This chapter outlines the significance of the digital revolution for International Relations. The first section establishes the political context that shaped the development of the internet, showing how this informed both its technical building blocks and modes of governance. The second section explains how these new technologies also entailed a distinct set of vulnerabilities. In doing so, it highlights the emergence of cybersecurity as an issue of national security, including the potential for cyber warfare between states. The third section introduces the politics of social media platforms that have enhanced pro-democracy movements such as the Arab Spring, but also driven polarisation, fostered extremism and been harnessed by a range of actors, from terrorist groups and intelligence services through to diplomats and even heads of state. The final section tracks the rise of internet sovereignty, which began in the early 2000s and has since become a significant international political tension point. We highlight how some states have sought to control information within their geographical borders, and use online censorship, propaganda and surveillance to govern their populations.

Actions in cyberspace by governments, businesses, NGOs and other players have become part of international relations and international security. Those actions reflect countries’ national interests and affect their bilateral and multilateral diplomatic relationships. This has led to the rise of cyber diplomacy, the activity of deploying international cooperation in cyberspace and using actions in cyberspace to achieve foreign-policy goals. The main focus of cyber diplomacy in its early stages is trying to forge a way to regulate state behavior and prevent and regulate conflict in cyberspace. Some governments have extended their cyber diplomacy portfolios to include the foreign-policy implications of new technologies. Both traditional tools from the diplomacy toolbox and new technologies are needed to build and maintain international cooperation in cyberspace. Cyber diplomacy is not the activity of using digital tools to accomplish traditional foreign-policy objectives–that is the definition of digital diplomacy.

Observing China’s use of force, its voting behaviours and argumentation in the UN Security Council (UNSC) and its official statements on other relevant occasions allows summing up the Chinese approach to jus ad bellum in the following aspects: a narrow meaning of the term ‘force’, a positivist interpretation of the threshold, time and target requirements of exercising the right of self-defence, a negative attitude towards humanitarian intervention and a strict reading of the responsibility to protect. These positivist tools have led China to consistently endorse a ‘restrictivist’ understanding of the UN Charter that prohibits any use of military force by one state against another absent authorization from the UNSC or a situation involving self-defence. In this sense, China would likely maintain its ‘wait and see’ approach regarding jus ad bellum in cyberspace. However, faced with the anonymity of cyberspace and the increasing frequency of cyber-attacks, the possibility that China will adopt a more flexible understanding of certain rules cannot be ruled out.

Our theory treats nominally democratic institutions as constraints that autocrats struggle to loosen and citizens’ beliefs as the central battlefield on which the struggle for political change is waged. After reviewing the book’s key findings, in this chapter we use our theoretical framework to suggest a series of important questions about autocratic politics in the early twenty-first century. We explore how the world’s autocrats are attempting to shape their citizens’ beliefs by weaponizing distinctly modern technologies, not just propaganda and censorship. We also discuss how the world’s autocrats are attempting to loosen the electoral constraints that bind them. Although this book is about propaganda in autocracies, it has important implications for politics in democracies, especially as a series of “populist-authoritarian” leaders take power across Europe and North America. We argue, in particular, that Xi Jinping’s propaganda strategy helps us understand the process of democratic erosion underway across the world. We conclude by discussing the book’s implications for public policy.

The chapter sets out the material conditions of the transition from the CAPE era to modernity, seeing a transition from the limited energy sources and materials of the CAPE era, to the more or less unlimited energy sources and materials that came into play during the nineteenth century. It looks in detail at the technological developments of the transition period since the early nineteenth century, and at the huge increases in interaction capacity and powers of destruction that these enabled. In material terms, the circumstances of humankind were transformed, but with the costs that the carrying capacity of the planet was overburdened, and humankind put itself at risk of committing species suicide.

