mass media similarly identified the importance of social media for organising the Climate Strike movement, but also the support the movement received from the legacy media (Chen et al., 2022). Not everybody has responded to Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future imagery in the same way. She has provoked some angry reactions. Some have mocked her for her relative luxury in comparison to impoverished children in Africa. People have attacked her dress choices as not being in line with fashion. Others have ridiculed her emotionality. Still others claimed that teenagers cannot possibly have political agency. By and larger, however, the response has been one of admiration, and support. Greta Thunberg has moved from the status of a networked microcelebrity to a globally known cultural icon. Social media were crucial in her success. And she was successful on social media because as a teenage girl she could use her

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vulnerability, a unique aesthetic style (that appears entirely unaesthetic), and emotionally charged messaging to obtain attention online and disseminate her message for the need of profound political change. One might wonder how much of Greta Thunberg’s success is due to the message, and how much of it is due to the particular strategy of the messenger. Obviously, it is impossible to quantify these effects. Both mattered in their combination, both were necessary, but only in their combination they became sufficient conditions. Greta Thunberg has been preceded and followed by other young female climate activists, and while many of them have been very successful on social media, none has come even close to the notoriety of Greta Thunberg. Luisa Neubauer has 210,900 followers on Twitter and 229,000 followers on Instagram, Xiye Bastida has 17,400 followers on Twitter and 35,700 followers on Instagram, Jamie Margolin has 55,700 followers on Twitter, and 53,400 followers on Instagram, Severn Cullis-Suzuki has 15,100 followers on Twitter, 11,200 followers on Instagram and 75,000 followers on Facebook, and Alexandria Villaseñor has 56,400 followers on Twitter. These young female climate activists share many characteristics with Greta Thunberg, but they also differ from her in terms of aesthetic style, emotional expressivity and directness, among others. Other female climate activists can for example accentuate their ethnic origins, or they follow some form of easily recognisable fashion standards in the North Atlantic region. They tend to highlight their femininity more, and downplay their child-like features. On the other hand, Naomi Seibt as one of the most successful climate sceptics shares some characteristics with Greta. Naomi frequently talks about some further unspecified health conditions that she is struggling with, and her appearance is slightly outside the norm in that one of the pupils of her eyes is in an unusual position. Otherwise she typically dresses in more revealing clothes than Greta, but the prior two features give her an added element of vulnerability, and relatability due to imperfection, that bears some semblance to Greta’s vulnerability. In sum, the message and the peculiar style of the messenger have allowed Greta Thunberg to reach millions of people on social media, who could appropriate her message and make it a part of their own online identity. She developed a highly original strategy to exploit the affordances social media provide, and fully enter into the logic of connective action. Social media has empowered a new kind of agent, and a new kind of messaging strategy, a new form of ‘winning over’, which has had a significant impact on changing the societal discourse of climate change in the North Atlantic region, and carries the potential to change the climate change order. European policy makers realise the power Greta Thunberg has. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has invited Greta Thunberg to the European Commission on 4 March 2020, the day the College of Commissioners voted on the Climate Law. In a press communique Ursula von der Leyen (2020) stated that ‘Greta speaks for many of her generation when she calls for more action to tackle climate change’ (von der Leyen, 2020). In a speech to the European Parliament in which Ursula von der Leyen introduced the European Green Deal she explicitly

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said that ‘only one year ago no one would have imagined that millions would take to the streets for climate’, and that ‘our children are not passive spectators; they are very active players in this endeavour. . . . Our climate pact will be with them, and for them’. She concluded with saying ‘Europeans are calling on us to drive the change, now it’s up to us to answer their call’ (von der Leyen, 2019). Frans Timmermans, Vice-President of the European Commission, and responsible for the European Green Deal, has requested Thunberg’s and the climate strike movement’s support for implementing radical reforms to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which they have happily provided on social media. To be sure, Greta Thunberg and the climate strike movement think that the European Green Deal lacks ambition and is not enough to uphold the targets in the Paris agreement (Politico, 2021). Yet, the fact that world leaders are referencing them when adopting important climate legislation indicates that they have become a crucial legitimating force, and thus indeed carry the potential to shape the climate change discourse. The establishment endorsement of the Climate strike movement, in turn, helps the movement gain further notoriety and legitimacy. Conclusion

In this chapter I have argued that social media hold specific affordances, such as allowing the lonely crowds to gather in a virtual space, and people to express their identity online, and become politically engaged with significantly lower opportunity costs. They permit new kinds of actors to reach large audiences, if those actors succeed in using the affordances social media provide effectively. Against the argument that digitisation empowers particularly tech savvy individuals (see Giacomello and Eriksson, this volume), the present analyses found that specific young women without much tech knowledge have learned to use their vulnerability, aesthetic style and emotionally charged messages to gain a voice on social media, generate large crowds of followers, and avail themselves of their social media accounts to advocate for political change. The logic of connective action, based on mechanisms of self-presentation and responses to that self-presentation that follow a networked dynamic, can lead to significant discursive shifts. Those shifts can impact the background layers of international order. I have focused the analysis on the potential social media hold for shifting the climate change discourse. I studied two kinds of actors who stood to gain from social media: climate sceptics, and the climate strike movement, notably Greta Thunberg. The aim was to identify the impact of these actors in shaping the mainstream climate change discourse through their social media usage. The findings demonstrate that while climate sceptics have so far not been able to use the affordances social media provide to their advantage and generate a significant logic of connective action, the climate strike movement and Greta Thunberg have been extraordinarily successful, and do hold the potential to shift the climate change discourse. Social media has changed the distribution of power among actors, and agential

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mechanisms of ‘winning over’. Changes in societal discourses have resulted from these shifts, which carry the potential to lead to a change in the climate order. Allan (2017a) argued that neither the securitisation of climate change nor more scientific certainty about climate change will bring about a solution to the problem, but ‘scientific cosmologies to construct positive visions of a sustainable future’ could (Allan, 2017b, p. 818). And that ‘the problem in climate discourse may be the emphasis on the problem rather than on generating images of the solution’ (Allan, 2017b, p. 818). Greta Thunberg and the climate strike movement do securitise the climate, and they emphasise the problem, rather than generating visions of a positive future. Yet, they have succeeded in creating a discursive space that provides room for ‘subjective and normative imaginations of climate alongside the universal, apolitical climate imaginary proffered by science (Jasanoff, 2010)’ (Pearce et al., 2018, p. 9). They are framing climate change as a matter of inter-generational and global justice. Calling upon the responsibility of adults to protect their own children has turned out to be a successful rhetorical strategy. As has been the suggestion that any individual can in their everyday life make a difference in combating climate change, that the magnitude of the problem does not prevent small people and small acts from acquiring great meaning. Climate scepticism, in turn, is not particularly successful on social media. Yet, there is a caveat to bear in mind: populism and the ultra-right are thriving in the social media environment, and climate scepticism can thrive with these political movements, although some of them espouse environmental conservatism. While climate scepticism is not a popularity booster or vote catcher for the time being, increasing climate scepticism could become a side effect of a potential increase in the popularity of the ultra-right. Notes 1 It is worth noting though that different far-right groupings in different countries adopt different kinds of environmental discourses; many on the far-right espouse environmental protectionism (Forchtner, 2020). 2 Agw stands for anthropogenic global warming.

References Adler, E., & Drieschova, A. (2021). The epistemological challenge of truth-subversion to the liberal international order. International Organization, 1–28. Adler-Nissen, R., Andersen, K. E., & Hansen, L. (2020). Images, emotions, and international politics: The death of Alan Kurdi. Review of International Studies, 46(1), 75–95. Adler-Nissen, R., & Drieschova, A. (2019). Track-change diplomacy: Technology, affordances, and the practice of international negotiations. International Studies Quarterly, 63(3), 531–545. Allan, B. (2017a). Producing the climate: States, scientists, and the constitution of global governance objects. International Organization, 71(1), 131–162.

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Jacques, P., Dunlap, R., & Freeman, M. (2009). The organization of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental skepticism. Environmental Politics, 17(3), 349–385. Jasanoff, S. (2010). A new climate for society? Theory, Culture and Society, 27(2–3), 233–53. Jurgenson, N. (2012). When atoms meet bits: Social media, the mobile web and augmented revolution. Future Internet, 4(1), 83–91. Kaiser, J.,  & Puschmann, C. (2017). Alliance of antagonism: Counterpublics and polarization in online climate change communication. Communication and the Public, 2(4), 371–387. Kirilenko, A., & Stepchenkova, S. (2014). Public microblogging on climate change: One year of Twitter worldwide. Global Environmental Change, 26(1), 171–182. Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Roser-Renouf, C., Feinberg, G., & Howe, P. (2013). Extreme Weather and Climate Change in the American Mind: April 2013. New Haven: Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Roser-Renouf, C., Feinburg, G., & Rosenthal, S. (2015). Climate change in the American mind: March 2015. In Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. New Haven: Yale University and George Mason University. Lewandowsky, S., Gignac, G. E., & Oberauer, K. (2015). The robust relationship between conspiracism and denial of (climate) science. Psychological Science, 26, 667–670. Lewandowsky, S., Gignac, G. E., & Vaughan, S. (2013). The pivotal role of perceived scientific consensus in acceptance of science. Nature Climate Change, 3(4), 399–404. Litfin, K. (2000). Environment, wealth, and authority: Global climate change and emerging modes of legitimation. International Studies Review, 2(2), 119–148. Loercher, I., & Taddicken, M. (2017). Discussing climate change online. Topics and perceptions in online climate change communication in different online public arenas. Journal of Science Communication, 16(2), 1–21. Lövbrand, E., Stripple, J., & Wiman, B. (2009). Earth system governmentality: Reflections on science in the anthropocene. Global Environmental Change, 19(1), 7–13. March, J., & Olsen, J. (1998). The institutional dynamics of international political orders. International Organization, 52(4), 943–969. Marris, E. (2019). Why the world is watching young climate activists. Nature, 573, 471–472. McCright, A., & Dunlap, R. (2003). Defeating Kyoto: The conservative moment’s impact on US climate change policy. Social Problems, 50(3), 348–373. McManus, P. (2000). Beyond Kyoto? Media representation of an environmental issue. Australian Geographical Studies, 38(3), 306–319. Meckling, J., & Allan, B. (2020). The evolution of ideas in global climate policy. Nature Climate Change, 10, 434–438. Medhaug, I., Stolpe, M. B., Fischer, E. M., & Knutti, R. (2017). Reconciling controversies about the ‘global warming hiatus’. Nature, 545(7652), 41–47. Medimorec, S., & Pennycook, G. (2015). The language of denial: Text analysis reveals differences in language use between climate change proponents and skeptics. Climate Change, 133, 597–605. Metcalfe, J. (2020). Chanting to the choir: The dialogical failure of antithetical climate change blogs. Journal of Science Communication, 19(2), 1–19. Methmann, C. (2013). The sky is the limit: Global warming as global governmentality. European Journal of International Relations, 19(1), 69–91. Milan, S. (2015). From social movements to cloud protesting: The evolution of collective identity. Information, Communication & Society, 18(8), 887–900.

