Henry Farrell

Chained to Globalization – with Abraham Newman

Why It’s Too Late to Decouple

In 1999, the columnist Thomas Friedman pronounced the Cold War geopolitical system dead. The world, he wrote, had “gone from a system built around walls to a system increasingly built around networks.” As businesses chased efficiency and profits, maneuvering among great powers was falling away. An era of harmony was at hand, in which states’ main worries would be how to manage market forces rather than one another.

Friedman was right that a globalized world had arrived but wrong about what that world would look like. Instead of liberating governments and businesses, globalization entangled them.


Read the full article at Foreign Affairs

Other Writing:

Academic Article

The Consequences of the Internet for Politics

March 8, 2012 Annual Review of Political Science 15:35-52.
Political scientists are only now beginning to come to terms with the importance of the Internet to politics. The most promising way to study the Internet is to look at the role that causal mechanisms such as the lowering of transaction costs, homophilous sorting, and preference falsification play in intermediating between specific aspects of the ...
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Academic Article

Watching from Afar: Media Consumption Patterns Around the Arab Spring – with Sean Aday, Deen Freelon, Marc Lynch, John Sides and Michael Dewar

March 15, 2013 American Behavioral Scientist 57 Deen Freelon Henry Farrell
Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of ...
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