Looking into Cyberspace

Abstract

Spatializing International Relations: Analysing Activism on the Internet. By Jayne Rodgers. New York: Routledge, 2003. 184 pp., $80.00 (ISBN: 0-415-25592-9). Theories of international relations are overwhelmingly based on territorialized accounts of geographical space. Even if individual states are not viewed as self-sufficient actors, they are still seen as territorial entities embedded in a hierarchy of nested territorial spaces, with power moving up and down the hierarchy from suprastate entities (such as alliances and customs unions) to local administrative units (such as municipalities and regions). What has generally been lacking is theoretical attention to alternative ways of spatializing power—beyond the territorial field-of-forces model that has long dominated the field. Various such alternatives exist—such as spatial network, ensemble-of-worlds, and world society models (see, for example, Agnew 2002). Moreover, the need for alternative models has become all the more urgent with the increased perception of the importance of economic, political, and cultural transactions that take place through space-spanning networks that cross state boundaries and that can no longer be easily restricted by states. Spatializing International Relations by Jayne Rodgers reviews some of the new ways in which scholars from a range of disciplines (predominantly geography, anthropology, and feminist political theory) have tried to “spatialize” our understanding of international relations. It does so in two ways. First, two chapters describe, respectively, the spatial theories of international relations and analogous theories drawn from feminist political theory. Second, Rodgers undertakes a sustained empirical examination of the politics of Internet political activism across five chapters, using the spatial theory of the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre as a rough-and-ready theoretical template. Rodgers's key contention is that “the Internet does not fit neatly … into …