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10 DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES, GOVERNANCE AND INTERNATIONAL LAW Victoria Baines

Introduction

Scholarship on international law in and on cyberspace has enjoyed a development as rapid as the technology by which it has been prompted. Given the comparative recency of cyberspace governance as an issue and the ongoing acceleration of technological change, it would be foolish to suggest that it has reached anything resembling maturity. Nevertheless, it is possible to trace a trajectory from initial debates of the legal status of cyberspace (Barlow, 1996; Goldsmith, 1998; Johnson & Post, 1996),1 through proposals for its designation as a res communis, global common or common heritage of mankind with parallels to shared sea-, air- and outer space (Hollis, 2012; Segura-Serrano, 2006); to the extensive work of the Tallinn group of experts on the applicability of existing international law to cyber conflict (Schmitt, 2013) and cyber operations (Schmitt, 2017); to proposals for ‘international internet law’, among them a restatement of core principles (Uerpmann-Wittzack, 2010), the introduction of international cyber torts (Crootof, 2018), and a common customary ius internet on the model of the Roman Empire’s ius gentium (Balleste & Kulesza, 2013). While researchers are agreed that non-binding norms for responsible behaviour and confidence building measures also have a role to play in cyberspace governance, opinion is divided as to their primary function: for some, their utility is in preparing the ground for and feeding into hard law (Schmitt & Vihul, 2014a); for others, they substitute for hard law, because a binding multilateral treaty on cyberspace is deemed either unrealistic or unnecessary (Eichensehr, 2015; Grigsby, 2017; Hitchens & Gallagher, 2019; Ziolkowski, 2013). In light of extensive misuse of digital technology for criminal purposes, influence operations, espionage and attacks on critical infrastructure, most public and DOI: 10.4324/9781003437963-14

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private stakeholders have abandoned Barlow’s claim that ‘legal concepts do not apply to cyberspace’, some with greater reluctance than others, and agree that regulation is both inevitable and desirable. Precisely what flavour (multilateral or multistakeholder) and what form (treaty, norms and principles, confidence building measures) is the matter at hand, and the source of not inconsiderable divergence. In the absence of binding international agreements or relevant case law of any real substance, jurisprudence has assumed the role of ‘interpretation catalyst’, in Ingber’s (2017) suggested terminology. Scholarly processes such as the interpretation of international law by the experts convened for the Tallinn Manuals themselves foster further dialogue and provoke reaction. In the case of Russia and China, public rejection of the Tallinn Manuals has been a political act, predicated on their initial sponsorship by NATO and a focus on existing international law that broadly aligns with US statements on the applicability of the law of armed conflict (LOAC) to cyber operations (Deeks, 2015; Huang & Mačák, 2017). As Mueller (2019) and others note, US insistence on LOAC as the primary frame of international legal reference effectively militarises cyberspace. In both research and practice, international law in and on cyberspace has been constructed as a problem, to which the dominant proposed solutions have been to maintain the status quo or to develop an entirely new comprehensive instrument. No small part of this problem appears to have sprung from a failure to agree on what cyberspace governance is, particularly as distinct from internet governance (Walden, 2013). While often tedious, agreeing terminology and scope provides much-needed clarity for concerned parties. In recent years, the increasing blurring of the distinction between the control of ICT architecture (internet governance) and the control of content and behaviour (cyberspace governance) in the name of national security by some states – Russia and China among them – reflects both internal public order concerns and fears of reliance on US technology (Nocetti, 2015). The extent to which internet governance and cyberspace governance are no longer politically or legally discrete adds to the confusion and divergence about who can participate in cyberspace governance, and how that participation is weighted. ‘Governance’ is itself an ambiguous term as regards cyberspace, variously denoting rules, norms and principles in the field of international law, and technical standards and community management in the sphere of multistakeholder internet administration. The politicisation of technical aspects of internet governance is a case in point: once the preserve of engineers, internet governance fora have become backdrops for strategic struggles over who controls the internet. In December 2012, the revised International Telecommunication Regulations famously failed to achieve consensus following the introduction of a ‘right of Member States to access international telecommunications services’ and other provisions that were deemed to encroach on content policy. Signatories included Russia, China and the majority of Gulf, African and South American states; the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the majority of EU states, India and

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Japan refused to sign. As we shall see, these groupings bear some similarity to the distribution of votes in multilateral negotiations on cybersecurity, suggesting shared state ethos and objectives in internet and cyberspace governance. Similarly, the transition of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority’s Domain Name System management and top-level domain assignment functions from effective US government control in 2016 was celebrated as a landmark in global multistakeholder governance, especially in states for whom this historical relationship has been seen as evidence of the United States’ iniquitous technological hegemony (Finley, 2016; Weinberg, 2000). At the same time, uncertainty over whether cyberspace governance is a national security, economic or socio-cultural issue has resulted in incoherence within the very organisations tasked with multilateral coordination. The subject has been discussed concurrently in the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, where the focus is Disarmament and International Security, and the Third Committee, focused on social, humanitarian, and cultural issues. Deliberations in these parallel streams have themselves proved rich material for scholarly investigation of stakeholder ideologies and dynamics, and prospects for rapprochement. For a time, the First Committee’s Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) became ‘the venue for addressing the future of cyber norms’ (Georgieva, 2020, p. 39). Adoption by consensus of the norms outlined in the report of the 2015 group was deemed to ‘hold out a new opportunity to lift the tempo of global advocacy of norms of state behaviour in cyberspace’ (Austin, McConnell, & Neutze, 2015, p. 3), at least until the group’s failure to achieve consensus in 2017, when states including Cuba, China and Russia refused to concede to the United States’ insistence on the applicability of LOAC to cyber conflict, a move that in the words of the Cuban representative ‘would legitimize a scenario of war and military actions in the context of ICT’ (Grigsby, 2017; Henriksen, 2019; Rodríguez, 2017; Tikk & Kerttunen, 2017)2, at least until the group’s failure to achieve consensus in 2017, when states including Cuba, China and Russia refused to concede to the United States’ insistence on the applicability of LOAC to cyber conflict, a move that in the words of the Cuban representative ‘would legitimize a scenario of war and military actions in the context of ICT’ (Grigsby, 2017; Henriksen, 2019; Rodríguez, 2017; Tikk & Kerttunen, 2017). Drawing on existing internet governance paradigms, a multistakeholder model of cyber norm development has proliferated in a number of venues, of which Microsoft is one of the key proponents. As the pre-eminent actors in apparently divergent, and arguably divisive, approaches to cyberspace governance, the activities of the UN and Microsoft independently merit further investigation. Furthermore, events in recent months indicate that both organisations are increasingly focused on bridging ideological and practical divisions. The following sections examine these developments, their prospects and possible synergies. They also seek to trace a dynamic interaction with international law of state preoccupations in the exercise of internal and external digital sovereignty.

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State of Play: Lex Lata, Lex Ferenda

At the time of writing, the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime (Budapest Convention, (CETS No.185) is the only binding multilateral treaty in the field of cyberspace governance. While its title suggests a focus on technical and criminal matters, the inclusion of numerous procedural provisions for international cooperation, an additional protocol criminalising racist and xenophobic propaganda (ETS 189), and guidance notes on critical infrastructure attacks, election interference, and terrorism, demonstrate a broader scope in practice (Council of Europe, 2013, 2016a, 2019). Arguably because of its unique status, the Convention has been ratified by 65 states since its entry into force in 2004, among them 18 non-members of the Council of Europe including the United States, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, and a number of Latin American, African, South Asian and Pacific nations. Of the 47 Council of Europe Member States, the Russian Federation is alone in having neither signed nor ratified the Convention. Reasons adduced for refusal include an assessment that its provision for cross-border data access (Art. 32b) constitutes a violation of national sovereignty (Gady & Austin, 2010; Hakmeh & Peters, 2020). For over a decade, it has pursued alternative arrangements for cyberspace governance, notably in the UN General Assembly’s Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security. Established in 2005 pursuant to General Assembly resolution 60/45, as the name suggests this group has had a much wider focus than cybercrime. The Russian Federation chaired the group in the 65th session (2009/2010) and has called more than once for a non-binding international code of conduct: to identify the rights and responsibilities of States in the information space, promote constructive and responsible behaviour on their part and enhance their cooperation in addressing common threats and challenges in the information space, in order to establish an information environment that is peaceful, secure, open and founded on cooperation, and to ensure that the use of information and communications technologies and information and communications networks facilitates the comprehensive economic and social development and well-being of peoples, and does not run counter to the objective of ensuring international peace and security. (A/66/359, p. 4) China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan joined this call in 2011, with the addition of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in 2015 (A/69/723). These same countries now form the core of a larger group – including Angola, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, the Syrian Arab Republic and Venezuela – that brought a draft resolution, with the Russian Federation as its main sponsor, to the 74th General Assembly ‘to establish an open-ended ad hoc intergovernmental committee of experts, representative of

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all regions, to elaborate a comprehensive international convention on countering the use of information and communications technologies for criminal purposes’ (A/C.3/74/L.11/Rev.1). Adopted by vote on 18 November 2019, the resolution was opposed by the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand and all 27 European Union Member States. It is tempting to see in this distribution a repeat of Cold War geopolitics. In addition to 34 abstentions (Brazil and Mexico among them), a number of large or otherwise influential countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia voted in favour, including the United Arab Emirates, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, India, Malaysia and Singapore. While a disposition towards greater digital sovereignty in the form of moves to restrict internet freedoms in relation to both access to content and digital surveillance may be one denominator for supporting states, a vote in favour of further exploration of a lex specialis was doubtless also a symbolic rejection of the US predilection for the application of LOAC to cyber operations, and to some extent of the US-endorsed peacetime regimes of the Budapest Convention and multistakeholder initiatives dominated by US corporations and NGOs. Existing International Law – Applicability Versus Sufficiency

In his foreword to the 2015 GGE report, the UN Secretary-General stated that ‘few technologies have been as powerful as information and communications technologies (ICTs) in re-shaping economies, societies and international relations. Cyberspace touches every aspect of our lives’ (A/70/174). This pervasiveness is reflected in the range of specialised regimes identified as having a bearing on cyberspace in the Tallinn Manuals on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, and the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations (Schmitt, 2013, 2017). For the second edition, relevant instruments were identified in international human rights law, diplomatic and consular law, the law of the sea, air law, space law, and international telecommunications law. Opponents to a lex specialis for cyberspace point to the wide range of touchpoints in existing international law as a complicating factor for any comprehensive new regime. The applicability of international law was accepted in the 2013 report of the UN General Assembly Group of Government Experts (GGE) (A/68/98 III 19). Several multistakeholder initiatives promote the applicability specifically of the UN Charter, including the Global Commission on Stability in Cyberspace, and the 2018 Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace, led by the French government. Particular attention has been drawn to the Charter principles of sovereignty, sovereign equality, settlement of disputes by peaceful means and non-intervention. A key point of divergence concerns the sufficiency of existing international law and has brought into focus a number of ‘grey areas’ currently exploited by states, particularly as regards activities that do not meet the threshold of armed conflict, such as influence operations, cyber espionage, and the vast majority of cyber attacks to date. Accordingly, research has identified a de facto norm of ‘anything goes’,

