Power, Information Technology, and International Relations Theory The Power and Politics of US Foreign Policy and the Internet

American policy towards the internet has been the subject of popular debate, from the Iranian Green Revolution to Edward Snowden's revelations about Internet surveillance. This book examines the internet as a form of power in global politics, taking into account the significance of global material culture upon theories of international relations to reconsider how technology is understood as a form of social power.

Examining American Internet policy as the product of the Open Door tradition in US foreign relations, McCarthy suggests that American policy officials actively promote the construction and maintenance of a network that maintains a 'free flow of information' in order to spread liberal democratic capitalism internationally. The book argues that technology is a form of institutional power that reflects the cultural values of its creators – in the case of the Internet, it reflects the cultural values of American liberal capitalism. Considered in this way, our theoretical conceptualization of technology and power is altered, pushing our analyses to consider the sociotechnical production of global order as the product of an uneven and combined global political economy.

A unique and topical contribution to internet governance studies, this book will be a valuable resource to scholars of International Relations Theory, Global Politics and Technology Studies.

Daniel R. McCarthy is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has previously taught at Aberystwyth University, the University of Sussex, and the London School of Economics.

1. Introduction
2. Power to the People: Looking for Agency in IR Treatments of ICTs
3. Towards A Historical Materialist Theory of Technological Power
4. U.S. Foreign Relations and the Institutional Power of the Internet
5. Pursuing Technological Closure: Symbolic Politics, Legitimacy and Internet Filtering
6. The Narration of Innovation in American Internet Policy
7. Conclusion