The world we live in is digital, and individual, as it is also political and persistently statist. State actors' control of
economic resources, combined with their
monopoly in the legitimate use of force, has helped maintain their superiority over non-state actors. This disparity has for the most part prevented the
Westphalian world order from being challenged. Despite
economic interdependence and norms like the
Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the state-centric logic has survived even through some of the most recent thinking toward a
new world order. 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 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 "
04-07-2012, 03:13 AM
Obama Embraces National Security as Campaign Issue
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