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in which attacks are unattributed or unchallenged (Hathaway, 2017; Schmitt & Vihul, 2014b), a ‘strategic ambiguity’ (Georgieva, 2020, p. 33) associated particularly with perceived US hypocrisy following the Snowden revelations, and a legal uncertainty desirable to some states for the opportunities it creates (Mačák, 2017). The pursuit of legal clarity by others is thus a normative statement of intent to hold these states to account. It also raises practical considerations of jurisdiction and attribution in relation to cyber operations. Technical Challenges to the Exercise of International Law

Establishing sovereign jurisdiction is very often problematic technically. Global progress towards cloud processing and storage, accelerated through rapid virtualisation during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, has led to a proliferation of data that moves between or is mirrored in several jurisdictions (Donnelly, 2020). These challenges, highlighted by the Cloud Evidence Group of the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention Committee (T-CY) as a ‘loss of location’, are yet to be resolved (Council of Europe, 2015, 2016b; Seger, 2018). A further technical difficulty relates to the notion of attribution, on which the responsibility of states depends to no small extent. It has become a commonplace in cybersecurity to refer to ‘state-sponsored’ cyber-attacks: this reflects the challenge of attributing definitively to governments’ cyber operations that may be outsourced to non-state actors or otherwise frustrate state attribution through the use of proxies and anonymisers. In contrast to the launch of a missile, identifying the origin of a cyber-attack can require a substantial amount of ‘tracking back’, which can take time. By way of illustration, it took seven months to attribute the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack, which infected computers in more than 150 countries and led to the declaration of a major incident in the UK’s National Health Service, to ‘cyber affiliates of the North Korean government’ (Smart, 2018; The White House, 2017). The hack and leak of the US Democratic National Committee’s email server in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election has been attributed to Russian hacking group APT 28 (aka Fancy Bear). APT 28 has in turn been identified by the US and UK governments as a front for the Russian GRU intelligence service: in 2018, the United States indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers on 11 counts, including two counts of Conspiracy to Commit an Offense Against the United States (Mueller, 2018; Foreign & Commonwealth Office, 2018). Legal scholars are divided on whether the 2016 hack constituted a violation of international law, specifically the principle of non-intervention. While there is some consensus that digital influence operations can violate the principle of nonintervention in another state’s internal affairs, achieving agreement on whether they have the required coercive effect to constitute intervention has proved more problematic (Hollis, 2018; Ohlin, 2017; Tsagourias, 2019). Tallinn 2.0 defines coercion as ‘an affirmative act designed to deprive another State of its freedom of choice,

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that is, to force that State to act in an involuntary manner or involuntarily refrain from acting in a particular way’ (Schmitt, 2017, Rule 66). In light of this requirement, the efforts of researchers, lawyers and media commentators to quantify the impact of Russian cyber operations on political outcomes in the United States and Europe are both warranted and unsurprising. On the issue of coordinated disinformation operations, the Tallinn experts were somewhat more confident: With regard to propaganda . . . its transmission into other States is generally not a violation of sovereignty. However, the transmission of propaganda, depending on its nature, might violate other rules of international law. For instance, propaganda designed to incite civil unrest in another State would likely violate the prohibition of intervention. (Schmitt, 2017, Rule 66) In the words of the Tallinn Manual’s editor, lack of clarity concerning remote electoral interference ‘comprises a normative grey zone ripe for exploitation by States and non-State actors’ (Schmitt, 2018, p. 30). Accordingly, the UN GGE has sought both to broaden the concept of state responsibility and to encourage clarification through international cooperation. Among the confidence-building measures proposed in the 2013 report, States are encouraged to consider developing ‘enhanced mechanisms for law enforcement cooperation to reduce incidents that could otherwise be misinterpreted as hostile State actions would improve international security’ (A/68/98* IV 26.f.). The 2015 report includes within its proposed norms that ‘States should not knowingly allow their territory to be used for internationally wrongful acts using ICTs’ (A/70/174 III 13.c.). Given the blurring of the distinction between state and non-state operations in cyberspace, the inclusion of non-state actors among the stakeholders for cyber norm development is entirely appropriate. At the same time, the opinion that foreign disinformation operations may constitute a violation of the non-intervention principle puts corporations such as social media platforms in the unenviable position of facilitating violations of international law, however unwittingly. Online service providers operating in multiple countries now find themselves targets and vectors of demonstrations of digital sovereignty. State Preoccupations of Digital Sovereignty

In the first 20  years of global internet access, countries around the world have grappled with how to apply their domestic legislation to cyberspace. The principle that everything accessible in a certain territory is within that territory’s jurisdiction proves impractical unless that access can be restricted domestically. This has led to the Chinese approach, the so-called Great Firewall of China, restricting access to information and services deemed ideologically undesirable; but also to the passing of legislation, as Russia’s 2014 Information Act or ‘Bloggers’ Law’, imposing data

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sovereignty on internet content and traffic by the very fact that all web services are required to store the user data of Russian citizens on servers within the territory. In June 2020, the European Court of Human Rights (2020) ruled that the blocking of websites failing to comply with the Act was a violation of the right to freedom of expression as set out in Article 10 of the ECHR. This proactive application of jurisdiction appears to be part of a wider program to create a national internet. The Sovereign Internet bill signed by Vladimir Putin in May 2019 was followed by a reportedly successful test of what is now being popularly referred to as the ‘Sovereign Runet’ – an internet capable of being disconnected from international infrastructure (Tsydenova, 2019). An internet that is domestically isolated can be shut down. Passed by consensus in 2016, UN Human Rights Council resolution A/HRC/32/L.20 both ‘recognizes the global and open nature of the Internet as a driving force in accelerating progress towards development in its various forms’ and ‘condemns unequivocally measures to intentionally prevent or disrupt access to or dissemination of information online in violation of international human rights law and calls on all States to refrain from and cease such measures’. Despite this, internet throttling and shutdowns have become tactics of choice for states. Digital rights non-profit Access Now reported 213 documented shutdowns in 2019 across 33 countries, of which India accounted for 121 (Taye, 2020). Shutdowns for political reasons – for example, during elections or protests – point to their use as tools to restrict freedom of expression, including that concerning human rights abuses (Article 19, 2020). Nor are they always temporary. More lengthy throttling measures, such as the 472-day ban on access to social media in Chad in 2018–2019, speak to the restriction of speech and access to information online as a persistent trend in many countries that do not necessarily fit into the Cold War mould of authoritarian states. As A/HRC/32/L.20 highlights, the designation of measures intended to disrupt access to information as violations of international human rights law creates an additional tension in light of digital technology’s own disruptive quality. By this statement the UN Human Rights Council – and more specifically the states in its membership – is cast in the role of defending the disruptor (digital technology) against state disruption. As per the feedback loop outlined by Bjola and Kornprobst in the introduction to this volume, the inclusion of digital technology in multilateral human rights governance forces a re-shaping of intra-order relations. Differing opinions over the extent to which governments should restrict access to the internet and its content has in turn manifested in competing proposals for international legal instruments. The global popularity of services provided by US and Chinese tech companies adds an additional layer of complexity. US companies are correctly supposed to be supportive of ‘Western’, less restrictive approaches to internet regulation. As regards internet content, US platforms are protected in the first instance by the US Communications Decency Act (CDA) 1996, also known as Section 230, which stipulates that ‘No provider or user of an interactive computer

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service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider’ (47 U.S.C. §230(c)1). The CDA also provides ‘Good Samaritan’ protection for providers, specifically that any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected. (47 U.S.C. §230(c)2(A)) In this context, attempts by other national governments to exercise legal control over content either accessible by their citizens or using domestic infrastructure are as much foreign policy statements of resistance to US technological hegemony as they are internal safety and security measures. While President Trump was bent on preventing censorship of online content, as demonstrated in a May 2020 Executive Order, legislative instruments such as the German 2017 Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) that seek to impose financial penalties for non-removal of content deemed domestically illegal, including Holocaust denial, issue a clear challenge to US companies to choose whether they are truly global providers, or extensions of the US technological complex (Delcker, 2018; The White House, 2020).3 Facebook’s October 2020 announcement prohibiting Holocaust denial or distortion content suggests a choice of the former. Chinese companies such as Huawei, meanwhile, have been depicted as threats to national security by the United States in particular, precisely because of their proximity to – and alleged control by – the Chinese government (Federal Communications Commission, 2020). In this scenario, measures aimed at preserving internal digital sovereignty are thus reactions to others’ practice of external sovereignty in the form of techno-nationalism. Digital Sovereignty Versus Techno-nationalism

The concept of techno-nationalism pre-dates the current debate over the power and state proximity of the largest global tech companies (Montresor, 2001). Originally used to denote 20th-century nationalising stances towards – and rhetoric of – manufacturing, oil production, aviation and innovation in general (Edgerton, 2007, 2020), it now popularly refers to foreign policy that seeks to leverage communications technology for a state’s wider strategic aims and is often seen as a reversal of the tendency towards globalisation (Capri, 2020; Rajan, 2018; World Economic Forum, 2019). As Otero-Iglesias notes elsewhere in this volume, the United States and China are the leading actors in this techno-nationalist drama. While apparently co-opted into a larger trade war, the designation of Huawei as a national security threat to the

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United States speaks both to the problem of attribution of cyber operations in international law and to digital sovereignty. Domestic Chinese cybersecurity legislation requires network operators in the country to ‘cooperate with cybersecurity and informatization departments and relevant departments in conducting implementation of supervision and inspections in accordance with the law’ (People’s Republic of China, 2017, Art. 49). Following that logic, the FBI has asserted that ‘Beijing could likely use these authorities and policies to compel access to U.S. commercial and sensitive personal data, including sensitive information stored or transmitted through Chinese systems’ (Wallace, 2020). A further draft security law published in July 2020 seeks to apply extraterritorial jurisdiction on entities outside China that engage in ‘data activities that harm the national security, the public interest, or the lawful interests of citizens or organizations of the People’s Republic of China’ (People’s Republic of China, 2020, Art.2), and the adoption of counter-measures ‘for any country or region that adopts discriminatory prohibitions, limitations or other such measures toward the People’s Republic of China with respect to investment or trade related to data, data development and use, or technology’ (Art.24). The identification of technology transfer sanctions as a security issue, and the provision in law for retaliation, epitomises techno-nationalism’s convolution of international relations, economic policy and technological innovation. President Trump’s 2019 Executive Order prohibiting the incorporation of ‘information and communications technology or services designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied, by persons owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of a foreign adversary’ is similarly techno-nationalist in its intent and impact (The White House, 2019). Designation of such technology as an ‘extraordinary threat to the national security’ has also created a space in which to exert diplomatic pressure on other nations to remove Huawei components from their telecommunications infrastructure. While moves to effectively ban Huawei’s involvement in 5G infrastructure in Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom may to some degree be seen as exercises of these countries’ digital sovereignty, concerns expressed by network providers over the resulting economic impact and delay to 5G rollout speak to a hampering of sovereign digital innovation (Assembly, 2019; Bloomberg, 2019). The suggestion that Iran’s construction of a National Information Network has been accelerated by US trade sanctions merits further consideration (Article 19, 2020; Harrell & Anderson, 2018). By dint of the United States’ global technological hegemony, US trade sanctions restrict the extent to which a country can interact with globally popular platforms and online services. In this respect, the exercise of trade sovereignty by one state can trigger a more robust exercise of digital sovereignty in another. This is not the preserve solely of authoritarian regimes, as aborted attempts to establish ‘sovereign clouds’ and a sovereign operating system in France demonstrate (Gueham, 2017).

