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Within the broader literature concerned with potential bias in student measures of instructor effectiveness, two broad types of bias have been shown to operate in a course: internal and external. M...

This chapter investigates the increasing use of social media during a 2012 flare up in armed conflict between Hamas and the state of Israel. Through tweet and counter tweet, Israel, Hamas, and digital recruits engage in a duel as lethal to identity as kinetic projectiles. Internet connected devices such as smartphones have become hostile agents through the republishing of social media content. Such devices and social media content have material affects beyond the geographic battlespace. The advent of Internet connected devices and social media content concomitant with their use during armed conflict by hostiles beyond the geographic battlespace suggest that patterns of conflict are rapidly changing calling into question the notion of hostile, hostile acts, and battlespace. In a social media and smartphone saturated era, who and what counts as hostile (people, smartphones, and tweets) is increasingly ambiguous.

Theories of international relations may soon confront a crisis of explanative power. This crisis emerges from a shift in how policymakers determine policy decisions to effectuate outcomes consistent with global policy objectives. International relations theory is a composite of heterodox traditions many of which are in disagreement but nonetheless share a common objective: the explanation of human decision-making under certain conditions. The emergence of information technologies has inundated policymakers with data derived from tracking, recording, and analyzing information technology user behavior. This data deluge has spawned new data analysis techniques and technologies leveraged when making and automating policy decisions. Automated systems are consequential actors in global politics. International relations theory must account for the agentive capacity of automated systems through reflexivity.

Russian state (alleged) interference in the 2016 US presidential election constitutes the sort of concrete example of how automated and autonomous information technologies may effect outcomes in political economy. Moreover, this concrete example strikes at the conception that there is or should be a clear demarcation between international and national politics/security. Automated and autonomous information technologies have rendered such a division as antiquated, at best, nonsensical, at worst. Perhaps more alarming is whether or not democracy will be able to survive in an era where politics is now digital. Without concerted and transnational policies initiating the sort of collective action called for in this collection, may prove to difficult a firewall to breach.

Fears of artificial intelligence-induced apocalypse and Terminator conundrums reveal an enduring puzzle concerning the prospects for human prosperity and security in an automated global political economy. This puzzle reflects human fear of the unknown and the unpredictability of technological change. Each contribution herein, constitutes brief interventions intended to provoke reflection, deliberation, and investigation into the practical implications to human affairs presented by the advent of autonomous robots, artificial intelligence, and, more generally, automated and autonomous information technologies. Our objective is to emphasize that understanding how human affairs will affect and be effected by such technologies must include, in addition to theory, an analysis of how automated and autonomous information technologies may alter practices of human affairs.

US Internet governance policy, it has been argued, is a threat to the Internet. Calls persist for the development of a multilateral Internet governance organization where states, especially the United States, play a lessened Internet governance role. Yet, US policymakers continue to resist greater multilateralism in global Internet governance favoring instead multistakeholder governance. Why do US policymakers continue to resist greater multilateralism in global governance of the Internet? Employing the Open Door interpretation of US diplomatic history, I show that, in the post–Cold War era, US policymakers purposed the Internet as a platform for the expansion of American products and political ideals and view greater multilateralism in global Internet governance as a threat to this purpose for the Internet. US policymakers will continue to support the present multistakeholder Internet governance structure that reflects US Internet governance policy preferences. Efforts at greater multilateralism in global governance of the Internet will continue to encounter US resistance unless such efforts incorporate US Internet governance policy preferences.

Patrolling near the contested Islands of Senkaku/Diaoyu in the East Asian Sea on 8 September 2010, a Japanese Coast Guard crew detained the captain of a Chinese fishing boat whose crew was plying their trade near the Islands claimed as Japanese territory. The waters around these contested islands contain rich fishing grounds in addition to potentially large deposits of oil and natural gas. The fishing boat captain was taken to Japan. Meanwhile, the Chinese government vehemently protested, and, ultimately, the fishing boat captain was returned to China, 16 days later on, 24 September 2010. During the 16-day diplomatic imbroglio between China and Japan and, it would appear, as part of an effort to increase pressure on Japan to release the Chinese fishing boat captain from custody, the government of China, on 10 September 2010, ceased rare earth metals exports to Japan. This action led to substantial distress within the tight knit circles of Japanese government and business elites owing to Japan’s absolute dependency on rare earth imports from China to feed its production of high technology products on which its economic model is based. In effect, China, in combination with other forms of diplomatic pressure, used rare earths as a bludgeon to forcibly coerce Japan into aligning its policy with Chinese interests or suffer economic hardship.

This chapter examines US cyber security policy in light of transnational cyber security, deterrence theory, and hegemonic stability theory. Recent work on US cyber security policy has argued for or against deterrence theory as a basis for US cyber security policy. Deterrence theory, as a state level theory of national security, focuses attention on strategic choice enabling policymakers to manage state level responses to perceived threats. The problem is that the Internet is a transnational medium and, increasingly, an important global medium for economic exchange, being treated as a duty free zone under WTO agreements. Thinking about cyber security at the level of the state elides threats to the Internet as a global commercial medium. Framing cyber security as a transnational security issue may assist in developing a comprehensive US cyber security policy that incorporates deterrence and US leadership. The role of the US in the global economic order is to provide leadership ensuring stability necessary or economic and information exchange to occur. From the standpoint of transnational security, the US should fulfill its role as leader of collective hegemony, by leading cyber space stakeholders to develop norms and rules for global cyber security governance regimes and institutions that will teach states the norms and rules necessary for a stable and secure cyber domain through which global information and economic exchange will continue to flourish.