I'm the SNF Agora Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and the 2019 recipient of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology
My and Abraham Newman's book, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, will be published by Henry Holt in 2023. Our previous book, Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Fight over Freedom and Security was the winner of the 2019 Chicago-Kent College of Law / Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize, the 2020 ISA-ICOMM Award, and one of Foreign Affairs' Best Books of 2019. I used to be the Editor-in-Chief of the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post.
I co-author a lot, (I enjoy writing with others), but here are three single authored pieces that I'm especially happy with.
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Dark Leviathan, Aeon.
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Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans, Boston Review.
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In Praise of Negativity, Crooked Timber.
My first major project focuses on the relationship between democracy and information in a complex world (the picture is Shaun Tan's "Thank You for Voting").
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"Analytical Democracy: A Microfoundational Approach, with Hugo Mercier and Melissa Schwartzberg, provides the beginnings of a "no bullshit" approach to understanding democracy. For the pop version, see The New Libertarian Elitists, Democracy, Spring 2023.
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Evolutionary Theory and Endogenous Institutional Change, with Danielle Allen and Cosma Shalizi, models different institutional trajectories of informational discovery in democratic and authoritarian regimes.
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Pursuing Cognitive Democracy, with Cosma Shalizi, examines how democracy can better harness the benefits of diverse perspectives than either markets or hierarchy.
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Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy, with Bruce Schneier, examines the vulnerability of democracy to attacks that use floods of information to heighten division.
My second project, with Abraham Newman addresses what we call Weaponized Interdependence, providing a structural theory of how information and economic networks enable state coercion.
- Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, "Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized, Nature 605, 219-222, May 12, 2022.
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Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, "Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Enable State Coercion," International Security, Summer 2019.
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Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, "Chained to Globalization: Why It's Too Late to Decouple," Foreign Affairs, January/February 2020.
My book with Abraham Newman, Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Fight over Freedom and Security examines EU-US disputes over privacy and surveillance. This article which surveys recent work on the 'new interdependence,' as well as setting out our own ideas, came out in World Politics in Spring 2014.
My guide to good writing for undergraduate political science students is here.
I blog at Crooked Timber (general political argument, intellectual discussion, and completely non-intellectual discussion) and at The Monkey Cage (political science and its applications).
The best part of my career as a blogger was putting together this seminar (made into a beautiful PDF by John Holbo) on Francis Spufford's wonderful book, Red Plenty. My Twitter handle is @henryfarrell, and my Pinboard feed is henryfarrell. Contact me at myfirstname.mylastname@gmail.com.
I'm a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. I am also a research associate at Stanford CASBS, an affiliated scholar at Stanford University Law School's Center for the Internet and Society, and an international correspondent for Stato e Mercato.
I remember Aaron Swartz.
Selected Recent Academic Articles
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Henry Farrell, Hugo Mercier and Melissa Schwartzberg (forthcoming), "Analytical Democracy: A Microfoundational Approach," American Political Science Review.
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Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, "Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized, Nature 605, 219-222, May 12, 2022.
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Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, "Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Enable State Coercion," International Security, Summer 2019.
See here for more.
Selected Recent Essays
- Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, "The U.S. Is the Only Sanctions Superpower. It Must Use That Power Wisely," New York Times, March 16, 2022.
- Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier, "What Makes Trump's Subversion Efforts So Alarming? His Collaborators, New York Times, November 23, 2020.
- Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, "Chained to Globalization: Why It's Too Late to Decouple," Foreign Affairs, January/February 2020.
- Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier, "Democracy's Dilemma," Boston Review Forum, with responses from Allison Berke, danah boyd, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Jason Healey, Joseph Nye, Riana Pfefferkorn and Astra Taylor.
- Henry Farrell, Margaret Levi and Tim O'Reilly, "Mark Zuckerberg Runs a Nation-State, and He's the King, Vox, April 18, 2018.
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Henry Farrell, "Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans," Boston Review: Global Dystopias 2018 (edited by Junot Diaz).
See here for more.