[p2p-research] Book Review: Cyber Conflict and Global Politics

[Michel Bauwens]

just published by kevin carson, list member:
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2008/12/book-review-cyber-conflict-and-global.html

Thanks for forwarding and supporting the members of our research community!!

Book Review: Cyber Conflict and Global Politics Athina Karatzogianni, ed. Cyber
Conflict and Global Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).
<http://www.amazon.com/Cyber-Conflict-Global-Politics-Athina-Karatzogianni/dp/0203890760/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228453750&sr=1-2>

Athina Karatzogianni's work first came to my attention through her
participation in the P2P Research email list. Her main area of research
these past several years has been a major interest of mine as well: the
intersection of networked communications technology with asymmetric warfare
to form networked resistance. I've been interested in what is variously
called "netwar" and "networked resistance" since I stumbled across work on
the subject by Rand analysists David
Ronfeldt<http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR994/>et al. That
model of conflict has since been further developed in William
Lind's work on Fourth Generation
Warfare<http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind-arch.html>,
and on rhizome by Jeff Vail <http://jeffvail.net/>. Having read Samuel
Huntington's analysis of the crisis of governability not long before I came
across Ronfeldt, I was struck by the potential for networked resistance to
become the stuff of elite nightmares. I recently applied that same model to
labor relations in a blog
post<http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2007/04/media-print-projection-embossed-body.html>that
was later expanded into Chapter
Nine<http://members.tripod.com/kevin_carson/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/Chapter9.pdf>of
my forthcoming org
theory book<http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html>
.

Karatzogianni's work is a welcome addition to the literature on networked
resistance. The theme of her latest effort in this field, as stated in her
introduction, is the emerging "counter-hegemonic account of globalization"
faced by neo-liberal governments and institutions.

One of the interesting sides to the argument is that the information
revolution is altering the nature of conflict by strengthening network forms
of organization over hierarchical forms. In contrast to the closure of
space, the violence and identity divide found in ethnoreligious discourses,
sociopolitical movements seem to rely more on networking and rhizomatic
structures. U.S. power is increasingly faced with resistance movements
operating on a network model and utilizing new information technologies.


Thanks to the Internet and new media associated with it, governments are
finding it increasingly difficult to shape public consciousness. The
proliferation of unofficial and unauthorized blogs by American soliders in
Iraq, and by Iraqis themselves, is just one example of the phenomenon. As a
result of such alternative news media, with their many-to-many
communications capabilities as a rival to the old broadcast communications
model, it is possible to challenge the official account with a
counter-narrative, an alternative framing for events, to the public.
Karatzogianni's contribution, "How small are small numbers in cyberspace?",
mentions one especially promising development associated with the new media:
the tendency of establishment media to "look over their shoulders" as their
accounts are challenged by the alternative media. An example that comes to
mind is the role of Al Giordano's Narco News
Bulletin<http://www.narconews.com/>in reporting
on what was really going on <http://www.narconews.com/threedays.html> in
Venezuela during the 2002 coup, while the Associated Press was rewriting
U.S. embassy handouts as straight news.

And as Karatzogianni is the latest of many to remark on, the Internet has
played a central role in the organization of the peace and antiglobalization
movements.

Before and during the war in Iraq, mobilization structures appear to have
been greatly affected by the Internet. Peace groups organized demonstrations
and events through the Internet, to the effect that ten million people
protested against the war globally, with the net speeding up mobilization
remarkably. It helped mobilization in loose coalitions of small groups that
organized very quickly, at the same time reserving the particularity of
distinct groups in network forms of organization. Anti-war groups used email
lists and websites, group text messages and chatrooms to organize protests,
and in some cases, to engage in symbolic hacking against the opposite
viewpoint.


Proxy servers and file-sharing networks make it possible for dissidents to
evade government surveillance in authoritarian countries like China (and
increasingly the U.S., for that matter).

These different themes, stated in Karatzogianni's Introduction, are
developed individually by the different contributors.

Unfortunately, the Internet and network organization are two-edged swords,
offering new capabilities to states and other centralizing institutions as
well as grass-roots resistance movements. This ambivalence is a recurring
theme throughout the book. Hall Gardener's article examines the influence of
networked computer technology on the balance of power between center and
resistance, and finds no easy answer. If the Internet offers tools for
disrupting power, it also offers new tools for surveillance and control. And
as Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin show, asymmetric warfare techniques are
not solely the weapon of the weak. Besides being used by violent non-state
actors like Al Qaeda, they are used as well by state actors. This is the
subject of Michael Dartnell's article, as well. Internet propaganda is
widely used for Al Qaeda propaganda, decapitation videos by Al Qaeda Iraq,
etc.

The Internet is also used by state actors against other state actors. One
example is China's cyberwar preparations for disrupting America's global C3I
network. Another is the use of the Internet to for similar low-grade
conflict short of war, across the Taiwan straits (the subject of Gary
Rawnsley's article), Russia's cyberwar against mini-states on its periphery.

Nevertheless, I think the net benefit of network technology is clearly on
the side of decentralizing forces and against the forces of central control.
This is demonstrated by Maria Touri's article is one of my favorite parts of
the book, "Transparency and accountability in the age of cyberpolitics: the
role of blogs in framing conflict." Another excellent article the same
general theme is Anastasia Kavada's "The Internet and decentralized
architectures: Email lists and the organizing process of the European Social
Forum." The subtitle is pretty indicative of the subject matter: the use of
the Internet and of particular network formats like email as an organizing
tool for loose coalitions of affinity groups. My favorite article of all is
Graham Meikle's "Electronic civil disobedience and symbolic power," which
relies heavily on the work of Ronfeldt and Arquilla. Meikle focuses on
disruptive or even clearly illegal activities like cracking institutional
networks, which at their most violent fade into the category of terrorism.
But a milder version of the same thing is the symbolic attacks on global
corporate brands described by Naomi Klein, the McLibel defendants'
propaganda campaign against McDonalds, or Charles Kernaghan's public
embarrassment of Kathie Lee Gifford. One of the more interesting
developments Meikle discusses, from my perspective of networked resistance
to corporate power, is the "virtual sit-in"--shutting down official
corporate and state websites and communication systems with excessive
traffic. It's essentially what Ronfeldt et al described as "swarming" ten
years before.

The book includes a contribution by another P2P Research list member, Michel
Bauwens of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/>:
"Some notes on the social antagonism in netarchical capitalism." It's the
subject of some of his best writing: netarchical capitalism as an attempt to
enclose the digital commons and capture profit from it, and the crisis of
realization it faces in attempting to do so.

This is a book that makes significant contributions to a significant field
of inquiry. If you're seriously interested in the political implications of
network organization, you need to read this book.

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