Weaponized Interdependence and Networked Coercion: A Research Agenda – with Abraham Newman

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence and Networked Coercion: A Research Agenda,” The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence, eds. Daniel Drezner, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (Brookings Institution 2021).

In May 2018, Donald Trump announced that the United States was pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement on Iran’s nuclear program and reimposing sanctions. Most notably, many of these penalties apply not to U.S. firms, but to foreign firms that may have no presence in the United States. The sanctions are consequential in large part because of U.S. importance to the global financial network.¹ This unilateral action led to protest among the United States’ European allies: France’s finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, for example, tartly noted that the United States was not the “economic policeman of…

Read the full chapter in The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence

Other Writing:

Essay

Behold the AI shoggoth – with Cosma Shalizi

Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster The academics argue that large language models have much older cousins in markets and bureaucracies An internet meme keeps on turning up in debates about the large language models (llms) that power services such Openai’s Chatgptand the newest version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It’s the “shoggoth”: an amorphous monster ...
Read Article
Essay

Information Attacks on Democracies – with Bruce Schneier

Democracy is an information system. That’s the starting place of our new paper: “Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy.” In it, we look at democracy through the lens of information security, trying to understand the current waves of Internet disinformation attacks. Specifically, we wanted to explain why the same disinformation campaigns that act as a stabilizing influence ...
Read Article