The Rise Of The Virtual State

What will power look like in the century to come? ”Imperial Great Britain may have been the model for the nineteenth century,” Richard Rosecrance writes, ”but Hong Kong will be the model for the twenty-first.” We are entering the Age of the Virtual State - when land and its products are no longer the primary source of power, when managing flows is more important than maintaining stockpiles, when service industries are the greatest source of wealth and expertise and creativity are the greatest natural resources.Rosecrance's brilliant new book combines international relations theory with economics and the business model of the virtual corporation to describe how virtual states arise and operate, and how traditional powers will relate to them. In specific detail, he shows why Japan's kereitsu system, which brought it industrial dominance, is doomed; why Hong Kong and Taiwan will influence China more than vice-versa; and why the European Union will command the most international prestige even though the U.S. may produce more wealth.

A leading scholar of international relations tells why the rise of virtual economies will make military conquest obsolete.

Virtual Statesexplores the role of the state in a rapidly globalizing, wired society. It presents a theoretical and historical introduction to the internet, its place in both the developed and the developing world, and its impact on society. Although the internet brings out new disparities--between the information rich and the information poor--it also has the potential to break down the boundaries of national identity. Jerry Everard argues that while information technology poses fundamental challenges to the inclusionary/exclusionary processes of state-making, this will not mean the decline but rather the mutation of the state. Everard goes on to look at the different ways in which states react to the wired society, covering issues such as war, censorship and the reactions of those excluded from this society.

What will power look like in the century to come? Imperial Great Britain may have been the model for the nineteenth century, Richard Rosecrance writes, but Hong Kong will be the model for the twenty-first. We are entering the Age of the Virtual State -- when land and its products are no longer the primary source of power, when managing flows is more important than maintaining stockpiles, when service industries are the greatest source of wealth and expertise and creativity are the greatest natural resources.Rosecrance's brilliant new book combines international relations theory with economics and the business model of the virtual corporation to describe how virtual states arise and operate, and how traditional powers will relate to them. In specific detail, he shows why Japan's kereitsu system, which brought it industrial dominance, is doomed; why Hong Kong and Taiwan will influence China more than vice-versa; and why the European Union will command the most international prestige even though the U.S. may produce more wealth.

As the world has become increasingly digitally interconnected, military leaders and other actors are ditching symmetric power strategies in favor of cyberstrategies. Cyberpower enables actors to change actual economic outcomes without the massive resource investment required for military force deployments. Cashing In on Cyberpower addresses the question, Why and to what end are state and nonstate actors using cybertools to influence economic outcomes? The most devastating uses of cyberpower can include intellectual property theft, espionage to uncover carefully planned trade strategies, and outright market manipulation through resource and currency values. Offering eight hypotheses to address this central question, Mark T. Peters II considers every major cyberattack (almost two hundred) over the past ten years, providing both a quick reference and a comparative analysis. He also develops new case studies depicting the 2010 intellectual property theft of a gold-detector design from the Australian Codan corporation, the 2012 trade negotiation espionage in the Japanese Trans-Pacific Partnership preparations, and the 2015 cyberattacks on Ukrainian SCADA systems. All these hypotheses combine to identify new data and provide a concrete baseline of how leaders use cybermeans to achieve economic outcomes.

This Handbook offers a comprehensive treatment of transformations of the state, from its origins in different parts of the world and different time periods to its transformations since World War II in the advanced industrial countries, the post-Communist world, and the Global South. 0Leading experts in their fields, from Europe and North America, discuss conceptualizations and theories of the state and the transformations of the state in its engagement with a changing international environment as well as with changing domestic economic, social, and political challenges. The Handbook covers different types of states in the Global South (from failed to predatory, rentier and developmental), in different kinds of advanced industrial political economies (corporatist, statist, liberal, import substitution industrialization), and in various post-Communist countries (Russia, China, successor states to the USSR, and Eastern Europe). It also addresses crucial challenges in different areas of state intervention, from security to financial regulation, migration, welfare states, democratization and quality of democracy, ethno-nationalism, and human development. The volume makes a compelling case that far from losing its relevance in the face of globalization, the state remains a key actor in all areas of social and economic life, changing its areas of intervention, its modes of operation, and its structures in adaption to new international and domestic challenges.

Recent years have seen a range of theoretical challenges to traditional notions of state sovereignty and a burgeoning debate about the power of the state in the face of globalization and new forms of governance. In this important new text, Georg Sørensen provides a systematic assessment of the contemporary state, steering a middle course between those who argue the state is in retreat and their critics. In so doing he sheds new light on just what is actually changing in the nature of sovereign statehood, on changes in the relative power of different states and on the changing relationship between the domestic and external aspects of state power.

On 18 March 2003, the United States attacked Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. On 16 January 1991, the US had attacked Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. The two wars were radically different. Whereas Operation Desert Storm had been launched with the hope that a new world order might emerge, Operation Iraqi Freedom signified the return of an imperial America unilaterally resorting to preventive warfare representative of a Hobbesian conception of international politics. Why did the promise of a privileged resort to peaceful inter-state conflict resolution implied during the first Gulf War give way to the explicit triumph of the 'might-is-right' principle during the second Gulf War? Is the shift in America's foreign behaviour but a mere parenthesis or potentially the first stage of a long term process likely to undermine the currently prevailing Lockean anarchy? This book aims to answer some of these questions.