Globalization and Perception on War

Globalization and International Organizations Assignment Submitted By A. S. M. Iqbal Bahar Rana. ID # 103-0007-085 MPPG Programme, North South University Date: 14. 11. 2011 Do you think the advent of information revolution has changed the way war is perceived by the West? If so, what are the implications of such changes for poorly-governed countries of the world? Introduction: The German philosopher Hegel held that revolutions are the locomotive of history. According to his theory, every social, political, and economic system builds up tensions and contradictions over time. Eventually these explode in revolution. One cannot create a revolution in the way that an architect designs a building. Nor is it possible to control revolutions like a conductor leads an orchestra. Revolutions are much too big and complex for that. Those who live in revolutionary times can only make a thousand small decisions and hope that they move history forward in the desired direction. Around the world today we see the growing sophistication and rapid international diffusion of powerful new information technologies, the mergers of huge communication empires, strategic alliances across borders, and the doubling of power and the halving of the price of computing every 18 months (Moore's Law). The Information Revolution, ethno-political conflicts, globalization — each of these three mega-trends is individually important for all nations' future; together, they are redefining the global context within which governments and citizens must make daily decisions in the years to come. Thus, their intersection should constitute a central concern of scholars, policy makers, and citizens. In an era of globalization, national security has a different meaning. Nation-states no longer have a monopoly on the means of coercion. Even if nuclear weapons had a deterrent value during the Cold War, today they have none as the causes of insecurity, more often than not, are economic collapse and internecine conflict, and not external aggression. The information age has revolutionized the instrument of soft power and the opportunities to apply them. The ability of a nation to project the appeal of its ideas, ideology, culture, economic model, and social and political institutions and to take advantage of its international business and telecommunications networks will leverage soft power. In simple terms, the information revolution is increasing inter-connectedness and escalating the pace of change in nearly every dimension of life. This, in turn, shapes the evolution of armed conflict. Whether in economics, politics, or war-fighting, those who are able to grasp the magnitude of this will be the best prepared to deal with it. The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in warfare scenarios has been of central interest to governments, intelligence agencies, computer scientists and security experts for the past two decades (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1997; Campen and Dearth 1998; Singer 2009). . ICTs gave rise to the latest revolution in military affairs (RMA) by providing new tools and processes of waging war – like network-centric warfare (NCW), and integrated command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR). This RMA concerns in the premise of military forces, as they have to deal with â€Å"the 5th dimension of warfare, information, in addition to land, sea, air and space†. Classical Perception of War: Clausewitz is under significant challenge. It is clearly alive and well in the military colleges of Western states but outside these corridors other philosophies are in the ascendancy. A debate continues to rage over the extent to which Clausewitzean thinking is still relevant to today’s wars. From today’s vantage point, several developments have eroded the appeal and power of the political philosophy of war. First, the concept of the battlefield, so central to the way in which Clausewitz understood warfare, has dissolved. The 9/11 attacks, for instance, demonstrated that today’s battlegrounds might be Western (or other) cities while the US-led ‘War on Terror’ – now rebranded as the ‘long war’ – conceives of the battlefield as literally spanning the entire globe. In the future, however, battles are unlikely to be confined to planet Earth as the US in particular will be forced to militarize space in an effort to protect the satellites upon which its communication and information systems depend (Hirst 2002). Second, as the speeches of both Osama bin Laden and US President George W. Bush make clear, the leadership cadres on both sides of the ‘War on Terror’ have often rejected political narratives of warfare. Instead, they have adopted eschatological philosophies in their respective rallying cries for a global jihad and a just war against evildoers where ideology played a significant role in waging war. A third problem for advocates of the political philosophy and one which Clausewitz obviously never encountered is war involving information technology. Information technology brings the Finally, when confronted by ‘revolutionary’ wars which cry out for counterrevolutionary responses, Clausewitz’s injunction to destroy the military forces of the adversary is problematic not just because such ‘military forces’ are often