The Power of Networks

With an ever-growing number of users, the Internet is central to the processes of globalization, cultural formations, social encounters and economic development. These aside, it is also fast becoming an important political domain. Struggles over disclosure, access and governance are only the most visible signs that the Internet is quickly becoming a site of fierce political conflict involving states, technical groups, business and civil society. As the debate over the global politics of the Internet intensifies, this book will be a valuable guide to anyone seeking to understand the emergence, organization and shape of this new issue. In this vivid study, Mikkel Flyverbom captures how questions about the digital divide and the information revolution, dialogues with stakeholders, and networked forms of organization have become key features of the global politics of the Internet. Tracing the making and stabilization of this transnational issue in and around the United Nations over almost a decade, this book demonstrates how multi-stakeholder networks make new political domains accessible and unsettle established ways of organizing transnational governance. The Power of Networks offers a rich account of the practices and effects of organizing global politics and governance through dialogues and collaborations among governments, business and societies the world over.

Offering a novel analytical vocabulary for the study of ordering, governance and organization in global politics, and its relationship to the growth of the Internet, this innovative ethnographic study of hybrid organizations and entangled forms of power in global politics shows how insights from actor-network theory and the Foucauldian governmentality literature can reinvigorate studies of transnational governance and organizational processes. It will appeal to anyone interested in emergent network issues in global politics, as well as practitioners and researchers focusing on multi-stakeholder processes, and students and scholars searching for a fresh perspective on organization, power and global politics.