Strategy
The Information Technology, War and Peace Project, established with support from the Ford Foundation, tracks the effects of Information Technology (IT) on traditional statecraft and new forms of networked global politics. InfoTechWarPeace supports and seeks to extend networks of knowledge and authority that are working to anticipate, analyze and mediate conflicts enabled by global terror, hate media, information warfare, and other bellicose uses of information technology.
InfoTech Transforms International Relations
From the revolution in
military affairs to hacktivism, from the
virtualization of money to the digital divide,
from computer code to genetic code, IT are
transforming international relations. IT
displays a capacity not only to collapse
distance between here and there, near and
far, but also between fact and fiction.
The public consequences are profound.
IT played a critical
role in the Gulf War, the Kosovo air campaign,
and most recently and vividly, in the recent
terrorist attack on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon. IT takes many forms in
international relations: network wars, computer
simulations, smart weapons, sensor arrays,
overhead surveillance, live-feeds, media
pools, 24/7 news cycles, and other complex
combinations of digital information, transmission,
and storage.
IT has the capacity to
actualize as well as to virtualize violence
in realtime. Ranging from organized warfare
to terrorist attacks to coercive diplomacy
to netwars, IT enables the continuation of
violence through infowar. Used by governmental
as well as nongovernmental organizations,
trans- and sub-national actors, and a wide
variety of virtual communities, IT has also
demonstrated a capability to prevent, mediate,
and resolve conflicts through infopeace.
The Goal of InfoTechWarPeace
The goal of InfoTechWarPeace
is to produce, through rapid internet interventions,
online forums, international symposia, videoteleconferences,
and documentaries, the kind of networked knowledge,
critical thinking, and ethical sensibility
that will help raise public awareness and
inform new policies on global technological
issues in war and peace.
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