indistinguishable from the local populace but also because one can never be sure they have been eliminated ‘unless one is ready to destroy a large portion of the population’ (Rapoport 1968: 53; see also Chapter 26, this volume). As we have seen, it is fair to say, however, that the political philosophy has been the most prominent in the traditionally Anglo-American-dominated field of security studies (on the ethnocentric tendencies of security studies see Booth 1979, Barkawi and Laffey 2006). All that can be said in general terms is that whatever approach to understanding warfare one chooses to adopt will have consequences, leading the analysis in certain directions and forsaking others. Within International Relations and security studies warfare has commonly been defined in ways that highlight its cultural, legal and political dimensions. Information Revolution and information Warfare: ICTs are used in several combat activities, from cyber attacks to the deployment of robotic weapons and the management of communications among the fighting units. Such a wide spectrum of uses makes it difficult to identify the peculiarities of this phenomenon. Help in respect to this will come from considering in more detail the different uses of ICTs in warfare. An attack on the information system called smurf attack is an implementation of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. A DDoS is a cyber attack whose aim is to disrupt the functionality of a computer, a network or a website. This form of attack was deployed in 2007 against institutional Estonian websites, and more recently similar attacks have been launched to block the Internet communication in Burma during the 2010 elections. The use of robotic weapons in the battlefield is another way to use ICTs in warfare. It is a growing phenomenon, coming to widespread public notice with US army, which deployed 150 robotic weapons in Iraq’s war in 2004, culminating in 12,000 robots by 2008. Nowadays, several armies around the world are developing and using tele-operated robotic weapons, they have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more sophisticated machines are being used at the borders between Israel and Palestine in the so-called ‘automatic kill zone’. These robots are trusted to detect the presence of potential enemies and to mediate the action of the human soldiers and hence to fire on potential enemy’s targets when these are within the range patrolled by the robots. Several armies also invested their resources to deploy unmanned vehicles, like the MQ-1 predators, which have then been used to hit ground targets, and to develop unmanned combat air vehicles, which are designed to deliver weapons and can potentially act autonomously, like the EADS Barracuda, and the Northrop Grumman X-47B. One of the latest kinds of robotic weapon – SGR-A1 – has been deployed by South Korea to patrol the border with North Korea. This robot has low-light camera and pattern recognition software to distinguish humans from animals or other objects. It also has a color camera, which can locate a target up to 500 meters, and if necessary, can fire its built-in machine gun. Up until now, robotic weapons were tele-operated by militaries sitting miles away from the combat zone. Human were kept in the loop and were the ones who decided whether to shoot the target and to maneuver the robot on the battlefield. The case of SGR-A1 constitutes quite a novelty, as it has an automatic mode, in which it can open fire on the given target without waiting for the human soldier to validate the operation. Finally, the management of communication among the units of an army has been revolutionized radically by the use of ICTs. Communication is a very important aspect of warfare. It concerns the analysis of the enemy’s resources and strategy and the definition of an army’s own tactics on the battlefield. NCW and C4ISR represent a major revolution in this respect. An example of such revolution is the use of iPhone and Android devices. Today, the US army is testing the use of these devices to access intelligence data, display videos made by drones flying over the battlefields, constantly update maps and information on tactics and strategy, and, generally speaking, gather all the necessary information to overwhelm the enemy. Changing Nature of Conflict: States have been resilient in the face of technological change, and despite the increasingly rapid diffusion of information, states still shape the political space within which information flows (Keohane and Nye 1998; Herrera 2004). Yet state power has been diminished too. States have lost much of their control over monetary and fiscal policies, which are often dictated by global markets (Castells 1996, pp. 245, 254). The rapid movement of currency in and out of countries by currency speculators can extract a devastating cost on countries that do not have large currency reserves. States no longer monopolize scientific research. The Internet allows a global scientific community to exchange information on topics that can be easily exploited by terrorist organizations (Castells 1996, p. 125). The Internet has made it impossible for states, dictatorships as well as democracies, to monopolize the truth (Castells 1996, pp. 384, 486-487). Nor can they monopolize strategic information (Keohane and Nye 1998) – the information that confers great advantage only if competitors do not possess it – because states no longer control encryption technologies. Most critically, IT has made the most technologically advanced and powerful societies by traditional indices the most vulnerable to attack. A distinguishing hallmark of the information age is the â€Å"network,† which exploits the accessibility and availability of information, and computational and communicative speed, to organize and disseminate knowledge cheaply and efficiently (Harknett 2003). The strength of the network lies in its degree of connectivity. Connectivity can increase prosperity and military effectiveness, but it also creates vulnerabilities. Information-intensive military organizations are more vulnerable to information warfare because they are more information-dependent, while an adversary need not be information-dependent to disrupt the information lifeline of high-tech forces. Information-dependent societies are also more vulnerable to the infiltration of computer networks, databases, and the media, and to physical as well as cyber attacks on the very linkages upon which modern societies rely to function: communication, financial transaction, transportation, and energy resource networks. The same forces that have weakened states have empowered non-states. The information revolution has diffused and redistributed power to traditionally weaker actors. Terrorists have access to encryption technologies which increase their anonymity and make it difficult for states to disrupt and dismantle their operations. (Zanini and Edwards 2001, pp. 37-8) Global markets and the Internet make it possible to hire criminals, read about the design and dissemination of weapons of mass destruction, and coordinate international money laundering to finance nefarious activities (Kugler and Frost, eds. 001; Castells 2000, pp. 172, 180-182). Terrorists can now communicate with wider audiences and with each other over greater distances, recruit new members, and diffuse and control their operations more widely and from afar. Non-state actors also have increasing access to offensive information warfare capabilities because of their relative cheapness, accessibility and commercial origins (US GAO 1 996; Office of the Under Secretary for Defense for Acquisition and Technology 1996). Globalization, and the information technologies that undergird it, suggest that a small, well-organized group may be able to create the same havoc that was once the purview of states and large organizations with substantial amounts of resources. The availability off-the-shelf commercial technologies benefits smaller states and non-state actors, to be sure, but only the wealthiest and most powerful states will be able to leverage information technology to launch a â€Å"revolution in military affairs. The ability to gather, sort, process, transfer, and disseminate information over a wide geographic area to produce dominant battle space awareness will be a capability reserved for the most powerful (Keohane and Nye 1998). In this respect, information technology continues trends already underway in the evolution of combat that have enhanced the military effectiveness of states. IT makes conventional combat more accurate, thereby improving the efficiency of high explosive attacks. On the other hand, IT also continues trends in warfare that circumvent traditional military forces and which work in favor of weaker states and non-states. Like strategic bombing and counter-value nuclear targeting, efforts to destroy or punish an adversary by bypassing destruction of his armed forces and directly attacking his society, predate the information technology age. Techniques of information warfare provide attackers with a broader array of tools and an ability to target more precisely and by non-lethal means the lifelines upon which advanced societies rely: power grids, phone systems, transportation networks, and airplane guidance systems. Information is not only a means to boost the effectiveness of lethal technologies, but opens up the possibility of non-lethal attacks that can incapacitate, defeat, deter or coerce an adversary, attacks that can be launched by individuals and private groups in addition to professional militaries. Warfare is no longer an activity exclusively the province of the state. Information is something that states, organized for success in the industrial age, do not have a comparative advantage in exploiting. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt argue that the information revolution is strengthening the network form of organization over hierarchical forms, that non-state actors can organize into networks more easily than traditional hierarchical state actors, and that the master of the network will gain major advantages over hierarchies because hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks. (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, pp. 1, 15. ) States are run by large hierarchical organizations with clearly delineated structures and functions. By contrast, a more efficient organizational structure for the knowledge economy is the network of operatives, or â€Å"knowledge workers† not bound by geographic location. This is precisely the type of organizational structure