Technology and its role in globalization — breaking down the state-centric system

The following is a post that I’ve written for the student blog that I’m setting up. Enjoy…

Much of International Relations theory, especially realist and neo-realist theories, takes the state-centric international system as an integral aspect of the system. While non-state actors have grown in importance recently, and international institutions try and are sometimes able to constrain state action, international relations continues to be, primarily, the study of relations between states. In more basic terms, despite Al Qaeda and the U.N., states remain at the center of International Relations.

Yet I argue that computers and the internet, and the powerful and pervasive communications technology that they spawn, have the potential to break down this system because they enable such fast and robust communication across all sorts of traditional barriers. This week I wrote a post in my personal blog about Hometown Baghdad, a video project featuring Iraqi youths. To me, this is an excellent example about the new types of communication that the internet has opened up.

While it’s easy to brush these projects aside as simply pop-culture fads, they represent significant communication, from one individual to another across serious cultural and national barriers. Influential technology in its infancy often resembles a fad, but this degree of communication provides individuals with increased access to other people around the world. This access to people removes the barriers to international journalism and commerce. Not only that, but this allows reciprocal access as well, creating a way for the rest of the world to access new places, at least virtually.

Barriers on the state level still prevent communication from reaching its true potential. Perhaps the two greatest barriers are the cost of access, which limits the participation of the developing world, and government censorship, in which governments are trying to impose state-based barriers onto the virtual world of the internet. But this is changing.

The cost of access is falling. Another one of my favorite projects, the One Laptop Per Child Program is trying to get low-cost machines into the hands of millions of children around the world. The technical specifications of the machines should allow quick and cost-effective access to networks, without much of the costly infrastructure. Low cost hardware, coupled with well-designed, open source software, will be essential in bringing networks to the masses.

In my mind, the results of this could be phenomenal. Access to networks is access to knowledge. But it is also access to reporters, and access to markets, and access to meaningful cross-cultural communication.

As for censorship, a classic internet quote offers some insight. “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” (apparently from John Gilmore). The actual technology, at its lowest levels, is designed to be difficult to stop. The debates about state control over the internet are, in my opinion, just beginning.

My views on technology are unabashedly optimistic, but I really do believe that computers and networked communications have the potential to open the world to everyone (and open everyone to the world), in ways that we are only beginning to see.

This post glossed over a lot of issues, but it also outlines and connects a number of my personal interests. As articles and case studies pop up, expect more information. And as always, please feel free to comment with your thoughts or questions.

June 2, 2007 | Filed Under Announcements [A]

 

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