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Digital Sovereignty as Sovereign Innovation

A somewhat less contentious conceptualisation of digital sovereignty is articulated by the European Parliament (Madiega, 2020). Defining the term as ‘Europe’s ability to act independently in the digital world’, and discussing the idea in the context of an identified need for ‘strategic autonomy’, digital sovereignty is here conceived as a techno-regionalist Europe First policy, focused as much on the fostering of innovation and competition as on the exertion of control. Data protection and privacy distinguish this approach: referencing the role of US companies in surveillance capitalism and invalidated arrangements for transatlantic data transfer, it frames digital sovereignty also as the ability of citizens to recover control over their data. Like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it has an ethical flavour that refocuses governance of digital technology on citizen rights and opportunities (Madiega, 2020, p. 3). For the European Parliament, technological hegemony is not solely the preserve of the United States. Chinese companies’ influence is noted as a concern, particularly reliance on Chinese 5G infrastructure (Madiega, 2020, p. 4). Among the 24 possible initiatives for strengthening Europe’s digital sovereignty listed are the inclusion of ‘data sovereignty’ clauses in public procurement contracts, amendments to GDPR and revision to the Network and Information Security (NIS) Directive, the establishment of an EU Joint Cybersecurity Unit, common standards for 5G and Internet of Things (IoT), legislation for ethical use of facial recognition, and new instruments to assess acquisitions of EU tech companies. While the proposals are ambitious, the precedent of GDPR instils hope that at least some of them could be achieved. Moreover, there is every reason to expect that the European Union will continue to be considered something of a model for digital governance. GDPR’s impact on data processing procedures worldwide and the European Commission’s investigations into large US tech companies’ acquisitions speak to the ability of the bloc to lead multilateral regulatory efforts by example (European Commission, 2017; Scott & Larger, 2019), while the recently unveiled Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts are already being hailed as possible blueprints for regulating Big Tech (Browne, 2020; European Commission, 2021; Perrigo, 2020). Recalling the introduction to this book, we may observe that state-based efforts to regulate in the interest of digital sovereignty are attempts to control the very sources of digital disruption identified by Bjola and Kornprobst. Techno-nationalist and sovereign innovationist policies promote state-sanctioned datafication which is necessarily less generative and spontaneous: at their most restrictive, they determine not only how data can be used, but who can develop technology that disrupts. The enforcement of censored, sovereign internet pushes back against the inherent pervasiveness of digital disruption. Meanwhile, regulatory proposals – especially those requiring international assent – challenge the speed of technological development, decelerating by default or by design. National and some multilateral initiatives have sought to apply the brakes on aspects of digital technology perceived

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to be outside governments’ effective control. More than simply aiming at rule creation, they seek to ‘regulate’ also in respect of controlling the rate and extent of disruption. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that alternative, multistakeholder governance paradigms have advocated a lighter regulatory touch, with a focus more on fostering responsible behaviour than on physical, logical and social control. Alternative Governance Paradigms

Recent years have seen the emergence of a host of multistakeholder cyberspace governance ventures, among them the UN’s Internet Governance Forum, the 2014 NETMundial conference, the Paris Call, the establishment of the Cyber Peace Institute, and thematic initiatives, such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) and Christchurch Call to Eliminate Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content Online. Along with fellow technology leaders, Microsoft has shown its support for these as a listed sponsor of activities and/or by means of explicit endorsements (Microsoft, 2014, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c). Microsoft’s listing as a leading partner (second only to the government of The Netherlands) of The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC) demonstrates the corporation’s commitment to inclusive cyber norm development. Established at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and the East West Institute in 2017, the GCSC’s commissioners hail from the United States, United Kingdom, the European Union, Israel and Japan – opponents to the 2019 UN resolution to explore a new international convention – but also from its core supporters, Russia and China. While on balance it is still ‘US heavy’ (8 out of 25 commissioners, and 1 of the 2 co-chairs), the engagement of experts from the opposing governance ideology, also from India, Nigeria, Brazil, South Africa, Singapore and Malaysia, may be seen as a conscious inclusion effort. Convened to make specific recommendations, the GCSC’s (2019) report identified the following principles as equally critical to advancing cyberstability: • Responsibility: Everyone is responsible for ensuring the stability of cyberspace. • Restraint: No state or non-state actor should take actions that impair the stability of cyberspace. • Requirement to Act: State or non-state actors should take reasonable and appropriate steps to ensure the stability of cyberspace. • Respect for Human Rights: Efforts to ensure the stability of cyberspace must respect human rights and the rule of law. There is much that is familiar, but also notable novelty. The principle of responsibility has a heritage in the International Law Commission’s Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for International Wrongful Acts (International Law Commission, 2001). The Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations continued the focus on state responsibility, asserting that ‘A State

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bears international responsibility for a cyber-related act that is attributable to the State and that constitutes a breach of an international legal obligation’ (Schmitt, 2017, Rule 14). For its part, the UN General Assembly GGE reported in 2015 that ‘While States have a primary responsibility to maintain a secure and peaceful ICT environment, international cooperation would benefit from the appropriate participation of the private sector, academia and civil society’ (A/70/174, p. 2). The GCSC’s (2019, p. 18) reference to ‘everyone’ is a clear extension of responsibility to individuals: While it may be obvious that those responsible for government cyber policies and employees that manage cloud services have a role to play, every individual connected to cyberspace must take reasonable efforts to ensure their own devices are not compromised and, perhaps, used in attacks. The identification of shared, bottom-up responsibility as critical to ensuring the stability of cyberspace is a clear departure from international law’s focus on state responsibility. It is unclear how that shared responsibility could be reflected in any legal instrument based on this principle. The GCSC’s application of the principle of restraint to non-state actors consciously extends the focus from the 2015 UN GGE’s recommendation that states should ‘prevent ICT practices that are acknowledged to be harmful or that may pose threats to international peace and security’ (A/70/174, p. 7). The Requirement to Act is likewise applied to private companies and individuals. The justification for including individuals in this requirement reflects the asymmetric nature of cyberattacks: ‘individuals can ensure they are employing best practices, such as upgrading, patching, and using multifactor authentication, to reduce the risk that botnets will take over their machines and then be used to launch broad-based attacks that threaten the stability of cyberspace’ (Global Commission, 2019, p. 19). The basic digital hygiene of billions of citizens is presented as a critical success factor. Minimum compliance with the Human Rights Principle advanced requires ‘that states abide by their human rights obligations under international law as they engage in activities in cyberspace’ (Global Commission, 2019, p. 19). Reference is made specifically to UN General Assembly resolutions 68/167 and 69/166 on The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age. These documents’ deep concern at the negative impact that surveillance and/or interception of communications, including extraterritorial surveillance and/or interception of communications, as well as the collection of personal data, in particular when carried out on a mass scale, may have on the exercise and enjoyment of human rights betrays the difficult geopolitical climate following Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 of large-scale surveillance by US authorities.

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Accordingly, both resolutions extend to digital communication the right to privacy enshrined in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Resolution 69/166 goes further, noting with deep concern that, in many countries, persons and organizations engaged in promoting and defending human rights and fundamental freedoms frequently face threats and harassment and suffer insecurity as well as unlawful or arbitrary interference with their right to privacy as a result of their activities. [original emphasis] The subsequent warning that ‘while concerns about public security may justify the gathering and protection of certain sensitive information, States must ensure full compliance with their obligations under international human rights law’ highlights the extent to which the widespread adoption of digital communications and surveillance technologies has both heightened the tension between privacy and security and disrupted the application of international human rights law. The GCSC’s proposed norms (2019, p. 8) build on those adopted by the UN GGE in 2015 (A/70/174, p. 7). Where the latter called on states to ‘not knowingly allow their territory to be used for internationally wrongful acts using ICTs’, the former calls on state and non-state actors to ‘neither conduct nor knowingly allow activity that intentionally and substantially damages the general availability or integrity of the public core of the Internet’, ‘not pursue, support or allow cyber operations intended to disrupt the technical infrastructure essential to elections, referenda or plebiscites’, and ‘not tamper with products and services in development and production, nor allow them to be tampered with, if doing so may substantially impair the stability of cyberspace’ [emphasis added]. The GCSC’s proposed norms also have a more technical flavour than those of the UN GGE: state and non-state actors ‘should not commandeer the general public’s ICT resources for use as botnets or for similar purposes’; developers should ‘(1) prioritize security and stability, (2) take reasonable steps to ensure that their products or services are free from significant vulnerabilities, and (3) take measures to timely mitigate vulnerabilities’. Here, too, non-state actors have both agency and practical responsibility. While not of themselves legally binding, the GCSC’s hope that these additional norms should over time be adopted, implemented and serve to hold accountable those who violate them (2019, p. 22), highlights the role of non-state actors in these activities. Special mention is made of the expanded role of the private sector in exposing, documenting and attributing attacks, of which Facebook’s reporting on information operations appearing to originate in Russia is a prominent example from recent years (Stamos, 2017; Weedon, Nuland, & Stamos, 2017). Nonstate actors are also called upon to ‘take a greater role in holding norms violators accountable for transgressions’. Selection of the boycott of the Saudi Future Investment Initiative following the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi as an example

