“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

The State of Statelessness

In August 8, 1897, Michele Angiolillo, an Italian anarchist, shot Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the Prime Minister of Spain. Cánovas had dominated Spanish politics for decades, even during periods when he was nominally out of office, helping shore up Spain’s tottering monarchy and its possession of Cuba and the Philippines through torture and wide-scale military ...
Read Article
Academic Article

The New Politics of Interdependence: Cross-National Layering in Trans-Atlantic Regulatory Disputes – with Abraham Newman

How are regulatory disputes between the major powers resolved? Existing literature generally characterizes such regulatory disagreements as system clash, in which national systems of regulation come into conflict, so that one sets the global standard, and the other adjusts or is marginalized. In this article, we offer an alternative account, which bridges early literature on ...
Read Article