The burgeoning of global connectivity in recent decades is without historical parallel and the 'wiring up' of the world continues apace, even in the poorest regions. Flux and ever-quickening change are the leitmotifs of the 'information age' across a swathe of human enterprise from industry and commerce through to politics and social relations. This is no less the case for the patterns of war, where change has been disorientating for soldiers and statesmen whose confidence in the old, the traditional, and the known has been shaken. David Betz's book explains the huge and disruptive implications of connectivity for the practice of warfare. The tactical ingenuity of opponents to confound or drop below the threshold of sophisticated weapons systems means war remains the realm of chance and probability. Increasingly, though, the conflicts of our time are less contests of arms than wars of hearts and minds conducted on a mass scale through multimedia communications networks. The most pernicious challengers to the status quo are not states but ever more powerful non-state actors.

From the visionary bestselling author of The Second World and How to Run the World comes a bracing and authoritative guide to a future shaped less by national borders than by global supply chains, a world in which the most connected powers—and people—will win. Connectivity is the most revolutionary force of the twenty-first century. Mankind is reengineering the planet, investing up to ten trillion dollars per year in transportation, energy, and communications infrastructure linking the world’s burgeoning megacities together. This has profound consequences for geopolitics, economics, demographics, the environment, and social identity. Connectivity, not geography, is our destiny. In Connectography, visionary strategist Parag Khanna travels from Ukraine to Iran, Mongolia to North Korea, Pakistan to Nigeria, and across the Arctic Circle and the South China Sea to explain the rapid and unprecedented changes affecting every part of the planet. He shows how militaries are deployed to protect supply chains as much as borders, and how nations are less at war over territory than engaged in tugs-of-war over pipelines, railways, shipping lanes, and Internet cables. The new arms race is to connect to the most markets—a race China is now winning, having launched a wave of infrastructure investments to unite Eurasia around its new Silk Roads. The United States can only regain ground by fusing with its neighbors into a super-continental North American Union of shared resources and prosperity. Connectography offers a unique and hopeful vision for the future. Khanna argues that new energy discoveries and technologies have eliminated the need for resource wars; ambitious transport corridors and power grids are unscrambling Africa’s fraught colonial borders; even the Arab world is evolving a more peaceful map as it builds resource and trade routes across its war-torn landscape. At the same time, thriving hubs such as Singapore and Dubai are injecting dynamism into young and heavily populated regions, cyber-communities empower commerce across vast distances, and the world’s ballooning financial assets are being wisely invested into building an inclusive global society. Beneath the chaos of a world that appears to be falling apart is a new foundation of connectivity pulling it together. Praise for Connectography “Incredible . . . With the world rapidly changing and urbanizing, [Khanna’s] proposals might be the best way to confront a radically different future.”—The Washington Post “Clear and coherent . . . a well-researched account of how companies are weaving ever more complicated supply chains that pull the world together even as they squeeze out inefficiencies. . . . [He] has succeeded in demonstrating that the forces of globalization are winning.”—Adrian Woolridge, The Wall Street Journal “Bold . . . With an eye for vivid details, Khanna has . . . produced an engaging geopolitical travelogue.”—Foreign Affairs “For those who fear that the world is becoming too inward-looking, Connectography is a refreshing, optimistic vision.”—The Economist “Connectivity has become a basic human right, and gives everyone on the planet the opportunity to provide for their family and contribute to our shared future. Connectography charts the future of this connected world.”—Marc Andreessen, general partner, Andreessen Horowitz “Khanna’s scholarship and foresight are world-class. A must-read for the next president.”—Chuck Hagel, former U.S. secretary of defense This title has complex layouts that may take longer to download.

In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly determined that affordable Internet access is a human right, critical to citizen participation in democratic governments. Given the significance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to social and political life, many U.S. tribes and Native organizations have created their own projects, from streaming radio to building networks to telecommunications advocacy. In Network Sovereignty, Marisa Duarte examines these ICT projects to explore the significance of information flows and information systems to Native sovereignty, and toward self-governance, self-determination, and decolonization. By reframing how tribes and Native organizations harness these technologies as a means to overcome colonial disconnections, Network Sovereignty shifts the discussion of information and communication technologies in Native communities from one of exploitation to one of Indigenous possibility.