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of private sector norms enforcement worthy of ‘further examination’ is particularly apposite in the context of cyberspace governance, given allegations that the Saudi government used NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to intercept Khashoggi’s communications (Kirkpatrick, 2018). Public reporting of the 2018 hack of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ mobile phone by means of a WhatsApp message apparently sent from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and WhatsApp’s lawsuit against NSO Group for compromising the accounts of its users, perhaps also serve as signals for how this private sector enforcement could manifest in future (Kirchgaessner, 2020a, 2020b). Multilateral fora also appear to be preparing for a future in which the digital technology industry takes a more active role in cyberspace governance. Never the Twain? Microsoft at the UN, and the Open-Ended Working Group

On 17 September 2020, Microsoft officially opened its United Nations representation office. As its lead, John Frank, acknowledged, the establishment of such an office – or perhaps rather an office that openly promotes itself as such – was an unprecedented step: ‘I don’t think any other company has set up an office like this, so I think we’re the first. I do think we’re pioneering this’. In a blog published to coincide with the opening of the 75th session, Frank set out the corporation’s priorities: ‘human rights, defending democracy, economic growth, education, broadband, environmental sustainability and digital empowerment of the UN itself. At the end of the day, they all roll up to global governance’ (Microsoft, 2020b). An earlier statement (Microsoft, 2020a) serves also as a call to action: A series of crises have exposed the fragility of our global governance systems and institutions. Given the scale of challenges we face today, the need for reform is clear, but the international community has yet to elaborate and agree upon the necessary solutions. Now is the time to think more broadly and reimagine what effective, inclusive global governance can do for society, and to strengthen the systems and institutions that are tasked with this work. The corporation’s clear signal of its intention to influence global governance – not merely technology governance – highlights leading technology companies’ triple role in the sphere of international relations. They are at one and the same time the subject of proposed regulation, service providers to state parties, and partners in the development and delivery of global solutions: ‘We’re not a government; we don’t pretend to be. There are some things that we don’t get invited to, but there are things that we can help with’ (Microsoft, 2020b). To coincide with the opening of the 75th session, Microsoft published white papers on its work towards the Sustainable Development Goals, and the issue of Digital Peace in Cyberspace (Art & Emejulu, 2020a, 2020b). These were by no

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means its first forays into advocacy for international law: in 2017, its President, Brad Smith, announced the publication of the corporation’s policy paper advancing a Digital Geneva Convention to protect cyberspace (Microsoft, 2017). The corporation’s increasingly active participation in the cyberspace governance debate has not gone unnoticed. Identifying Microsoft as falling into Finnemore and Hollis’ (2016) category of ‘norm entrepreneur’, an actor who may ‘frame the issue, articulate the norm, and organize support’, Hurel and Lobato (2018) conclude that Not only does the company focus on changing the behaviour of states regarding global cybersecurity norms, but also seeks to stretch its own legitimacy beyond technical and economic services to influence international diplomatic efforts at the forefront of global cybersecurity debates.4 Meanwhile, following the failure of the 2016/2017 GGE process there are indications that a parallel multilateral deliberative process is proving more promising. The UN General Assembly’s 2018 decision to convene an Open Ended Working Group (OEWG) on developments in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security had among its stated objectives ‘making the United Nations negotiation process on security in the use of information and communications technologies more democratic, inclusive and transparent’, and ‘to further develop the rules, norms and principles of responsible behaviour of States . . . and the ways for their implementation’ on a consensus basis (A/RES/73/27). Meeting throughout 2019 and 2020, the OEWG process succeeded in engaging a larger number of states than the more restrictive membership of the GGE. China, Cuba, India, Iran, the Non-Aligned Movement, Pakistan and others contributed written submissions on specific language proposals for rules, norms and principles (United Nations General Assembly, 2021a).5 These reveal familiar preoccupations, among them a Chinese focus on sovereignty and suggested text aimed at countering US tech dominance: ‘States should not exploit their dominant position in ICTs, including dominance in resources, critical ICT infrastructures and core technologies, ICT goods and services to undermine other states’ right to independent control of ICT goods and services as well as their security’; but also the apparent emergence of new leadership, evidenced for example in Canada’s extensive contribution on practical guidance for norm implementation. The process has therefore been a much needed demonstration and restatement of the principle of sovereign equality enshrined in the UN Charter. The OEWG has also succeeded in engaging numerous non-state actors in intersessional consultation, including IGOs, NGOs, Microsoft and Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky.6 While inviting industry opinion on matters of cyberspace governance is itself nothing new, the inclusion in the process of an opportunity for them to both comment on the group’s reporting, and even suggest new norms and confidence building measures, is evidence of a growing acceptance of technology providers’ role as norm entrepreneurs. So, Microsoft’s dual written submission

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(2020c, 2020d) advocates for the establishment of a repository on national statements on the applicability of international law to cyberspace, confidence building measures (CBMs), capacity building and new norms, and affirms ‘the vital role of the United Nations’: in addition to new norms and CBMs, Kaspersky (2020) recommends the development of a consensus-based lexicon of terminology relevant to ICT governance. The deliberations of the OEWG thus have something of a hybrid quality, employing a multistakeholder process to deliver multilateral responses. To draw on the framing used at the start of this book, by reflecting the multiplex reality of the cyberspace governance community, they acknowledge the reconfiguring of its ordering processes. Perhaps because they resist neat categorisation as sovereigntist/statist OR (US-backed) multistakeholder, they arguably represent the most promising current initiative in international cyberspace law. Concluding Thoughts, Future Outlook

Assessments of international law, and indeed multilateralism, as in crisis over cyberspace are attractive and familiar: notions of deadlock speak to Cold War divisions between control and freedom that to some extent map to sovereigntist/statist and multistakeholder paradigms for cyberspace governance.7 But this overlooks the multipolarity of states’ positions on digital technology: a close reading of the zero draft of the OEWG report and analysis of state voting patterns reveals preoccupations of digital sovereignty that are as much about resisting US technological hegemony and designations of cyberspace as a conflict zone as about controlling internet content and access. When even the multistakeholder paradigm is eyed with suspicion as an engine of US influence, the need for a truly inclusive approach is clear. There is cause for those dejected by the failure of the 2016/2017 GGE process to be cautiously optimistic: the engagement of many more states in the OEWG process, and the extension of at least informal participation to the private sector and civil society, suggests that there is renewed hope for multiateral regulation with multistakeholder influence. Microsoft’s rationale for establishment at the UN aligns with this paradigm: while it is not unprecedented, the extent to which corporations have publicly taken a lead in shaping legal and non-binding norms may be, the comparative speed at which technology providers can respond mirroring that of urban networks as observed by Ashbrook elsewhere in this volume. Both these developments align with the view expressed by Kornprobst and Bjola in the introduction to this volume that digital disruption, through datafication, its speed and its pervasiveness, reconfigures traditional agential and ordering processes in international relations, and demands new foreground institutions for their deliberation. That is not to say that the long-term future of cyberspace governance is any more certain or clear. France’s call in October 2020 for a Programme of Action to end the dual track discussions in the GGE and OEWG, and establish ‘a permanent UN forum to consider the use of ICTs by States in the context of international security’, backed by 43 states from five continents, may indicate frustration with

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the ‘messiness’ of multilateral deliberations, and also growing consensus of the need for greater order (UN Office for Disarmament Affairs, 2020). According to another line of thinking, multiple initiatives may help generate greater consensus and norm-setting momentum: in Joseph Nye’s (2018, p. 25) words, ‘at this stage, many homes may be better than one or none’. Nye’s (2014) mapping of a ‘regime complex’ for cyberspace governance is a helpful hermeneutic for appreciating the already crowded (multi)stakeholder environment and the potential impact of fostering norms in multiple fora simultaneously. Separating cyberspace governance into sub-issues of internet governance, cyber conflict, responsible behaviour in peacetime, criminal investigation and the like risks generating misalignment and difficulties in implementation, as the EU has already experienced in matters relating to the ability of corporations to detect illegal content under the European Electronic Communications Code (European Parliament, 2020); nevertheless, it breaks the issue into more manageable pieces, and allows for acceleration by means of cross-fertilisation. Thanks to the disruptive speed of its development, digital technology is always novel. Increasing calls for regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), only serve to highlight the urgency of establishing international consensus on the lawful use of digital technology. For all that regulatory responses lag behind, a few months can be a long time in international relations, particularly when a leading power undergoes regime change. At the time of writing (early 2021) there is considerable speculation on President Biden’s cybersecurity policy, and his stance towards Russia and China. However the US proceeds in cyberspace governance deliberations, greater synergy between multilateral and multistakeholder efforts embodied by the UN OEWG and Microsoft’s activities suggest the emergence of a practical way out of the deadlock, one that may succeed precisely because it challenges established notions of who should be at the table, and how they should contribute. Scholarly and stakeholder hopes have been dashed several times before: nevertheless, there are signs that we may be starting to see the end of the beginning. Notes 1 While perhaps the best-known, Barlow’s piece is by no means the earliest exploration of this legal status: see, for example, Trotter Hardy (1994). 2 See also Henderson (2015) and Tikk-Ringas (2016). 3 ‘What Mark Zuckerberg wishes or demands for the American or international market is not possible in Germany’: German Justice Ministry spokesperson, quoted in Delcker (2018). 4 For Microsoft’s role in international norm creation, see also Fairbank (2019). 5 See also now the group’s final report (United Nations General Assembly, 2021b) and Chair’s summary (United Nations General Assembly, 2021c), both issued March 2021. 6 A full list of state and non-state contributions can be found at https://www.un.org/disar mament/open-ended-working-group/ (accessed 14 March 2021). 7 See Mačák (2017) for a systematic discussion of the relevant crisis indicators.

