“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:

Essay

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The result of all this is that policy discourse about the United States, China,and technology has careened from one pathology to another: The cheeryglobalism of a decade ago has given way to today’s diffuse paranoia. Nowthe national security conversation is almost exclusively focused on theimpossible task of severing the ties of technological interdependence,with the only ...
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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

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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