Globalization and Perception on War

Globalization and planetary Organizations Assignment Submitted By A. S. M. Iqbal Bahar Rana. ID 103-0007-085 MPPG Programme, North South University Date 14. 11. 2011 Do you speak up the advent of culture re refresheding has miscellanyd the way strugglef argon is perceived by the West? If so, what argon the implications of such converts for poorly-g e genuinelywherened countries of the domain? Introduction The German philosopher Hegel held that vicissitudes ar the locomotive of history.harmonize to his theory, of all timey social, semi governmental, and economical system builds up tensions and contradictions everyplace cadence. Eventu on the wholey these explode in alteration. One batch non create a mutation in the way that an architect designs a building. Nor is it accomplishable to entertain revolutions deal a supportor leads an orchestra. Revolutions are much too big and analyzable for that. Those who live in revolutionary times sess only brand a thousan d sm whole decisions and hope that they move history antecedent in the desired direction.Around the world equal a shot we see the ripening sophistication and rapid international airing of exponentful new randomness technologies, the mergers of huge conference empires, strategical alliances across inchs, and the doubling of force-out and the halving of the ratified injury of computing every 18 months (Moores Law). The tuition Revolution, ethno- policy-making negates, globalization &8212 each of these terce mega-trends is individually important for all nations forthcoming together, they are redefining the global background at heart which governments and citizens must make daily decisions in the years to come.Thus, their convergence should constitute a central concern of scholars, policy makers, and citizens. In an era of globalization, national credential has a different meaning. Nation- says no extended start out a monopoly on the heart and soul of coercion. Even if nuclear instruments had a hinderance value during the mothy warfare, today they get none as the ca determinations of in cheerive cover, to a greater extent often than not, are economic collapse and internecine conflict, and not outdoor(a) aggression. The instruction years has revolutionized the instrument of sluttish power and the opportunities to apply them.The exponent of a nation to project the appeal of its ideas, ideology, culture, economic model, and social and political institutions and to take advantage of its international business and telecommunications mesh topologys go out leverage soft power. In simple terms, the tuition revolution is change magnitude inter-connectedness and escalating the pace of change in nearly every dimension of life. This, in turn, shapes the evolution of gird conflict. Whether in economics, politics, or contendfare-fighting, those who are able to grasp the magnitude of this result be the best prepared to deal with it.The make use of of data and conference Technologies (ICTs) in give in of struggle scenarios has been of central interest to governments, news show agencies, computer scientists and tri exactlye experts for the past two decades (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1997 Campen and Dearth 1998 Singer 2009). . ICTs gave rise to the latest revolution in host aff line of businesss (RMA) by providing new tools and processes of waging contend resembling network-centric war (NCW), and integrated command, checker, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR).This RMA concerns in the premise of soldiery forces, as they pose to deal with the 5th dimension of warfare, info, in addition to land, sea, radicalard pressure and space. Classical Perception of War Clausewitz is under earthshaking challenge. It is understandably alive and well in the military colleges of occidental cites solely outside these corridors some other philosophies are in the ascenda ncy. A debate continues to rage over the extent to which Clausewitzean thinking is still relevant to todays wars. From todays vantage point, several developments beat eroded the appeal and power of the political philosophy of war.First, the concept of the discipline, so central to the way in which Clausewitz understood warfare, has dissolved. The 9/11 attacks, for instance, demonstrated that todays battlegrounds effectualness be Western (or other) cities while the US-led War on Terror straight external rebranded as the long war conceives of the battlefield as literally spanning the consummate globe. In the future, however, battles are un alikely to be confined to planet primer as the US in particular leave behind be oblige to militarize space in an effort to protect the satellites upon which its communication and breeding systems depend (Hirst 2002).Second, as the speeches of twain Osama bin Laden and US chairwoman George W. Bush make clear, the leaders cadres on twa in sides of the War on Terror name often rejected political narratives of warfare. Instead, they have adopted eschatological systemal philosophies in their abide byive rallying cries for a global jihad and a just war against evildoers where ideology played a signifi after partt role in waging war. A third problem for advocates of the political philosophy and one which Clausewitz obviously never encountered is war involving discipline applied science.Information engine room brings the Finally, when confronted by revolutionary wars which cry out for counterrevolutionary responses, Clausewitzs order to destroy the military forces of the antagonist is problematic not just because such military forces are often in seeable from the local populace yet in addition because one sewer never be sure they have been eliminated unless(prenominal) one is ready to destroy a large(p) portion of the creation (Rapoport 1968 53 see as well Chapter 26, this volume).As we have seen, it is f air to say, however, that the political philosophy has been the most prominent in the traditionally Anglo-American-dominated field of gage studies (on the ethnocentric tendencies of security studies see Booth 1979, Barkawi and Laffey 2006). All that can be said in general terms is that whatever approach to discretion warfare one chooses to adopt go out have consequences, leading the compendium in certain directions and forsaking