Under contract with Oxford University Press
Virtual Territories examines how the digitization of information technology is transforming the relationship between war and sovereignty, that is, between war-making and state-making. Historically, states emerged out of institutional changes driven by military competition—in Charles Tilly’s famous phrase, war made the state as much as states made war. In today’s world of rapid technological development, where open major-power conflict is increasingly replaced with operations short of war, this historical connection between war and state transformation continues, but in new forms.
The book argues that digital technologies are neither undermining the state nor simply allowing it to persist. Instead, new technologies and their applications are changing the interaction between the institutions of the territorial state and how wars are planned, fought, and ended. States are adapting to new technological features of international competition, deploying new technologies to pursue their interests, and reshaping technological development in turn. In particular, Virtual Territories focuses on the role of representational processes the war-state-technology intersection today: representations using new technologies and representations of new technologies. Emphasizing representations moves away from instrumental or deterministic arguments about technology and instead suggests a different set of questions about information technology and state transformation today. How has digitization reshaped the interests, institutions, and representations that constitute the state? How has warfare—which today is comprised of a set of informational activities as much as the direct application of violence and force—driven or altered those transformations?
The book addresses those questions through three case studies of technological innovations in, respectively, war planning, war fighting, and war termination. A chapter on cybersecurity examines how wars are planned today in the shadow of digital capabilities and vulnerabilities. Through a close study of military doctrine and strategy, it shows how new boundary-crossing cyber threats and opportunities are themselves reshaped by the territorial ideas and institutions of the state. A chapter on drone warfare considers how remote war-fighting—especially through ambiguous violations of territorial sovereignty by way of unmanned incursions into airspace—changes the territorial strategies of both strong and weak states. The third case looks at the effects of applying new representational tools—digital mapping, satellite imaging, and other territorial virtualizations—to negotiations over disputed boundaries. Digital tools fundamentally alter the processes of negotiation as spatial information is presented with greater speed, accuracy, and affective resonance, with important consequences for how states peacefully end conflict over disputed boundaries.
The book draws together the findings of these cases, revealing how the state is remaking itself to fit the new strategic environment of the twenty-first century. New technologies are simultaneously driving state transformation, providing the tools that states are using to adapt, constraining what changes are possible, and being reshaped by political ideas and institutions in return. For international relations theory, the book thus argues that technological change is far from exogenous to political interactions. Instead, political institutions and interactions are, and always have been, fundamentally technological.
Contents:
Chapter 1. Introduction: Technology, Politics, and Representation
Chapter 2. Information Technology, State-Building, and Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 3. From Dayton to Google: Digital Mapping and Negotiation
Chapter 4. Metaphors and the Internet: The “Cyberspace Domain”
Chapter 5. Drone Warfare: The Representational Politics of Remote Operations
Chapter 6. Conclusion