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CONCLUSION Upgrading, Augmenting and Rewiring the Discipline Corneliu Bjola and Markus Kornprobst

Introduction

The purpose of this conclusion is to discuss the implications of the findings of this book for the discipline of International Relations (IR). With international relations becoming increasingly digitalised, we need to reflect on how a ‘digital turn’ in IR, which is already underway, is to change our discipline. This chapter makes a case for moving from IR to Digital International Relations (DIR). Digital international relations have been steadily building up for decades already. The arrival of a new generation of algorithmic-driven digital technologies has added momentum to efforts seeking to theoretically amend and re-code the ‘old’ IR in response to the disruptive impact of digital technologies. This book studied digital international relations, defined as the disruptive interplay of digital technologies and power structures in global politics responsible for altering ontological foundations of agency, shaping hybrid patterns of conflict and cooperation, and streaming the formation of new international political orders. Drawing on this definition, we proposed a digital disruption map to study the crisscrossing of technological, agential and ordering processes. The definition and the map are deliberately broad and eclectic as we seek to encourage IR scholars to step out of their conceptual comfort zone and explore new vocabularies (see discussion below on upgrading, augmenting and rewiring the IR discipline) that promise to better capture the (meta-)theoretical underpinnings of DIR. At the same time, our framework highlights critical elements of continuity between IR and DIR. For as much as agential and ordering processes change amidst digital disruption, they remain key analytical categories for studying digital international relations. This can help chart the (meta-)theoretical highways on which DIR is expected to travel. DOI: 10.4324/9781003437963-15

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This conclusion is organised into five sections. First, we summarise the main findings of the individual chapters. Second, we point to signposts for how to travel from IR to DIR. Third, we illustrate these signposts by discussing the study of artificial intelligence. Fourth, we discuss what signposts might be most promising to be put to use in scholarly research. Fifth, we reflect upon how the transformation from IR to DIR is likely to change – and ought to change – the ways we study world politics. Summary

The speed and pervasiveness of datafication do not automatically remake international relations. Our digital disruption map puts agential processes at the centre. It is political agents who let their doings be infused by digital technological processes or who pro-actively introduce the latter to the former. Some entries of digitally disrupted agential processes, coming to be used over and over, even come to sediment into ordering processes. Agential and ordering processes then feed back to technological processes, adding to sources of digital disruption. The contributors to this book show that such a nuanced view of how digital elements come to reconfigure international relations is warranted, indeed. On the one hand, they concur that the digital transformation of international relations is very much happening. No matter from what theoretical angle our authors look at this evolutionary change and no matter what functional order of international relations they put under scrutiny, they find evidence for the digital transformation of world politics. This prompts Harknett to revisit the core assumptions of realism, Drieschova and Hall to broaden the research agenda on transnational social movements, as well as Kello, Clüver-Ashbrook, Aradau, Giacomello and Eriksson to revisit questions about who has political efficacy in international politics. On the other hand, the contributions highlight that digital disruption finds its way into agential and ordering processes to varying degrees. At times, agential processes are affected but not ordering ones. Baines demonstrates that international actors discuss more and more how what sources of digital disruption are to reshape world politics. There are important debates about digital sovereignty and cyber-governance. From a legal point of view, however, these discussions rarely make a difference in re-ordering international relations. Since the agential processes, shaped by clashing views about how to order digital affairs, are highly contested, they barely affect ordering processes. Digital international law remains in its infancy. Hall’s contention is about how digital disruption makes it into agential and ordering processes, but the ordering effects remain mostly confined to the domestic level. Researching online advocacy movements, she qualifies that these movements campaign first and foremost within state borders. They are actually less transnational in nature than they are often assumed to be. With the campaigns focusing more on the state than deterritorialised space, their potential to re-make

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order is greater within states. Their potential to re-make international order, by contrast is more limited. Most contributors contend that it is not only agential but also international ordering processes that come to be reconfigured by digital disruption. Adapting key concepts of international relations theory to digital international relations, Harknett, Kello and Otero-Iglesias contend that digital disruption fundamentally transforms ordering processes. Harknett moves from a traditional realist understanding of international politics as struggle for power to a novel one of international politics as struggle for autonomy among states. While reminding us that states continue to be important actors in world politics, Kello alludes to different kinds of actors and the ‘new balance of players’ that ensues in international politics. Otero-Iglesias draws from Strange’s conceptualisation of four dimensions of power (security, production, finance and knowledge) as structuring forces in world politics and address how a particular knowledge dimension, that is, digital know-how, reconfigures world order. Zooming in on the individual level of analysis, Giacomello and Eriksson echo this structural argument. Individuals with plenty of digital expertise, especially knowledge about how to design algorithms, make for a new kind of powerful actor, capable of shaping domestic and international orders. They refer to this kind of power as ‘nerd power’. A number of contributions deal with a particular aspect of new background ordering, that is, the re-making of the institution of diplomacy. Holmes and Wheeler inquire in-depth into how digital conferencing tools such as Zoom affect the interaction of diplomats. They contend that, while the production and reproduction of trust are possible even in digital encounters, the latter results in thinner social bonds than physical encounters do. Thus, it becomes more difficult for diplomacy to fulfil its ordering functions. Clüver-Ashbrook elaborates on new diplomatic actors. Global cities find it easier and easier to connect to one another and, therefore, metrodiplomacy is becoming a feature of international order. Studying the logic of connectivity, Drieschova contends that digital infrastructure has the potential to empower even low-tech individuals such as Greta Thunberg. Note that Clüver-Ashbrook’s and Drieschova’s chapters echo a point made by Kello, OteroIglesias as well as Giacomello and Eriksson. To a considerable extent, digital disruption re-shuffles agential possibilities. While the interplay of technological, agential and ordering processes is not all about radical change, some dimensions of it are. Aradau’s chapter underlines such far-reaching transformations. She traces the evolution of non-human agency (artificial intelligence) and discusses how the interplay of human and non-human agency comes to re-shape international ordering processes. Focusing on the international security order, she argues that agential changes have major effects on ordering processes. In the security field, the new paradigm of anticipatory security is in the making. And this may only be the beginning of even deeper ordering changes produced by the emergence of non-human and hybrid forms of agency.

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The remainder of this conclusion looks ahead into the future of the discipline. What do our findings mean for studying international relations? Tackling this question, we outline a ‘digital turn’ in International Relations. We reflect on how to move from IR to DIR. The Digital Turn: Signposts for Travelling From IR to DIR

Calls for new ‘turns’ in IR are inevitably controversial as they raise ambitious meta-theoretical questions to challenge what is deemed to constitute the ‘mainstream’ of IR. As Baele and Bettiza (2020) point out, the impact of these ‘turns’ is more likely to be felt at the ‘margins’ of the discipline, often resulting in the fragmentation of IR and the formation of ‘camp’ mentalities. We seek to pre-empt these epistemic hazards by advancing two interrelated qualifications about what a ‘digital turn’, in our view, entails and ought to accomplish. First, partly borrowing from Garfinkel (1981, p. 7) we refer to the ‘digital turn’ as problem-driven explanatory and normative frame of enquiry for studying digital international relations rather than a meta-theoretical project. As the contributions to this volume cogently illustrate, the frame is broad enough to inspire a vibrant research agenda for DIR without falling into the traps of narrowly confined (meta-)theoretical pigeonholes. Second, comparing with its predecessors, the objective of the ‘digital turn’ has little to do with the ambition to establish a new school of thought, alongside or in competition with traditional IR ‘-isms’. The purpose of the ‘digital turn’ is rather to stimulate an engaging conversation across IR traditions. It draws on their theoretical and methodological richness, while remaining agnostic about their ontological and epistemological assumptions, to examine the future of international politics in the digital age. That being said, what are the roads available to us to travel from IR to DIR? Putting it into metaphorical language borrowed from informational technology, we identify three signposts that may help us to orient ourselves: upgrading, augmenting and rewiring. Upgrading is akin to adding new software to the existing hardware of IR. If we stayed with upgrading, it would suffice to add digital aspects to existing approaches in the discipline. Textbook distinctions between, say, Realism, Liberalism and Constructivism or Critical Theory and Poststructuralism, would remain intelligible as vehicles for mapping contestation within the field. Upgrading could be done in different ways. To use Lakatos’s (1970) categories on research programs, one way could simply be to add auxiliary hypotheses to protect the core an existing research program such as Realism. Such hypotheses could then take care of extending the conceptual focus on security to cyber-security, military capabilities to digital capabilities, and, in the case of classical realism at least, diplomacy to digital diplomacy.1 While we do not dismiss this option, we do want to point out that Lakatos would be sceptical about it. It would signify to him that the research program

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is degenerative. A more promising variant of upgrading would be to re-visit the core of a research program (Elman & Elman, 2003, p. 28; Lakatos, 1970). This is exactly what Harknett does in this book. He moves from a struggle for power to a struggle for autonomy of states. Augmenting is about more fundamental changes to studying world politics. It is, to stay with the metaphor, about both new hardware and software. In the same way that digital augmentation transforms perceptions of reality by rendering data into real-world objects, DIR augmentation alters and expands the field of view by which to study international politics. The idea of hybridity is a good example. As a discipline focused on examining the systemic impact of physical interactions among international actors, the growing prevalence of virtual interactions has the potential to be highly disruptive. Current discussions regarding the role of avatars and digital humans as new vectors of social interaction suggest that the impact of these virtual interactions could be significant (Bjola, 2023; Freeman, Zamanifard, Maloney, & Adkins, 2020; Renieris, 2023). Unlike the upgrading dimension which seeks to solve IR puzzles using traditional and new concepts, the augmentation signpost is more about expanding the epistemic horizon that the digital sphere superimposes on the IR logic of inquiry of global ordering processes. The epistemic logic of these investigations thus relates less to their ability to generate digital ‘problemshifts’ in IR or to protect its ‘hard core’ of assumptions from digital incursions, but rather to their capacity to ‘shake up’ the reflexive intuitions that can shed light on the production of IR knowledge (Hamati-Ataya, 2013, pp. 685–686). Put differently, augmenting invites us to reflect upon what it means to theorise IR through a digital lens. What novel DIR methodological and empirical questions can be envisaged if digital IR research takes the centre stage, and in what ways may their new-found visibility reflexively inform our approaches to studying international relations? Finally, rewiring engages with the ethical ramifications that digital technologies extend to processes of global ordering. Depending on the preferred theoretical perspective, digital technologies are viewed as either the ‘great equalizer’ (Xiao, 2020; United Nations, 2019) or (increasingly) the ‘great divider’ of political, social and economic opportunities (McCarthy, 2016; Shejni, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). Either way, digital technologies are about to usher in an era of intensive and extensive contestation of the rules, norms and principles informing agential and global ordering processes. These normative contestations may overlap and amplify pre-existing battles for influence in world politics (Bettiza & Lewis, 2020). At the same time, they are also likely to invite new modes of formal, social and cultural validation of positions and issues on digital governance (Wiener, 2017a, p. 121), as current debates on digital sovereignty and cyber security already suggest. The ‘digital turn’ is thus bound to lay bare the sites, issues, and forms of normative contestation that digital disruption has activated in global politics and to stimulate novel ethical reflections about the conditions that can mitigate and possibly dissolve some of the emerging normative tensions and conflicts.

