Institutional Power and Information Technology: American Foreign Policy and the Uneven and Combined Development of the Internet

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The proposed course of research will seek to outline a theory of information communications technology as a form of institutional power in international relations. Technological institutions carry a social and political bias due to their design and production within a particular social and historical context. When these institutions spread through the international system they function as a form of agenda setting power, forcing other actors in the international system to accept the bias of the technology, or to attempt to alter it at a significant cost. This is a deep understanding of social power, in which dominant actors structure the everyday practices of social reproduction through a global material culture. The key contemporary example is the development of the Internet. The Internet expresses a particular bias due to its creation in a specifically American context, a bias towards liberal freedom of speech present in the free flow of information on the Internet. When this bias is enacted in other societies that have adopted the technology - such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, and many others - it creates political problems that require the either technological or social change. This is seen most clearly in the development of Internet filtering strategies. Understanding the power of technology in this way is important in gauging the nature of power in international politics, a topic of significant controversy and importance touching upon a potential decline of American power, the possible rise of China to superpower status, and the purported diffusion of power represented by social media and Wikileaks.With these concepts in place, this research will seek to further elaborate how this process of technological development and diffusion is generated sociologically. Considering social development as uneven and combined provides the theoretical grounding for this project. The characteristics of an uneven international society create the space for technology's institutional power, while the process of combination is the manner in which this power is enacted upon other actors. The development of technology in domestic contexts thereby always contains an element of 'international' causality, in which the presence of multiple political societies actively informs domestic social development through technology's institutional character. Seen in this light, technologies are no longer viewed as developing according to a single linear rationale, nor are they viewed as neutral tools which can be turned to any particular task. Instead, the process of technological develop is correctly viewed as a politically contested process, constituted by the multiple, fragmented, and global process of social development. The primary output of this research will be one book length manuscript that develops the initial insights of my doctoral research on the institutional power of the Internet. I will also write three draft papers developing some of the above arguments, two of which I will present to large conferences in the social sciences in order to ensure maximum impact for this research. Finally, I will submit two papers to academic journals that will outline the importance of these ideas for ongoing research agendas within the field of International Relations and Sociology.