A Comprehensive Look at Information and Communication Technologies and Global Politics

Abstract

The Information Revolution and World Politics. By Elizabeth C. Hanson. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. x+280 pp., $27.95 paper (ISBN: 9780742538535). Information technology and world politics has become an increasingly important subject in the field of international relations. Its related courses have been listed in the curricula of many programs of political science and international relations. However, there are very few books that attempt to draw the overall picture of the information revolution and how it influences world politics. When I took my course of “Information Technology, Globalization and Governance” as a graduate student at Rutgers, my professor listed Ronald J. Deibert's (1997) Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation as one of the core readings. Afterwards, I also read James N. Rosenau and J.P. Singh's (2002) edited volume of Information Technologies and Global Politics: The Changing Scope of Power and Governance , and Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen's (2005) edited volume of Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm among others. All of them are outstanding scholarly works and help readers understand such an important, but fast-changing topic in global affairs. From the perspective of serving as a textbook for students interested in this subject, Betty Hanson's Information Revolution and World Politics is the best textbook with a “big picture” of this subject so far. The development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has always been an important driving force behind our globalizing world. These new technologies have radically altered the methods of communication used within and among all kinds of communities, especially over interstate borders. This information revolution …