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An Illustration: Artificial Intelligence and International Relations

Artificial intelligence (AI), which refers to the design and use of intelligent systems able to simulate human reasoning and/or behaviour by applying sophisticated algorithms to process large volumes of data (High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, 2019, p. 6), is the technology with the strongest disruptive potential in international relations. It closely embraces and amplifies all three major sources of digital disruption discussed in this volume: datafication, speed and pervasiveness. While the quest for Artificial Intelligence has gone through multiple ‘seasons of hope and despair’ in the past decades (Bostrom, 2014, pp. 6–11), there is a growing consensus that the current stage of AI development is qualitatively different. Owing to the fast-paced development of complex machine and deep learning algorithms, AI applications have now reached the point at which they can learn on their own using statistical models and neural-like networks without being explicitly programmed. This allows state and non-state actors to process large volumes of data, extremely fast and in a pervasive manner that reaches deep into the fabric of domestic and international politics. AI disruption is therefore the next big test for IR but theorising about it could be challenging. This is where the upgrading, augmenting or rewiring signposts could prove enlightening as they are well configured to provide viable conceptual roadmaps. As mentioned earlier, the upgrading signpost is about adding digital aspects to existing approaches in the IR discipline based on the formula ‘take IR concept X and add AI’. Current research examining the broader ramifications of AI in world politics largely falls in this category. A significant fraction of these studies predictably focuses on military-strategic aspects involving the changing character of warfare or the AI impact on international stability (Horowitz et al., 2018; Johnson, 2020). AI is expected, for instance, to increase a nation’s military power by decreasing the amount of resources and time required to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and to wage twenty-first-century political warfare. However, its ability to produce disruptive change is likely to face limitations due to various constraints, including institutional integration and decision-making calculations (Jensen, Whyte,  & Cuomo, 2020). What is less clear is the impact that AI might have on the foundations of international order. For some, the AI race is already underway triggered by great powers’ drive to secure a ‘first-mover advantage’, and this could have large-scale consequences for the global balance of power. At the same time, the outcome remains uncertain, not least because AI’s impact is likely to be shaped by how people and organisations use the technology rather than by the technology itself (Horowitz, 2018, p. 54). The picture to emerge from existing national security studies is that the ‘upgrading’ is yet to move beyond the technological level. AI’s potential is being mapped and potential conditions that can open or close agential processes are being examined as the ongoing debate about the global ramifications of ChatGPT illustrates (Muñoz & Torreblanca, n.d.; Rotman, 2023) The difficulty of understanding the

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broader impact of AI on international order stems from the fact that the move from agential to ordering processes is yet to be theoretically ‘upgraded’. This situation does not only affect the national security domain. Studies examining the impact of AI in diplomacy and foreign policy or in international development have exposed a similar pattern, albeit with slight variations. AI is expected, for instance, to prompt MFAs and embassies to radically rethink their approaches to consular affairs, crisis management, public diplomacy and international negotiations, but the broader impact of these transformations on foreign policy remains unclear (Bjola, 2020). While current studies have made good progress in examining the potential contributions of AI to achieving sustainable development goals (Vinuesa et al., 2020) and identifying potential disruptive challenges (Goralski & Tan, 2020; McDuie‐Ra  & Gulson, 2020), the conditions for understanding the broader ramifications of global development are yet to be deciphered as well (Bjola, 2022). As AI technology continues to evolve, we should therefore expect DIR ‘upgrading’ to fill ever more theoretical gaps in the digital flow connecting agential to ordering processes and analysing their feedback effect on digital disruption. While upgrading is all about adding digital conceptual software to the IR hardware, the augmenting signpost features a more ambitious agenda. It seeks to expand the epistemic field of view by which international politics is studied. This involves not just new conceptual lenses but also novel methodological tools. Computational methods have established a presence in a variety of social science disciplines, including sociology (Edelmann, Wolff, Montagne,  & Bail, 2020) and communication studies (Theocharis & Jungherr, 2021), although surprisingly less so in IR.2 In their original manifesto, more than a decade ago, Lazer et al. powerfully argued that a new field, ‘computational social science’ (CSS) was emerging which leveraged ‘the capacity to collect and analyse data with an unprecedented breadth and depth and scale’ (Lazer et al., 2009, p. 722). Their call was echoed by other scholars, who agreed that the unprecedented availability of information on discrete behaviours, social expressions, personal connections and social alignments promised to revolutionise research in social sciences (Shah, Cappella, & Neuman, 2015). CSS is believed to be particularly well suited for building ‘virtual computational social worlds’ that researchers can use to analyse, experiment with, feed with and test against empirical data on a hitherto unprecedented scale. It is also useful for studying the process of emergence of novel social phenomena where individual intentions produce unexpected aggregate results, sometimes with potentially disastrous consequences (Conte et al., 2012, pp. 333–335). In essence, CSS combines a wide range of computational methods, including data mining, data visualisation, natural language processing, automated text analysis, web scraping, geospatial analysis, social network analysis and machine learning to link macro levels of theories on social and cultural change to microlevel processes of decision making. What differentiates CSS from other approaches in

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the social sciences is the combination of cross-disciplinary methodological innovations driven by the availability of new types of data or by data of a different scale than has been previously possible (Alvarez, 2016, p. 5). CSS features two main versions that broadly align themselves yet seek to transcend discussions regarding the contributions of deductive vs inductive approaches to science (Epstein, 1999). The most visible version, which is referred to as ‘social science at scale’, is data driven and emphasises Big Data analytics in order to find patterns, structure, and anomalies within increasingly large and live data. The less discussed CSS version, also known as ‘bottom-up’ or ‘generative social science’, emphasises modelling and simulation based on processes of decision-making to occur via individual and group interactions (Frank, 2017, p. 580). From an AI perspective, CSS can contribute to augmenting the study of digital IR by refining current methods and developing new approaches for tracing and explaining the emergence of agential and ordering processes. Drawing on the Agent-Based Models (ABM) literature (De Marchi & Page, 2014), the ‘generative’ CSS approach could be applied, for instance, to map out the ‘basins of attraction’ and the equilibrium distributions that may inform agential and ordering processes. Research in both areas can build on the ABM literature on political decision-­making (Qiu & Phang, 2020), social integration (Schelling, 1971; Sert, Bar-Yam, & Morales, 2020), as well as on more conventional ABM studies examining the formation of norms and world order (Cioffi-Revilla, 2017). Computational ABM models could shed light, for instance, on the conditions by which AI can affect the structure of incentives informing actors’ forcing, enticing, and winning-over strategies. As AI continues to evolve from ‘narrow’ to faster (‘speed superintelligence’), more synchronised (‘collective superintelligence’), and smarter (‘quality superintelligence’) forms (Bostrom, 2014, pp.  63–69), DIR researchers could also develop models of regional or global ordering. These models would involve data-driven analysis of the type of agents, environmental configurations and sequence of interactions that may shape cooperative versus competitive behaviour and facilitate the emergence of new institutions to address challenges generated by AI proliferation. Within the context of AI revolution, the third signpost, rewiring, has attracted unusual public and academic attention and for good reasons. The pervasive entrenchment of choice-inducing algorithms in almost every aspect of human life has fuelled concerns about human agency being gradually transformed by powerful AI techniques to the extent that people may lose their capacity for autonomous decision-making and turn instead into mere ‘choosing subjects’ (Kotliar, 2021). From a broader perspective, AI is perceived to alter the landscape of security risks for citizens, organisations and states by expanding on existing threats, introducing new threats, or modifying the typical character of threats. Malicious use of AI could threaten, for instance, digital security by lowering barriers for hacking and cyberattacks, physical security by increasing the scale of attacks via networks of

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autonomous systems, and political security through privacy-eliminating surveillance, profiling and repression, or through automated and targeted disinformation campaigns (Brundage et al., 2018). Managing these risks is not easy as the race for AI supremacy creates a complex ecology of choices that could push stake-holders to underestimate or even ignore ethical and safety procedures (Han, Pereira, Santos, & Lenaerts, 2020). The AI ‘rewiring’ challenge for IR is well illustrated by the ‘Collingridge Dilemma’: although new technology can be best controlled in its early stages, not enough can be known about its harmful social consequences at this stage; by the time these consequences are apparent, control has become costly and slow (Collingridge, 1980, p. 19). Overcoming the ‘Collingridge Dilemma’ is not easy. It requires a precautionary approach and the reinforcement of responsibilities in research and innovation rather than the attenuation of accountabilities (Genus & Stirling, 2018, p. 67). In the context of digital IR, this translates into a quest for designing innovative ethical frameworks to oversee agential and ordering processes. On the agential part, good progress has been made in designing recommendations to support the adoption of ethically accountable AI applications, such as the five core principles of beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy, justice and explicability (Floridi & Cowls, 2019). On the ordering part, the AI for Social Good (AI4SG) movement has set out to build support for the design, development and deployment of AI systems in ways that help prevent, mitigate and resolve problems adversely affecting human and natural life without introducing new forms of harm or amplifying existing disparities and inequities (Cowls, Tsamados, Taddeo, & Floridi, 2021, p. 112). In the short and medium term, the most likely challenge for the normative rewiring of IR will be AI-driven digital authoritarianism. The latter refers to ‘the use of digital information technology by authoritarian regimes to surveil, repress, and manipulate domestic and foreign populations’ (Polyakova & Meserole, 2019, p. 1), and it has the power to rewire IR at both the level of agential and ordering processes. Recent studies suggest that the ongoing trend witnessing the use of digital technologies in support of political repression rather than democratisation (Rød & Weidmann, 2015) is likely to accelerate and AI is the driving factor that could tilt the disruptive ‘needle’ further on the digital authoritarian side (Dragu & Lupu, 2021). The implications for the global order could be far reaching. Digital authoritarianism will likely bolster the power of existing authoritarian states, encourage semi-democratic states to adopt authoritarian models and further weaken the domestic and international standing of democratic states (Sherman, 2021). From a DIR ‘rewiring’ perspective, ethical questions concerning the mechanisms and policies by which agential and ordering processes can be fine-tuned to arrest and derail the rise of digital authoritarianism would become critically important. As this final chapter suggests, the time to reflect upon and address these questions could not come soon enough.

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Which Signposts to Put to Use?

