“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 ArticleEssay

Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized – with Abraham Newman

Russian sanctions highlight how network analysis is urgently needed to find and protect vulnerable parts of the global economy. When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, nobody expected that the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and other nations would isolate Russia from the global economy in retaliation. Instead of limited ...
Read Article
Essay

A Most Lonely Union

In September 2019, two months before officially taking office, the new European Commission president was already insisting that the European Union needed to change. On the one hand, Ursula von der Leyen promised a new “geopolitical Commission,” but on the other, she wanted the EU “to be the guardian of multilateralism.” The difficult question was ...
Read Article