Cyber politics
A
recently coined term, refers to the conjunction of two processes or realities
those pertaining to human interactions (politics) surrounding the determination
of who gets what, when, and how and those enabled by the uses of a virtual
space (cyber) as a new arena of contention with its own modalities and
realities. Despite differences in perspectives worldwide, there is a general
scholarly understanding of the meaning of politics. It is the complexity
attending the prefix cyber that distinguishes this newly constructed semantic.
Cyber politics in International
relations
All
international relations involve politics in one way or another, implicitly or
explicitly. The laws of politics, though subject to debate among some political
scientists, generally refer to regularities of human behavior across time and
space. Often, variation is explained in terms of issue area, empirical
referent, specific modalities, or exceptionalism, to note some of the most
common terms. Insofar as there is as yet no decisive account or description of
cyber politics, the language and concepts we use are the familiar ones of
politics in kinetic domains.
Combining
Lasswells (1958) definition of politics as the authoritative allocation of
values in society with David Easton s (1953) stark statement about who gets
what, when, and how
leads
us to the most generic and appropriate view of politics, relevant in all
contexts, times, and places. With the creation of cyberspace, a new arena for
the conduct of politics is taking shape, and we may well be witnessing a new
form of politics as well.
These
dual insights into the nature of politics, while initially articulated for the
individual polity or the nation-state, carry powerful meaning that is readily
transferable to the international arena. They also skillfully draw our
attention to issue areas dominated by the politics of ambiguity, areas where
the domain is unclear and the stakes are not well defined.
We
must also keep in mind that politics consists of the more or less incomplete
control of human behavior through voluntary habits of compliance in combination
with threats of probable enforcement (Deutsch 1968,). Moreover, politics is the
interplay of enforcement threats, which can be changed relatively quickly, with
the
existing
loyalties and compliance habits of the population, which are more powerful but
which most often can only be changed more slowly (ibid, 19).
All
politics, in cyber or real arenas, involves conflict, negotiation, and
bargaining over the mechanisms, institutional or otherwise, to resolve in
authoritative ways the contentions over the nature of particular sets of core
values. As Harold Lasswell noted, the study of politics is the study of
influence and the influential.
The
influential people are those who get the most of what there is to get (Lasswell
1958).When politics is evoked, power is a necessary corollary. Since politics,
by definition, involves some struggle, even in the most collaborative of
situations, the capabilities available to the participants become important
determinants of potential outcomes; and the final outcomes must be viewed as
authoritative in nature subject to the next round of contention.
BY JAMES CATHERINE
BAPRM 42566
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