Under public international law, a State has a right to exercise jurisdiction. States are expected to show restraint when attempting to regulate a situation with foreign elements. The research outlines territory- and personality-based permissive principles of jurisdiction. EU data protection provisions that lend themselves to extraterritorial application fall into the subjective territoriality, objective territoriality, passive personality, effects doctrine and potentially protective principles of jurisdiction. The provisions do not come under any one of these principles, but rather an interpretation of several of them. The applicable law articles in the General Data Protection Regulation could most plausibly constitute the objective territoriality (where an act is terminated) and passive personality (the nationality of a victim) principles. Whilst there appears to be a shift from territory to personality, for example, by referring to data processing in the context of activities ‘in the Union’ or individuals ‘subject to the jurisdiction of’ rather than data processing in the context of the activities ‘on the territory of a Member State’ or ‘in the territory of’ each state party’, to justify the exercise of jurisdiction, territory is still necessary to trigger the application of jurisdiction in the online sphere.

This chapter looks at the national security and public law aspects of the global crisis resulting from the rise of national populism and revisionist states challenging the global order. Threats include war, nuclear proliferation, erosion of human rights, and the pollution of cyberspace.

A wave of crises for the international system, international law, and the world economy began in 2016. The rise of national populism in many parts of the world, a political force openly opposed to international law and regulation, directly challenged the projects of the 1990s. The rise of revisionist states invoking nationalist identity, especially China and Russia, produced new international tensions and challenges. Online life evolved in an increasingly dystopian direction. These three developments reinforced each other. The global pandemic made everything even worse.

This chapter describes the various dimensions of the world crisis, how the crisis implicates international law, and how the knowledge economy has contributed to the crisis even as it accomplishes great wealth creation and technological mastery.

In this chapter, the law scholar Ebrahim Afsah outlines different implications of AI for the area of national security. He argues that while AI overlaps with many challenges to the national security arising from cyberspace, it also creates new risks, including the emergence of a superintelligence in the future, the development of autonomous weapons, the enhancement of existing military capabilities, and threats to foreign relations and economic stability. Most of these risks, however, Afsah concludes, can be subsumed under existing normative frameworks.

A presentation of the concluding remarks and main submissions on the issues discussed in Chapters 1 to 6 of the book.

This chapter builds on the understanding of fuzzy logic regulatory practice, but re-focuses on the main topic of the book: the policy contradictions between the emergence of a seemingly more restrictive cyber regime in China since 2014 and simultaneous announcements of new top-down policies for encouraging entrepreneurial activity. It argues that China’s data and cyber security laws cannot be understood without first understanding both the Chinese government’s Informatisation drive (which includes the Internet Plus policy) and the concept of Network Sovereignty. The chapter is also necessary to understand China’s unique system of governance that is well suited to promote innovations proposed by private Chinese tech companies.

The paper enriches New Materialism with a macro-historical theorization of changes of international order. It finds inspiration in Emanuel Adler’s cognitive evolution, and complements this theoretical framework with a New Materialist dimension. Following cognitive evolution international orders change when the configuration of international practices, their background knowledge and the practitioners change. The two steps that are crucial for these changes are creative variation and selective retention. Technologies and artefacts play a key role in the variation and retention of international practices. New Materialist mechanisms of creative variation focus on forbidden fruit blending (the combination of material objects from realms that do not typically belong together to create a new device), on the intertwinements between new ideas and new technologies and artefacts, and on the entanglements between new practices and new artefacts and technologies. In terms of selective, retention I argue that functionality and aesthetics can operate as material criteria for selective retention, and I highlight the relevance of network memory for the kinds of information that are stored and how they can be stored, thus retained. The paper illustrates the usefulness of a New Materialist version of cognitive evolution on the evolution of the internet as a specific international order.

The standardization of minority languages has little room in language policy and language planning because models of nation-state building are generally not designed to accommodate minority languages, while standardized minority languages often lead to challenges for the state. This chapter reviews how various ideologies, such as nationalism, nationism and patriotism, interact with nation-state building and globalization in shaping approaches to the standardization of minority languages. As a case study, it examines how China, adopting the Soviet model of multinational state building, technically standardized minority languages in a two-track multilingual system where standardized Chinese functioned as the main track and standardized minority languages functioned as the satellites of an eventual linguistic integration. Since the failure of this model in the 1990s, globalization has created opportunities in China through transnational institutions, such as UNESCO and ISO, and technical revolutions, such as the Internet, for bottom-up efforts at the standardization of minority languages. The case shows a trajectory from the state monopoly of the agency of standardization to the diversity of the agency among the state, local communities and the global community. This development appears to be the future of the standardization of minority languages in multilingual nation-states in an age of globalization.