Technology and Governance-Evolution or Revolution?

Abstract

Information Technologies and Global Politics: The Changing Scope of Power and Governance. Edited by James N. Rosenau, J. P. Singh Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 312 pp., $75.50 cloth (ISBN: 0-7914-5203-4), $25.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7914-5204-2). Technology, Development, and Democracy: International Conflict and Cooperation in the Information Age. Edited by Juliann Emmons Allison. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 248 pp., $75.50 cloth (ISBN: 0-7914-5213-1), $25.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7914-5214-X). Advances in technology, and especially the development of the Internet, have contributed to an increasingly fractured and competitive global political economy. One of the results of this fracturing, or what James Rosenau (1997) might call fragmegration, is an increased tendency for nonstate actors to become the creators of rules and institutions, a role formerly thought of as reserved to nation-states. This trend, in turn, raises a number of questions about the changing nature of authority in the global political economy. How, for example, will transnational technology infrastructures be regulated? Who will make the rules? How will they be enforced? How will conflicts be resolved? What is the relationship between state and nonstate actors in developing governance structures in the global political economy? The international relations (IR) literature offers many competing and contradictory answers to these questions (see, for example, Risse-Kappen 1995; Strange 1996; Zacher and Sutton 1996; Deibert 1997; Haufler 1997; Keohane and Nye 2001). Unfortunately, the qualitative changes in the global political economy—brought about in part by the development and proliferation of information technology, the heightened role of finance, and the increased mobility of people—have outpaced advances in theory. Indeed, much of modern IR theory development occurred as a result of the Cold War, a period of bipolarity that was rife with military tensions and colored by the constant (even if generally unlikely) threat of nuclear war. It should not surprise us then that many of our conceptual tools are ill-equipped to explain phenomena in a post-Cold War world characterized by economic multipolarity and military unipolarity—a world in which strength is measured in initial public offerings instead of intercontinental ballistic missiles and in which security threats come less from nation-states than from terrorists. In such a world, the proliferation of actors and the means …