“Panopticons and Chokepoints,” an interview with Richard Byrne

A new view of international relations puts global networks – and how they can be weaponized – at its center. What’s the future of regulation in this new landscape?

“The debate we see at the moment is never going to be about trade and open markets in the same kind of way anymore,” says Farrell. “Once the door has been opened to thinking about these things in terms of their consequences for security, different actors will enter into the scene and begin to gobble up this policy area that you think is defined in these terms, and start redefining in it in very different ways indeed…. We’re not going back to where we were – and once you’ve opened up the door to these kinds of concerns, they are going to metastasize through the entire system.

Access the full interview at the Wilson Quarterly

Other Writing:

Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Weaponized Interdependence and Networked Coercion: A Research Agenda,” in The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence – with Abraham Newman – eds. Daniel Drezner, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman

When we initially wrote our article on weaponized interdependence, we hoped that it would help people think more clearly about how economic coercion was changing. We did not anticipate either the reception that the argument has gotten or how dramatically the changes that we wanted to understand would accelerate, thanks to factors including the deterioration ...
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Essay

Do the Right Thing with – Cosma Shalizi

Benevolent meddling won’t help us make good decisions. We have all cringed watching friends and family make terrible decisions, and been tempted by visions of the pain spared if we could only make them follow our advice. The same feeling motivates well-intentioned technocrats to take charge of the public: People are plainly making sad blunders ...
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