being adopted by terrorist groups as they adapt to the information age. There is evidence that adaptation is quicker in flat hierarchies or matrix organizations than it is in the steep pyramidal hierarchies that run the modern nation-state; that flatter networks have a much shorter learning curve than do hierarchically networked organizations (Areieli 2003). The higher the hierarchy, the faster it operates if it is doing something it has already foreseen and thus for which it is prepared. If, on the other hand, a scenario requires the development of new processes that were not foreseen, the flatter organization is better at learning. Matrix organizations are more creative and innovative. According to Castells, the performance of a network depends on two fundamental attributes: â€Å"its connectedness that is its structural ability to facilitate noise-free communication between its components; its onsistency, that is the extent to which there is sharing of interests between the network’s goals and the goals of its components† (Castells 1996, p. 171). On both criteria, large state bureaucracies suffer serious disadvantages. Informal war: Informal war is armed conflict where at least one of the antagonists is a non-state entity such as an insurgent army or ethnic militia. It is the descendent of what became known as low intens ity conflict in the 1980s. Like today, future informal war will be based on some combination of ethnicity, race, regionalism, economics, personality, and ideology. Often ambitious and unscrupulous leaders will use ethnicity, race, and religion to mobilize support for what is essentially a quest for personal power. The objectives in informal war may be autonomy, separation, outright control of the state, a change of policy, control of resources, or, â€Å"justice† as defined by those who use force. Informal war will grow from the culture of violence which has spread around the world in past decades, flowing from endemic conflict, crime, the drug trade, the proliferation of weapons, and the trivialization of violence through popular culture. In many parts of the world, violence has become routine. Whole generations now see it as normal. In this setting, informal war will remain common, in part because of the declining effectiveness of states. Traditionally, governments could preserve internal order by rewarding regions or groups of society which supported the government, punishing those which did not, and, with wise leadership, preempting conflict and violence through economic development. In a globalized economy, the ability of governments to control and manipulate the economy is diminished, thus taking away one of their prime tools for quelling dissent and rewarding support. In regions where the state was inherently weak, many nations have large areas of territory beyond the control of the government. And, as political, economic, and military factors constrain traditional cross border invasion, proxy aggression has become a more attractive strategic option. Regimes unwilling to suffer the sanctions and opprobrium that results from invading one’s neighbors find that supporting the enemies of one’s neighbors is often overlooked. This is not likely to change in coming decades. Finally, the combination of globalization and the Cold War have fueled the growth of an international arms market at the same time that the international drug traffic and the coalescence of international criminal networks have provided sources of income for insurgents, terrorists, and militias. With enough money, anyone can equip a powerful military force. With a willingness to use crime, nearly anyone can generate enough money. Informal war is not only more common than in the past, but also more strategically significant. This is true, in part, because of the rarity of formal war but also because of interconnectedness. What Martin Libicki calls â€Å"the globalization of perception†Ã¢â‚¬â€the ability of people to know what is happening everywhere—means that obscure conflicts can become headline news. There are no backwaters any more. As suffering is broadcast around the world, calls mount for intervention of one sort or the other. Groups engaged in informal war use personal and technological interconnectedness to publicize their cause, building bridges with a web of organizations and institutions. The Zapatista movement in southern Mexico is a model for this process. The Zapatistas, in conjunction with a plethora of left-leaning Latin Americanists and human rights organizations, used of the Internet to build international support with web pages housed on servers at places like the University of California, Swarthmore, and the University of Texas. This electronic coalition-building was so sophisticated that a group of researchers from the RAND Corporation labeled it â€Å"social netwar. Undoubtedly, more organizations will follow this path, blending the expertise of traditional political movements with the cutting-edge advertising and marketing techniques that the information revolution has spawned. A defining feature of the information revolution is that perception matters as much as tangible things. This will certainly hold for informal warfare. Future strategists will find that crafting an â€Å"image assessment† or â€Å"perception map† of a conflict will be a central