At this time, everyone recognizes that cyberspace is a fact of daily life. Given its ubiquity, scale, and scope, cyberspace—including the Internet, the billions of computers it connects, its management, and the experience it enables—has become a central feature of the world we live in. It has created a fundamentally new reality for almost everyone in the developed world and rapidly growing numbers of people in the developing world.
There are excellent maps and visual materials for international relations and various facets. There are also excellent maps of cyber access, different representations of traffic, and different features of the cyber domain. But there is limited understanding of how cyberspace influences the global system and how power and politics influence the conduct in, and management of, cyberspace—or how they shape the configuration of this domain.
Positioned as an interdisciplinary initiative in computational social sciences, our purpose here is to pull together, and extend, some major research initiatives with substantive content and methodological rigor for the research challenges at the core of the MIT Global CyberPolitics. Three issues serve as an introduction to the entire initiative:
High Politics – Low Politics
A reminder that, until recently, cyberspace was considered largely a matter of low politics, a term used to denote background conditions and routine decisions and processes. By contrast, high politics concern national security, core institutions, and decision systems that are critical to the state, its interests, and underlying values.
Background
A brief note of the MIT-Harvard joint initiative in Exploration in Cyber International Relations sponsored by an early grant from the Minerva Program, US Department Defense – served as the foundation for MIT Global CyberPolitics.
Global Imperatives – Introduction
An overview of the research agenda and the seven issues defined as critical imperatives. Each is important in its own right, as are the interconnections among them. Each imperative is “part” of a “whole” vision for scientific initiatives. Each serves as overarching frames for the set of projects embedded therein.