“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

Stability of Democracies: A Complex Systems Perspective – with Karoline Wiesner, Alvin Birdi, Tina Eliassi-Rad, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky, Patricia Palacios, Don Ross, Didier Sornet and Karim Thebault

Karoline Wiesner, Alvin Birdi, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Henry Farrell, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky, Patricia Palacios, Don Ross, Didier Sornet and Karim Thebault (2019), “Stability of Democracies: A Complex Systems Perspective,” European Journal of Physics 40, 1:014002. The idea that democracy is under threat, after being largely dormant for at least 40 years, is looming increasingly large ...
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Essay

Tornado Cash Is Not Free Speech. It’s a Golem – with Bruce Schneier

In August, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned the cryptocurrency platform Tornado Cash, a virtual currency “mixer” designed to make it harder to trace cryptocurrency transactions—and a worldwide favorite money-laundering platform. Americans are now forbidden from using it. According to the U.S. government, Tornado Cash was sanctioned because it allegedly laundered ...
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