part of their planning. In failed states, informal war may be symmetric as militias, brigand bands, and warlord armies fight each other. At other times, it may be asymmetric as state militaries, perhaps with outside assistance, fight against insurgents, militias, brigands, or warlord armies. Future insurgents would need to perform the same functions of defense, support, and the pursuit of victory, but will find new ways to do so. In terms of defense, dispersion is likely to be strategic as well as tactical. There will be few sanctuaries for insurgent headquarters in an era of global linkages, pervasive sensor webs, nd standoff weapons, so astute insurgents will spread their command and control apparatus around the world. Information technology will make this feasible. Right wing anti-government theorists in the United States have already developed a concept they call â€Å"leaderless resistance† in which disassociated terrorists work toward a common goal and become aware of each other’s action s through media publicity. The information revolution will provide the opportunity for â€Å"virtual leadership† of insurgencies which do not choose the anarchical path of â€Å"leaderless resistance. The top leadership might never be in the same physical location. The organization itself is likely to be highly decentralized with specialized nodes for key functions like combat operations, terrorism, fund raising, intelligence, and political warfare. In many cases, insurgent networks will themselves be part of a broader global network unified by opposition to the existing political and economic order. Informal war in the coming decades will not represent a total break with its current variants. It will still entail hands on combat, with noncombatants as pawns and victims. Insurgents, militias, and other organizations which use it will seek ways to raise the costs of conflict for state forces. Gray Area War: As the Cold War ended defense analysts like Max G. Manwaring noted the rising danger from â€Å"gray area phenomena† that combined elements of traditional war-fighting with those of organized crime. Gray area war is likely to increase in strategic significance in the early decades of the 21st century. To an extent, this is a return to historical normalcy after the abnormality of the Cold War. Today, gray area threats are increasing in strategic significance. Information technology, with its tendency to disperse information, shift advantages to flexible, networked organizations, and facilitate the creation of alliances or coalitions, has made gray area enemies more dangerous than in the past. For small or weak countries, the challenge is particularly dire. Not only are their security forces and intelligence communities less proficient, but the potential impact of gray area threats is amplified by the need to attract outside capital. In this era of globalization and interconnectedness, prosperity and stability within a state are contingent on capital inflows. Except in nations that possess one of the very rare high-payoff natural resources like petroleum, capital inflows require stability and security. In places like Colombia, South Africa, Central Asia, and the Caucuses, foreign investment is diminished by criminal activity and the insecurity it spawns. This makes gray area threats a serious security challenge. Gray area war involves an enemy or a network of enemies that seeks primarily profit, but which has political overtones and a substantially greater capability for strategic planning and the conduct of armed conflict than traditional criminal groups. Like future insurgents, future networked gray area enemies may have nodes that are purely political, some political elements that use informal war, and other components that are purely criminal. This greatly complicates the task of security forces that must deal with them. Because gray area enemies fall in between the realm of national security and law enforcement, the security forces that confront them must also be a â€Å"gray† blend of the military and the police. Like the military, security forces must have substantial fire power (both traditional and informational), and the ability to approach problems. But these security forces also must have characteristics of law enforcement, working within legal procedures and respecting legal rights. Even though the objective will be monetary rather than purely political, violence will be goal-oriented. Astrategic gray area war will consist primarily of turf battles between armed gangs or militias. It may be related to refugee movements, ethnic conflict, ecological degradation, or struggles for political power (as in Jamaica in the 1990s, where political parties used street gangs to augment their influence). When astrategic gray area war is linked to struggles for political power, the armed forces (such as they are) will be serving as mercenaries only partially controlled by their paymasters, rather than armed units under the actual command of political authorities. Strategic Information warfare: Formal, informal, and gray area war are all logical extensions of existing types. Technology, though, could force or allow more radical change in the conduct of armed conflict. For instance, information may become an actual weapon rather than simply a tool that supports traditional