others.Within International Relations and security studies warfare has coarsely been defined in ways that highlight its cultural, healthy and political dimensions. Information Revolution and reading war ICTs are utilise in several scrap activities, from cyber attacks to the deployment of robotic weapons and the management of communications among the fighting units. such a wide spectrum of uses makes it difficult to identify the peculiarities of this phenomenon.Help in respect to this will come from considering in to a greater extent detail the dif ferent uses of ICTs in warfare. An attack on the breeding system called smurf attack is an implementation of distri neverthelessed self-abnegation of service (DDoS) attacks. A DDoS is a cyber attack whose aim is to disrupt the functionality of a computer, a network or a bladesite. This form of attack was deployed in 2007 against institutional Estonian websites, and more(prenominal) new-madely similar attacks have been set in motioned to jam the Internet communication in Burma during the 2010 elections.The use of robotic weapons in the battlefield is some other way to use ICTs in warfare. It is a growing phenomenon, coming to general public notice with US army, which deployed 150 robotic weapons in Iraqs war in 2004, culminating in 12,000 robots by 2008. Nowadays, several armies well-nigh the world are development and using tele-operated robotic weapons, they have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more sophisticated machines are being used at the borders among Isra el and Palestine in the alleged(prenominal) automatic exhaust zone.These robots are trusted to detect the movement of capability enemies and to mediate the action of the human soldiers and hence to send packing on potential antagonists posts when these are within the range patrolled by the robots. Several armies also invested their resources to deploy unmanned vehicles, like the MQ-1 predators, which have then been used to hit ground targets, and to develop unmanned combat air vehicles, which are designed to deliver weapons and can potentially act autonomously, like the EADS Barracuda, and the Northrop Grumman X-47B.One of the latest kinds of robotic weapon SGR-A1 has been deployed by South Korea to patrol the border with North Korea. This robot has grim-light camera and pattern recognition software to distinguish humans from animals or other objects. It also has a color camera, which can locate a target up to 500 meters, and if requisite, can cease its built-in machine gun. Up until now, robotic weapons were tele-operated by militaries sitting miles away from the combat zone.Human were kept in the loop and were the ones who decided whether to shoot the target and to maneuver the robot on the battlefield. The case of SGR-A1 constitutes quite a novelty, as it has an automatic mode, in which it can move over fire on the effrontery target without waiting for the human soldier to validate the operation. Finally, the management of communication among the units of an army has been revolutionized ingrainedly by the use of ICTs. Communication is a very important aspect of warfare.It concerns the analysis of the enemys resources and strategy and the explanation of an armys own tactics on the battlefield. NCW and C4ISR represent a major revolution in this respect. An example of such revolution is the use of iPhone and Android devices. Today, the US army is testing the use of these devices to access intelligence data, display videos made by drones flyin g over the battlefields, constantly update maps and teaching on tactics and strategy, and, generally speaking, gather all the necessary entropy to overwhelm the enemy. Changing Nature of ConflictStates have been alert in the face of technological change, and despite the increasingly rapid diffusion of reading, states still shape the political space within which information flows (Keohane and Nye 1998 Herrera 2004). hitherto state power has been diminished too. States have lost much of their promise over monetary and fiscal policies, which are often dictated by global markets (Castells 1996, pp. 245, 254). The rapid movement of currency in and out of countries by currency speculators can extract a devastating cost on countries that do not have large currency reserves.States no longer monopolize scientific research. The Internet allows a global scientific lodge to exchange information on topics that can be easily apply by terrorist makeups (Castells 1996, p. 125). The Interne t has made it impossible for states, dictatorships as well as democracies, to monopolize the truth (Castells 1996, pp. 384, 486-487). Nor can they monopolize strategic information (Keohane and Nye 1998) the information that confers great advantage only if competitors do not possess it because states no longer engage encryption technologies.Most critically, IT has made the most technologically advanced and powerful societies by traditional indices the most vulnerable to attack. A distinguishing hallmark of the information age is the network, which exploits the accessibility and avail mogul of information, and computational and communicatory speed, to organize and disseminate association cheaply and impellingly (Harknett 2003). The strength of the network lies in its degree of connectivity. Connectivity can increase prosperity and military effectiveness, simply it also creates vulnerabilities.Information-intensive military organizations are more vulnerable to information warfare because they are more information-dependent, while an adversary need not be information-dependent to disrupt the information lifeline of high-tech forces. Information-dependent societies are also more vulnerable to the infiltration of computer networks, databases, and the media, and to physical as well as cyber attacks on the very linkages upon which modern societies desire to function communication, financial transaction, transportation, and get-up-and-go resource networks.The alike(p) forces that have weakened states have empowered non-states. The information revolution has diffused and redistributed power to traditionally weaker actors. Terrorists have access to encryption technologies which increase their anonymity and make it difficult for states to disrupt and destruct their trading operations. (Zanini and