Maxwell's Demon and the Golden Apple by Randall L. Schweller

Author:Randall L. Schweller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Hybrid Responses to a Hybrid World

In a constantly shifting world steered by networked arrangements for specific tasks, where states share the international arena with a wide range of multilateral organizations, nongovernmental actors, illicit enterprises, influential private sector entities, civil society groups, and individuals with significant and increasing influence in global politics, effective action to get things done will require hybrid responses, that is, integrated partnerships among states, corporations, civil society, and individuals. This has always been true for soft power—the resources for which largely lie outside of government in the private sector and civil society, in a nation’s bilateral alliances, or through its participation in multilateral institutions. What is different is that these kinds of hybrid public-private partnerships will be increasingly necessary for the effective use of hard power as well. Consider, for instance, the problem of transnational criminal organizations.

Few would refute the proposition that globalization has made people all over the world, on average, healthier, better-informed, and more peaceful than at any other time in history. Moreover, nation-states have benefited from the information revolution, tighter and denser political and economic linkages, and the shrinking of geographic distance. But the global systems that carry people, goods, and data around the globe also facilitate the movement of dangerous people, goods, and data. And, unfortunately, transnational criminal networks engaged in illegal international trade in drugs, arms, intellectual property, people, and money have benefited most of all. As the internationally renowned columnist, Moisés Naím, observes:

Never fettered by the niceties of sovereignty, [criminal networks] are now increasingly free of geographic constraints. Moreover, globalization has not only expanded illegal markets and boosted the size and the resources of criminal networks, it has also imposed more burdens on governments: Tighter public budgets, decentralization, privatization, deregulation, and a more open environment for international trade and investment all make the task of fighting global criminals more difficult. Governments are made up of cumbersome bureaucracies that generally cooperate with difficulty, but drug traffickers, arms dealers, alien smugglers, counterfeiters, and money launderers have refined networking to a high science, entering into complex and improbable strategic alliances that span cultures and continents …. The resources—financial, human, institutional, technological—deployed by the combatants have reached unfathomable orders of magnitude. So have the numbers of victims.13

Similarly, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt argue that the “information revolution is altering the nature of conflict across the spectrum … favoring and strengthening network forms of organization, often giving them an advantage over hierarchical forms. The rise of networks means that power is migrating to nonstate actors, because they are able to organize into sprawling multiorganizational networks (especially ‘all-channel’ networks, in which every node is connected to every other node) more readily than can traditional, hierarchical, state actors. This means that conflicts may increasingly be waged by ‘networks,’ perhaps more than by ‘hierarchies.’ It also means that whoever masters the network form stands to gain the advantage.”14

Highly networked with the ability to wage swarming attacks, “netwarriors”— be they terrorists, criminals, fanatics associated with militias and extremist single-issue movements,

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