“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:

Academic Article

The Janus Face of the Liberal International Information Order: When Global Institutions are Self-Undermining – with Abraham Newman

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2021), “The Janus Face of the Liberal International Information Order: When Global Institutions are Self-Undermining,” International Organization Vol 75, No.2:333-58 (75th anniversary special issue). Scholars and policymakers long believed that norms of global information openness and private-sector governance helped to sustain and promote liberalism. These norms are being increasingly contested ...
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Academic Article

Institutions and Majority Rule in Online Communities – with Melissa Schwartzberg

Norms, Minorities, and Collective Choice Online Much work in political science and political theory, ranging from the arguments of eighteenth-century political theorists, such as Condorcet and Rousseau, to modern social-choice theory, concerns the relationship between decision rules and collective choice. It is emphatically clear that the former have important consequences for the latter. Individuals’ preferences ...
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