Dr Sarah Logan1
1The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Biography:
Sarah is a senior lecturer in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University. Her research studies the impact of information technology on International Relations, primarily focusing on the politics and political economy of knowledge production. Recent publications have focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligence analysis, epistemic uncertainty and documentality in AI-facilitated resort-to-force decision-making, and sovereign AI in south-east Asia. Her first book. 'Hold Your Friends Close: Countering Radicalisation in Britain and America' was published by Oxford University Press in 2024.
Abstract:
Shifts in industrialisation, rational-state-building and ideologies of progress in the 19th century destabilized existing forms of global order and promoted novel institutional formations (Buzan and Lawson 2013). This 19th century transformation was intertwined with processes of industrialisation and attendant shifts in the nature of global capitalism. This paper asks whether current conditions of informational capitalism might induce similar processes of change, and if so, why. Under conditions of informational capitalism (Castells 1998, Cohen 2019), market actors use knowledge, culture and networked information technologies as a means of extracting and appropriating surplus value. This suggests a movement away from a global economy primarily oriented towards manufacturing and related activities towards one oriented principally towards the production, accumulation and processing of information. This paper asks: what does a redirection towards the development of intellectual and informational goods and services mean for global order? What does the increasingly prominent role of information technology in industrial production mean for global order? The paper takes as a departure point the role of information technology companies such as Google, Meta, X, TikTok, Alibaba, Nvidia and Open AI in recent international politics. It adapts this discussion to interrogate the configurational character of global order in the context of informational capitalism, focusing particularly on core and periphery relationships and the nested competencies of rational states.