Annotation Because the wireless industry is less capital intensive than others sectors in the telecommunications marketplace, it is expected to enjoy continued profitability. With survival at stake, telecommunications companies must ready themselves for battle to win access and operations rights in the wireless communications spectrum. This book maps out the strategies required to fight this battle by explaining how a telecommunications company should structure its entry and operations in the spectrum.

The trinity of government, military and publics has been drawn together into immediate and unpredictable relationships in a "new media ecology" that has ushered in new asymmetries in the waging of war and terror. To help us understand these new relationships, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin here provide a timely, comprehensive and highly readable survey of the field of war and media. War is diffused through a complex mesh of our everyday media. Paradoxically, this both facilitates and contains the presence and power of enemies near and far. The conventions of so-called traditional warfare have been splintered by the availability and connectivity of the principal locus of war today: the electronic and digital media. Hoskins and O'Loughlin identify and illuminate the conditions of what they term "diffused war" and the new challenges it raises for the actors who wage and counter warfare, for their agents and mechanisms of the new media and for mass publics. This book offers an invaluable review of the key literature and presents a fresh approach to the understanding of the dynamic relationships between war and media. It will be welcomed by a broad range of students taking courses on war and media and related modules, especially in media, communication and cultural studies, politics and international relations, sociology, journalism, and security studies.

A groundbreaking look at the future of great power competition in an age of globalization and what the United States can do in response The two decades after the Cold War saw unprecedented cooperation between the major powers as the world converged on a model of liberal international order. Now, great power competition is back and the liberal order is in jeopardy. Russia and China are increasingly revisionist in their regions. The Middle East appears to be unraveling. And many Americans question why the United States ought to lead. What will great power competition look like in the decades ahead? Will the liberal world order survive? What impact will geopolitics have on globalization? And, what strategy should the United States pursue to succeed in an increasingly competitive world? In this book Thomas Wright explains how major powers will compete fiercely even as they try to avoid war with each other. Wright outlines a new American strategy—Responsible Competition—to navigate these challenges and strengthen the liberal order.

Early studies on forecasting the growth of the Internet suggested that its evolution could not be predicted as being simply the result of a random network formation process. Recent evidence has shown that commercial connectivity goes through cycles, due to providers regularly disconnecting their customers. We model these cycles as being a result of the providers' limited ability to monitor their customers' contractual compliance. Based on twelve years of quarterly observations, we estimate the impacts of key covariates on the probability of starting a connectivity war. Following a choice model approach, we use different econometric specifications to test the model implications. Our results predict that the asymmetry between customers and providers, which increases the incentives to abuse connectivity, and the history of past connections, which affects mutual trust and information asymmetries, are the main factors in determining the probability of providers starting a connectivity war, thus helping to explain the cycles that are observed in Internet connectivity.

A FINANCIAL TIMES ECONOMICS BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Compulsively readable... An essential course in geopolitical self-help' - Adam Tooze 'Full of fresh - and often surprising - ideas' - Niall Ferguson 'Extraordinary... One of those rare books that defines the terms of our conversation about our times' - Michael Ignatieff We thought connecting the world would bring lasting peace. Instead, it is driving us apart. In the three decades since the end of the Cold War, global leaders have been integrating the world's economy, transport and communications, breaking down borders in the hope of making war impossible. In doing so, they have unwittingly created a formidable arsenal of weapons for new kinds of conflict and the motivation to keep fighting. Rising tensions in global politics are not a bump in the road - they are part of the paving. Troublingly, we are now seeing rising conflict at every level, from individuals on social media all the way up to nation-states in entrenched stand-offs. The past decade has seen a new antagonism between the US and China; an inability to co-operate on global issues such as climate change or pandemic response; and a breakdown in the distinction between war and peace, as overseas troops are replaced by sanctions, cyberwar, and the threat of large migrant flows. As a leading authority on international relations, Mark Leonard has been inside many of the rooms where our futures, at every level of society, are being decided - from the Facebook HQ and facial recognition labs in China to meetings in presidential palaces and at remote military installations. In seeking to understand the ways that globalisation has broken its fundamental promise to make our world safer and more prosperous, Leonard explores how we might wrest a more hopeful future from an age of unpeace.

Between 1870 and 1945, advances in communication and transportation simultaneously expanded and shrank the world. In five interpretive essays, A World Connecting goes beyond nations, empires, and world wars to capture the era’s defining feature: the profound and disruptive shift toward an ever more rapidly integrating world.