International Relations in the Cyber Age:
The Co-Evolution Dilemma
Nazli Choucri and David D. Clark
2019
A foundational analysis of the co-evolution of the internet and international relations examining resultant challenges for individuals, organizations, firms, and states.
In our increasingly digital world, data flows define the international landscape as much as the flow of materials and people. How is cyberspace shaping international relations, and how are international relations shaping cyberspace? In this book Nazli Choucri and David D. Clark offer a foundational analysis of the co-evolution of cyberspace (with the internet as its core) and international relations, examining resultant challenges for individuals, organizations, and states.
The authors examine the pervasiveness of power and politics in the digital realm, finding that the internet is evolving much faster than the tools for regulating it. This creates a “co-evolution dilemma”—a new reality in which digital interactions have enabled weaker actors to influence or threaten stronger actors, including the traditional state powers. Choucri and Clark develop a new method for addressing control in the internet age, “control point analysis,” and apply it to a variety of situations, including major actors in the international and digital realms: the United States, China, and Google. In doing so they lay the groundwork for a new international relations theory that reflects the reality in which we live—one in which the international and digital realms are inextricably linked and evolving together.
Cyberpolitics in International Relations
Nazli Choucri
2012
Cyberspace is widely acknowledged as a fundamental fact of daily life in today’s world. Until recently, its political impact was thought to be a matter of low politics—background conditions and routine processes and decisions. Now, however, experts have begun to recognize its effect on high politics—national security, core institutions, and critical decision processes. In this book, Nazli Choucri investigates the implications of this new cyberpolitical reality for international relations theory, policy, and practice.
The ubiquity, fluidity, and anonymity of cyberspace has already challenged such concepts as leverage and influence, national security and diplomacy, and borders and boundaries in the traditionally state-centric arena of international relations. Choucri grapples with fundamental questions of how we can take explicit account of cyberspace in the analysis of world politics and how we can integrate the traditional international system with its cyber venues.
After establishing the theoretical and empirical terrain, Choucri examines modes of cyber conflict and cyber cooperation in international relations, the potential for the gradual convergence of cyberspace and sustainability—in both substantive and policy terms—the emergent synergy of cyberspace, and international efforts toward sustainable development. Choucri’s discussion is theoretically driven and empirically grounded, drawing on recent data and analyzing the dynamics of cyberpolitics at individual, state, international, and global levels.
Mapping Sustainability:
Knowledge e-Networking and the Value Chain
Nazli Choucri, Dinsha Mistree, Farnaz Haghseta, Toufic Mezher, Wallace R. Baker, and Carlos I. Ortiz, eds.
2007
Part of the Alliance For Global Sustainability Bookseries book series (AGSB, volume 11)
This book focuses on three interdependent research initiatives designed to facilitate the management of transitions toward sustainable development. These initiatives consist of: (a) mapping sustainability as a domain of knowledge; (b) contributing to the development of global knowledge e-networking and extending the knowledge value chain; and (c) exploring new methods to expand our knowledge and to improve e-networking practices. While the activities differ in nature, scale and scope, they are highly interconnected. It is our hope that, jointly, they will contribute to our common quest for a sustainable future. Our underlying objectives are to contribute to the provision, management, and sharing of knowledge, and to enhance the value of knowledge and its uses by different constituencies in diverse contexts and at different stages of development. The central theme of this book, connecting its different parts, is about ways of transcending critical barriers to the effective uses of knowledge and e-networking. Of special relevance is the development of new approaches to the provision and transmission – from local sources to global networks and from global sources to local networks. In many ways, this is a book of theory and methods, as well as policy and performance.