The End of Hypocrisy with Martha Finnemore

The U.S. government seems outraged that people are leaking classified materials about its less attractive behavior. It certainly acts that way: three years ago, after Chelsea Manning, an army private then known as Bradley Manning, turned over hundreds of thousands of classified cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, U.S. authorities imprisoned the soldier under conditions that the UN special rapporteur on torture deemed cruel and inhumane. The Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, appearing on Meet the Press shortly thereafter, called WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, “a high-tech terrorist.”

More recently, following the disclosures about U.S. spying programs

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Other Writing:

Academic Article

Bias, Skew and Search Engines Suffice to Explain Online Toxicity – with Cosma Shalizi

Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi (2024), “Bias, Skew and Search Engines Suffice to Explain Online Toxicity,” Communications of the ACM, preprint, 67,4:25-28. U.S. political discourse seems to have fissioned into discrete bubbles, each reflecting its owndistorted image of the world. Many blame machine-learning algorithms that purportedly maximize“engagement” — serving up content that keeps YouTube or ...
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Academic Article

Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion – with Abraham Newman

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2019), “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security 44, 1:42-79. Reprinted in Daniel Drezner, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence, Brookings Institution 2021. Liberals claim that globalization has led to fragmentation and decentralized networks of power relations. This does not ...
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