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08-12-2015, 07:53 PM
The world we live in is digital, and individual, as it is also political and persistently statist. State actors' control of economic resources (http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GDP.pdf), combined with their monopoly in the legitimate use of force (http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/ethos/Weber-vocation.pdf), has helped maintain their superiority over non-state actors. This disparity has for the most part prevented the Westphalian world order (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/westphal.asp) from being challenged. Despite economic interdependence (http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/oesc/globalization.shtml) and norms like the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) (http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/responsibility.shtml), the state-centric logic has survived even through some of the most recent thinking toward a new world order (https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/1647-slaughter-annemarie-sovereignty-and-power-in-a). When we think of the world, we still think mostly in terms of the states that comprise it.
The information age demands that we envision state-to-state, or S2S interactions in a new light. The idea that a state government speaks on its citizens' behalf in foreign policy is increasingly giving way to the idea that S2S interactions should, at least in part, be the aggregation of human-to-human, or H2H connections. Insisting that states are still unitary actors (http://gametheory101.com/Unitary_Actor_Assumption.html) distorts our reality by focusing disproportionately on military power. A human-centric approach to foreign policymaking remains underexplored in spite of our expanding technological toolkit. One byte may not be mightier than a bullet, but what about one byte per person? What about two (which, by the way, is what it takes to text "
The information age demands that we envision state-to-state, or S2S interactions in a new light. The idea that a state government speaks on its citizens' behalf in foreign policy is increasingly giving way to the idea that S2S interactions should, at least in part, be the aggregation of human-to-human, or H2H connections. Insisting that states are still unitary actors (http://gametheory101.com/Unitary_Actor_Assumption.html) distorts our reality by focusing disproportionately on military power. A human-centric approach to foreign policymaking remains underexplored in spite of our expanding technological toolkit. One byte may not be mightier than a bullet, but what about one byte per person? What about two (which, by the way, is what it takes to text "