kinetic weapons. Future war may see attacks via computer viruses, worms, logic bombs, and trojan horses rather than bullets, bombs, and missiles. This is simply the latest version of an idea with recent antecedents in military history. Today strategic information warfare remains simply a concept or theory. The technology to wage it does not exist. Even if it did, strategists cannot be certain strategic information warfare would have the intended psychological effect. Would the destruction of a state’s infrastructure truly cause psychological collapse? Would the failure of banking, commercial, and transportation systems crush the will of a people or steel it? But until infrastructure warfare is proven ineffective, states and non-state actors which have the capacity to attempt it probably will, doing so because it appears potentially effective and less risky than other forms of armed conflict. Future infrastructure war could take two forms. In one version, strategic information attacks would be used to prepare for or support conventional military operations to weaken an enemy’s ability to mobilize or deploy force. The second possible form would be â€Å"stand alone† strategic information warfare. This might take the form of a sustained campaign designed for decisive victory or, more likely, as a series of raids designed to punish or coerce an enemy But should cyber-attacks, whether as part of strategic information warfare or as terrorism, become common, the traditional advantage large and rich states hold in armed conflict might erode. Cyber-attacks require much less expensive equipment than traditional ones. The necessary skills exist in the civilian information technology world. One of the things that made nation-states the most effective organizations for waging industrial age war was the expense of troops, equipment and supplies. Conventional industrial-age war was expensive and wasteful. Only organizations that could mobilize large amounts of money flesh, and material could succeed at it. But if it becomes possible to wage war using a handful of computers with internet connections, a vast array of organizations may choose to join the fray. Non-state organizations could be as effective as states. Private entities might be able to match state armed forces. While substantial movement is underway on the defense of national information infrastructure, offensive information warfare is more controversial. Following the 1999 air campaign against Serbia, there were reports that the United States had used offensive information warfare and thus â€Å"triggered a super-weapon that catapulted the country into a military era that could forever alter the ways of war and the march of history. According to this story, the U. S. military targeted Serbia’s command and control network and telephone system. The Future Battlefield: The information revolution is transforming warfare. No longer will massive dug-in Armies, armadas and Air Forces fight bloody attritional battles. Instead, small highly mobile forces, armed with real time information from satellites and terrestrially deployed battlefield sensors, will strike with lighteni ng speed at unexpected locations. On the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be, located, tracked and targetted almost instantaneously through the use of: * Sensors and their fusion with a view to presenting an integrated highly reliable intelligence picture in real time. * Surveillance devices that unceasingly seek and shadow the enemy. * Data-links and computer-generated battle picture, task tables and â€Å"maps that change scale and overlay differing types of information in response to voice requests. † * Automated fire control, with first round kill probabilities approaching near certainty. Simulation, visualization and virtually in planning, and testing concepts and weapon effectiveness. This would balance out the need for large forces to overwhelm the opponent physically. Control function will be decentralized and shared at all levels of command. Combat will be in tandem to intelligence gathering. Non-lethal, soft-kill electronic weapons will assume as much importance as highly lethal, hard-kil l weapons. Intelligent command posts and paperless headquarters will be the form. A Commander will be of a different breed-priding more in his lap-top than his baton. He will be his own staff officer. Changing Perception of War and its implications on poorly governed country: The idea that weak states can compromise security — most obviously by providing havens for terrorists but also by incubating organized crime, spurring waves of migrants, and undermining global efforts to control environmental threats and disease — is no longer much contested. –Washington Post, June 9. 