While we think that there is added value in putting to use any of these signposts for moving towards DIR, we would caution against prioritising upgrading and neglecting augmenting and rewiring. These signposts point into directions that do not come all that natural to most IR scholars but they are vital for making sense of digital international relations. One would expect upgrading to dominate research in DIR, at least in the initial stage. In recent decades, the field has split up into more and more approaches, subfields and niches. It comes more natural to many IR scholars to upgrade the ‘allotment’ they have chosen or socialised into than to direct their gaze at the entire field (Grieco, 2019; Kornprobst, 2009). We are somewhat sceptical whether this is likely to change in DIR any time soon. Scholars are likely to continue to put their (often habitual) lenses to use. Whatever digital aspects they see through these lenses may prompt them to amend existing concepts, hypotheses and/or lines of critique. As suggested by the contributions to this volume, the security and military domains are the most likely IR arenas to undergo digital upgrading, but studies of political economy, foreign policy and environmental governance are moving fast to close the upgrading gap. Augmenting does not come easy to IR scholarship. It would require a reflexive perspective on the production of IR knowledge, the preparedness to leave one’s allotment behind, and daring to think outside of the box. Yet we would submit that this kind of methodological expansion of the current state of the art and moving beyond it would be important for the discipline’s explanatory power. Consider Aradau’s discussion of hybrid and even non-human agency in this book, for example. These new kinds of agency make for micro-foundations that are out of sync with any IR paradigm. We would hope that scholarly engagements with such pronounced qualitative breaks in how world politics is done will prompt scholars building bridges across different paradigms and disciplines (including overcoming the schism between the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences).3 Computational social science could provide such a methodological bridge as Big Data analytics or Agent-Based Modelling can help us better understand the emergence of agential and ordering processes. Otherwise, it will be difficult to rise to the major conceptual challenges lying ahead of us. Rewiring does not come easy either. Normative research in the discipline is also split up into a range of different approaches. Thus, normative theorising is unlikely to be a major exception to a prevailing trend to update. Yet, again, only upgrading today’s contending normative approaches will probably not do. The map we developed in the introduction, for example, is meant to facilitate upgrading as well as rewiring. But how many normative theories link up the evolution of technological, agential and ordering processes? Approaches more tending towards cosmopolitanism come down quite heavily on the agential side and more communitarian ones more on the ordering side. But the technological processes, save

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for very few exceptions (Cheah, 2006; Drieschova, 2021; Thorpe, 2008), remain excluded. Bringing these into the orbit of normative theorising as well as balancing agency and order in light of these technological processes appear to us important steps for moving normative international theory forward. This is badly needed. There are quite a few political debates about how to order – or not to order – digital international relations. Yet international theory offers precious little guidance in these debates. Doing DIR

The kinds of (meta-)theoretical and methodological innovations we have discussed earlier will not come easy. They presuppose that we do DIR differently from IR. Digital technology can help us upgrade and even augment and rewire. But this does not happen automatically. Once more, agency matters, and this time around it is the agency of us as scholars studying digital international relations. More than ever – and digital technology has a lot to do with this – can we conceive of our field of study in terms of networks. Yet digital technology does not broaden these networks all by itself or reconfigure the nodes in these networks. The expansion of opportunities to communicate may be seized only within ‘citation cartels’ (Checkel, 2004; Kratochwil, 2003) to maintain existing allotments or carve out ever smaller ones. Within these cartels, communicative power may be distributed very unequally into those who primarily listen and read on the one hand and those doing the speaking and writing on the other. Communication from allotment to allotment may be limited to occasional shouting matches that maintain the fences. IR has increasingly moved into this direction since the so-called Third Debate. There is no grand debate across different perspectives. Instead, there is a trend towards more and more paradigmatic compartments and communication across them has become increasingly difficult (Checkel, 2004; Grieco, 2019; Herrmann, 1998; Kristensen, 2012). The Annual International Studies Association’s Conference, for example, may move towards a digital format as it did in 2021 or incorporate more hybrid formats in the future. This alone, however, is very unlikely to reverse the trend. If panels still cater primarily to allotments, discussions continue to lack precisely the kinds of liminal spaces that can spark innovation.4 This is a kind of communicative configuration that makes upgrading difficult as well as augmenting and rewiring highly challenging. Research ought to involve heterogeneous exchange because this kind of exchange can produce novelty. If the exchange is seriously curtailed, we are much more likely to end up with the same old, or something very familiar, over and over. If DIR wants to steer clear of stale debates, it has to broaden networks and make communication within these networks more inclusive. To use Granovetter’s terminology, DIR ought to strive for many weak ties rather than a few strong ones (Granovetter, 1973). Such an endeavour would take four lines of criticism seriously

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that have been levelled at prevailing IR practices for quite some time: First, rather than focusing on their allotment, scholars would broaden their horizons and look at the entire field of study. This would not be equivalent to abandoning holding different perspectives. But it would mean to dare entering debates across perspectives and, equally important, being open to be convinced to revise one’s one perspective in light of these debates. Note that this is very much how the social (and natural) sciences describe the way they do science. For as pessimistic a scholar such as Bourdieu may have been about communication outside of academia, he fully embraced inclusive debates and the free flow of arguments for ‘homo academicus’ (Bourdieu, 1988; Swartz, 1997, pp. 247–269). Second, instead of studying the same players, topics and regions of the world, scholarship should embrace what Acharya (2016) calls ‘global IR’ and what, in the context of this book, one may refer to as ‘global DIR’. International Relations should not be reduced to, say, the study of great power politics, international security, US foreign policy or the European Union as an actor in international affairs. It ought to be about global politics in all its many different manifestations. This means, among other things, to re-direct the scholarly gaze towards regions that remain notoriously under-researched and ill-understood in the discipline. African and Asian regions come to mind immediately. Third, as understandable as it may be for a comparatively young discipline to build up disciplinary walls, studying international affairs requires us to reach out to other disciplines. Economics and Sociology have been important sources of inspiration in the past. They are likely to remain pertinent to our inter-discipline and so are other social sciences and humanities, ranging from Anthropology to History. Yet given the pace of technological innovation, we increasingly need to reach out to the science and technology (Ancarani, 1995; Weiss, 2005). Research on climate change or global health, for example, often needs to cross the divide between the social sciences and the natural sciences in order to generate meaningful research results. Fourth, there are not all that many exchanges between scholars, political practitioners and the broader public, and when they happen, they often end up being rather one-sided. Most notably, some scholars embrace the role of shouting messages from the rooftop of the supposed Ivory Tower that are highly contentious within the discipline but win over practitioners and/or the public because the epistemic stamp of ‘truth’ comes with shouting from this mighty rooftop. Note that this is very much opposed to how ‘homo academicus’ describes the way of how he or she generates knowledge. There is plenty of emphasis on uncertainty, scepticism and continuously checking truth claims with the help of peers. DIR makes it all the more important to take these four criticisms seriously. Simply continuing to nurture one’s own allotment makes following any of the signposts sketched above impossible. A fragmented discipline simply cannot generate the inter-perspectival sparks that it takes to upgrade, not even to speak of

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augmenting and rewiring. Moving beyond what Stanley Hoffmann (1977) once called ‘an American discipline’ as well as what Tickner (2013) identified as a Western (mainly US) core and a Southern periphery is all the more important for DIR. Otherwise, the digital divide, discussed above already, will simply reinforce these unequal relations. Digital disruptions can shake up these relations if scholars come up with novel formats and channels to exchange and produce research results in more inclusive fashion. But this certainly does not happen all by itself. DIR simply cannot afford just looking at ‘IR’ without the ‘D’ and grasping the ‘D’ has a lot to do with engaging across the social and natural sciences divide. DIR is an interdiscipline par excellence. Finally, if DIR simply continues IR practices of shouting messages from the rooftop, it will participate in ever more sophisticated spin doctoring. Indeed, the more it makes use of digital technologies to simply spread the message, the more it will distort debates. The shouting will turn into a whispering that can no longer be easily traced back to the scholarly source. By contrast, broadening the inclusive network of DIR beyond the Ivory Tower of academia and meaningfully engaging political practitioners and the public would make it possible for DIR to contribute to a global polylogue (Kornprobst, 2020; Wiener, 2017b, pp. 165–166; Wimmer, 2004). There is no escaping from the fact that DIR will shape digital international affairs. Scholars, too, are actors (with some having much more agency than others) and their doings, too, have repercussions for ordering processes. How scholars will do so, whether ‘methodologically nationalist’ (Beck, 2007; Wimmer & Schiller, 2003) or global, whether manipulative and purely geared towards swaying audiences or in the scholarly spirit of an inclusive debate that checks truth claims over and over will make a difference for digital international affairs. We’d better keep that in mind. Notes 1 Whereas Morgenthau (1948), Kissinger (1959) and Niebuhr (1959) put strong emphasis on diplomacy (and its role in making balances of power), diplomacy takes a heuristic back-seat in other Realist approaches. 2 For a review of recent IR studies using computational methods, especially in relation to conflict, see Ünver (2019). 3 This would mean to move from DIR on to what may be labelled Digital International Studies (DIS) or Digital International Affairs (DIA). 4 On liminality and innovation, see Tempest and Starkey (2004).

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INDEX

agential processes 4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 56, 74, 97; agential change 52; enticing 4, 5, 9, 100, 115, 204, 290; forcing 4, 5, 8, 204, 290; winning over 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 100, 123, 148, 230 algorithms: AI 8, 33, 73, 77, 79, 177, 275, 288; analytical power 81, 90; anomaly 189; connecting power 80, 83, 90; decision-making 33, 46; design power 80, 82, 87, 90; killer robots 178; machine learning 6, 73, 179 – 181, 192, 289; predictive analytics 183, 191; security 179, 183; “Waze for war” 178 climate change 43, 121, 130, 141, 160, 201, 227, 229, 230 computer nerd 73, 76; see also super-individuals connective action 157, 233, 250 COVID–19, 115, 128, 138, 147, 161, 168, 200 cyberspace 12, 29, 35, 40, 45, 52, 59, 105, 258; cyber persistence 32, 35, 46; Starlink 46, 80 cyberwarfare 10; see also forcing DARPA 178, 188 digital agency 14; posthuman agency 7, 14; super-individuals 14

digital international relations 14, 16, 30, 179, 283; cyberspace governance 258, 269, 272; data relations 179, 193; digital advocacy 15, 154, 158 – 159, 166; digital power 123, 131; digital sovereignty 264, 268; information security 53, 59, 64, 251; techno-anarchism 52; technonationalism 266 digital revolution 2, 5, 198, 201; 5G networks 210, 220; Big Data 5, 8, 73, 84, 179, 182; digital disruption 2, 5, 8, 12, 40, 82, 182, 230, 274, 288; digitalisation 78, 85, 158, 201, 211 diplomatic relations: bonding 99, 110; building trust 105, 114; digital interaction 19, 109; signaling mechanisms 106; video conferencing 15, 100, 110, 117 European Union 67, 77, 206, 217 globalization · 124, 159 Global South 19, 132, 143, 220 great powers 8, 288; concentrated power environment 37; diffused power environment 38; distribution of power 29, 34, 42, 201, 219 Greta Thunberg 228, 248, 285

Index  301

hacked world order 10; see also forcing metrodiplomacy 125, 134; C40, 124, 142; networking power 124, 141 Nerd power 73, 78, 82 network analysis 146 nuclear weapons 40, 59 ontological security 13 ordering processes 3, 5, 8, 12, 74, 175, 205, 274; background ordering 4; foreground ordering 4

social media: affordances 227 – 229 social movements 86, 157 – 158, 230 State absence 52, 59 – 60 state pushback 66; see also state absence structural theory: anarchic system 36 – 37; inter­connectedness 30, 34, 82; power 78, 90, 198; struggle for autonomy 34, 285 surveillance 79, 85, 135, 192

raison d’état 115

targeted societies 175, 190 techno-authoritarianism 204, 291 technological determinism 10, 85; see also digital revolution technological processes: datafication 5; pervasiveness 5, 7, 23, 53, 154, 203; speed 5, 6, 53, 74, 83 transnational threats 121

signaling mechanisms: non-verbal cues 109 social de-synchronization 6; see also speed

urban power 124, 126; see also metrodiplomacy

paradiplomacy 15, 124, 135; see also metrodiplomacy Project Maven 8, 177, 192