The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World by Anne-Marie Slaughter

Author:Anne-Marie Slaughter [Slaughter, Anne-Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300215649
Google: Zmo-DgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0300215649
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:38:24.751000+00:00

THE POWER OF NETWORKS

Defining and measuring the power of a network is another way of asking what networks are good for as foreign policy tools. What attributes do networks have that make them particularly effective in specific circumstances, relative to hierarchies or markets? When, for instance, would we strive to create a network of states or web actors rather than a more formal organization or simply an informal group or club?

The first answer rests on the need for “efficient, reliable information.” According to Walter Powell, “The most useful information is rarely that which flows down the formal chain of command in an organization, or that which can be inferred from shifting price signals.”7 The speed with which information can travel across a relatively flat network is perhaps best illustrated by the story of Mona Eltahawy, a well-known Egyptian-American blogger with sixty thousand Twitter followers, who was arrested and beaten in November 2011 in the Egyptian Interior Ministry in Cairo. Somehow she managed to tweet five chilling words: “beaten arrested in Interior Ministry.”

Eltahawy tweeted those words at 5:44 P.M. U.S. Central Time. At 6:05 P.M. I got a direct message on Twitter from National Public Radio’s Andy Carvin, the top English-language curator of tweets from Arab protesters in multiple countries, telling me of Mona’s tweet. I immediately sent an email to my former colleagues at the State Department. Within five minutes, I had heard back and was able to send out a general tweet that the U.S. embassy in Cairo was on top of the case. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times sent out a similar message to his more than one million followers. By then the hashtag #FreeMona was trending on Twitter, and a few hours later Mona was free, though with two broken bones and a traumatic story of sexual assault to tell. Maged Butter, an Egyptian blogger who was arrested with Eltahawy, was also released. In a world of hierarchies we would have still been trying to figure out whom to call.

A second property that makes networks effective in global affairs is their adaptability. Network members build relationships rather than routines. In crises and rapidly evolving situations, routines can be a handicap. The trust that comes from established relationships allows rapid shifts in course while keeping everyone involved on board. Walter Powell identified this feature of networks as well. Because they are “typified by reciprocal patterns of communication and exchange” (another way of saying that they depend on relationships more than structures, rules, and processes), they build the trust and tacit knowledge that support sustained but open-ended cooperation.8 In a world of uncertainty and rapid change, trust is the key ingredient of adaptability.

Transnational criminal and terror organizations draw power from adaptability. When U.S. law enforcement declared war on Colombian drug cartels in the 1980s and 1990s, these criminal networks changed their structure to maintain both secrecy and coordination. The decision-making hierarchies flattened out, ties weakened, and the peripheral nodes—the crop harvesters, processing labs, distributors, and so on—became more independent.

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