2004 A majority of states in the contemporary security environment can be classified as weak. These states exhibit a limited ability to control their own territories because, in part, they do not have a monopoly on the use of force within their borders. They also struggle to provide security or deliver major services to large segments of their populations. These vulnerabilities generate security predicaments that propel weak regimes—both democratic and authoritarian—to act in opportunistic ways. Because they lack conventional capabilities, out of necessity, weak states will have to be opportunistic in their use of the limited instruments they have available for security and survival. The threat of information warfare should be understood within a broad vision of global power that is based on an up-dated version of Mao Zedong’s theory of the ‘Three Worlds’. Just as Mao believed that the world was divided into three tiers of states, with the superpowers at the top, the developed states in the middle and the developing states at the bottom, in the information age is also supposed to be three types of state. At the top of the pile is the ‘information hegemony state’, asserting its control by dominating the telecommunications infrastructure, software development, and by reaping profits from the use of information and the Internet. After this comes the ‘information sovereign state’, exemplified by those European states that have accumulated sufficient know-how to exert independent control over their information resources and derive profits from them, and to protect themselves from information hegemony. At the bottom of the pile are the ‘information colonial and semi-colonial states’, which have no choice but to accept the information that is forced on them by other states. They are thus left vulnerable to exploitation because they lack the means to protect themselves from hegemonic power. In recent years, the nature of conflict has changed. Through asymmetric warfare radical groups and weak state actors are using unexpected means to deal stunning blows to more powerful opponents in the West. From terrorism to information warfare, the Wests air power, sea power and land power are open to attack from clever, but much weaker, enemies. The significance of asymmetric warfare, in both civilian and military realms become such an important subject for study to provide answers to key questions, such as how weaker opponents apply asymmetric techniques against the Western world, and shows how the West military superiority can be seriously undermined by asymmetric threats. Conclusion: It is said that nothing is permanent except change. This is particularly true in the information age. It is important to understand the nature of the new world information order in order to be effective in foreign policy initiatives and to conduct the international relations. The information revolution throws up various contradictory phenomena. It includes the strengthening of the forces of anarchy and control. The revolution empowers individuals and elites. It breaks down hierarchies and creates new power structures. It offers more choices and too many choices, greater insight and more fog. It reduces the risk to soldiers in warfare and vastly increases the cost of conflict. It can lead to supremacy of the possessors of information technologies while it leads to vulnerabilities to the same possessors from weaker nations. It cedes some state authority to markets, to transnational entities and to non-state actors and as a result produces political forces calling for the strengthening of the state. However, a mere look at some of the manifestations of the arrival of information technology in international relations, clearly brings out how the nature and exercise of power have been permanently altered. Benjamin Barber describes a world that is both coming together and falling apart in his book Jihad Against McWorld. He describes a world where the nation state is losing its influence and where the world is returning to tribalism, regionalism, and the ethnocentric warfare that characterized much of the earlier human history. This problem is most apparent in the developing world where we continue to see the spread of disease, continuing humanitarian crisis, political and economic instability, and ethnic, tribal, civil, and drug related war. There are several themes that are consistent across these global futures. The first is conflict. The negative effects of globalization will continue to promote regionalism, tribalism, and conflict in the developing world. Secondly, nations with uncontrollable population growth, a scarcity of natural resources, and poor government systems will fail to benefit from globalization regardless of its effects on the rest of the world. Thirdly, technology will continue to be exploited to benefit developed nations and illicit criminal/terrorist networks, and will have little affect on the developing world. In all scenarios the power of the state will weaken and the power of the non-state networked actor will continue to expand with the help of the tools of globalization. References: Paul D. Williams. (2008). War. In: Paul D. Williams Security Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. p151-p171. Akshay Joshi. (2010). The Information Revolution and National Power:Political Aspects-II. Available: www. idsa. org. Last accessed 13rd November 2011. Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. 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Jessica Mathews, â€Å"Powershift†, Foreign Affairs, January/February 1997, pp. 50-55. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). The seminal discussion of the political philosophy of war. Emily O. Goldman and Leo J. Blanken, 2011, THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS OF MILITARY POWER, California, University of California-Davis