iControl: International Relations and Information Manipulation in the Digital Age

• Main Author: Baksi-Lahiri, Supallav
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholarship @ Claremont 2011
• Online Access: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/235; http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1302&context=cmc_theses

In the increasingly digitized twenty-first century, technology affects everything including international relations. Specifically, this paper looks at information technologies such as social media, censorship, hacking, information theft, surveillance, and even future technologies that attempt to predict significant worldwide events. This is looked at from the point of view of governments, private companies, hacker groups, NGOs, and even individuals. All evidence indicates that the future of international relations will be a system in which the key players are no longer only states, but also these third parties. As a result of increasingly powerful information manipulation techniques, each of these actors will experience notable decreases in privacy (also known as the ability to keep valuable information from other actors). Thus, the world is fast becoming a place in which information is the strongest form of power and the behavior of these international actors is changing to reflect that reality.