What Are the Sources of Power in the Digital Age?

I reviewed some books!

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I have been mulling over the sources of power in world politics for *checks notes* pretty much my entire academic career. One of the obvious ways that the nature of power can shift is through technological change. As cyberspace has become a new arena of governance, power, and conflict in this century, there have been debates about “technopolarity” and “weaponized interdependence” and even the question of whether it represents the end of power.

All of this is a windup to saying that I have a new review essay out in Foreign Policy of two recent, must-read books that have some things to say about this topic: Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s Underground Empire and Anu Bradford’s Digital Empires. Here’s an excerpt:

Underground Empire suggests that some forms of structural power are extremely difficult to dislodge. As during the late 1980s—when many international relations scholars believed the United States was in terminal decline, only for the country to be the last superpower standing a decade later—commentators may be underestimating current U.S. power in the digital world.

For Bradford, however, what matters is the combination of market power, state capacity, and attractiveness of a government’s regulatory preferences. This formula enables her to predict that, going forward, the EU will be the most important democratic actor in global digital governance. The EU’s lack of big tech firms is a plus in Bradford’s model because it reduces the EU’s incentive to cater to domestic interest groups….

The definitions of digital power proffered in Underground Empire and Digital Empires are not mutually exclusive. It can be simultaneously true that the United States retains considerable structural power and the EU exercises its market power adroitly—and all the while China tries to amass both forms of power. Still, if there are arenas of contestation where U.S., European, and Chinese officials disagree, whose form of power might prevail?

You’ll have to read the whole thing to find out the answer I give to the proffered question above. For the purposes of this newsletter, however, I will just close with three quick notes.

First, these are both fantastic books. The highest praise that an academic can bestow on a book is to say that “it belongs in the syllabus,” and that applies to both of these books. I’ve written previously about Farrell and Newman’s book in this space. As for Bradford’s Digital Empires, it will be immensely helpful to me when I teach global political economy at Fletcher next year. It will be useful for scholars who know something about cyberspace as well as those who have been leery of including such topics in their more traditional international relations courses.

Second, it was only in reading these two books that I appreciated how my work has straddled the dialogue that these two books are having. Bradford’s argument rests in part on how states can exercise their market power as rule-makers rather than rule-takers, and that is certainly the primary point I was trying to make in All Politics Is Global. And given my research in economic coercion I am obviously sympathetic to Farrell and Newman’s causal logic.

Finally, after being stuck in my power project for a spell, I am grateful to have read these books. I am find myself doing some of my best scholarly thinking in reaction to seeing how others are thinking about the topic. Maybe it was always thus, but it seems increasingly true in recent years. With the spring semester almost over, I am looking forward to noodling around with these ideas for the next several months.