Edwards 2001, pp. 37-8) Global markets and the Internet make it possible to hire criminals, read or so the design and dissemination of weapons of mass destruction, an d coordinate international money clean to finance nefarious activities (Kugler and Frost, eds. 001 Castells 2000, pp. 172, 180-182). Terrorists can now communicate with wider audiences and with each other over greater distances, recruit new members, and diffuse and control their operations more widely and from afar. Non-state actors also have increasing access to sickening information warfare capabilities because of their relative cheapness, accessibility and commercial origins (US GAO 1996 Office of the raven the stairs Secretary for Defense for Acquisition and Technology 1996).Globalization, and the information technologies that undergird it, stir that a small, well- organize group may be able to create the same havoc that was once the purview of states and large organizations with substantial amounts of resources. The avail qualification ready-made commercial technologies benefits smaller states and non-state actors, to be sure, but only the wealthiest and most powerful st ates will be able to leverage information technology to launch a revolution in military affairs. The ability to gather, sort, process, transfer, and disseminate information over a wide geographic area to produce governing battle space awareness will be a ability reserved for the most powerful (Keohane and Nye 1998). In this respect, information technology continues trends already underway in the evolution of combat that have enhanced the military effectiveness of states. IT makes courtly combat more accurate, thereby improving the talent of high explosive attacks. On the other hand, IT also continues trends in warfare that circumvent traditional military forces and which work in favor of weaker states and non-states. same strategic bombing and counter-value nuclear targeting, efforts to destroy or punish an adversary by bypassing destruction of his armed forces and directly attacking his society, predate the information technology age. Techniques of information warfare provide a ttackers with a broader array of tools and an ability to target more precisely and by non-lethal means the lifelines upon which advanced societies rely power grids, phone systems, transportation networks, and airplane guidance systems.Information is not only a means to boost the effectiveness of lethal technologies, but opens up the possibility of non-lethal attacks that can incapacitate, defeat, deter or coerce an adversary, attacks that can be launched by individuals and private groups in addition to professional militaries. Warfare is no longer an activity exclusively the province of the state. Information is something that states, organized for success in the industrial age, do not have a comparative advantage in exploiting.John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt argue that the information revolution is strengthening the network form of organization over hierarchical forms, that non-state actors can organize into networks more easily than traditional hierarchical state actors, and that the track of the network will gain major advantages over hierarchies because hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks. (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, pp. 1, 15. ) States are run by large hierarchical organizations with clearly delineated structures and functions.By contrast, a more efficient organizational structure for the knowledge economy is the network of operatives, or knowledge workers not bound by geographic location. This is precisely the type of organizational structure being adopted by terrorist groups as they adapt to the information age. on that point is evidence that adaptation is quicker in flat hierarchies or matrix organizations than it is in the steep pyramidal hierarchies that run the modern nation-state that pamper networks have a much shorter learning curve than do hierarchically networked organizations (Areieli 2003).The higher the hierarchy, the faster it operates if it is doing something it has already foreseen and thus for which it is prepared. If, on the other hand, a scenario requires the development of new processes that were not foreseen, the flatter organization is better at learning. Matrix organizations are more creative and innovative. According to Castells, the performance of a network depends on two fundamental attributes its connectedness that is its structural ability to help oneself noise-free communication between its components its onsistency, that is the extent to which there is sharing of interests between the networks goals and the goals of its components (Castells 1996, p. 171). On both criteria, large state bureaucracies bear serious disadvantages. knowledgeable war Informal war is armed conflict where at least one of the antagonists is a non-state entity such as an inflammatory army or ethnic militia. It is the descendent of what became known as low intensity conflict in the 1980s. Like today, future sexual war will be based on some combination of ethnicity, race, regionalism, economics, personali ty, and ideology. a good deal ambitious and unscrupulous leaders will use ethnicity, race, and religion to disperse support for what is essentially a quest for personal power. The objectives in informal war may be autonomy, separation, outright control of the state, a change of policy, control of resources, or, justice as defined by those who use force. Informal war will grow from the culture of hysteria which has spread slightly the world in past decades, flowing from endemic conflict, crime, the drug trade, the proliferation of weapons, and the trivialization of violence by means of popular culture. In many parts of the world, violence has accommodate routine.Whole generations now see it as normal. In this setting, informal war will remain common, in part because of the declining effectiveness of states. Traditionally, governments could preserve internecine order by rewarding regions or groups of society which supported the government, weighed down those which did not, and, with wise leadership, preempting conflict and violence through economic development. In a globalized economy, the ability of governments to control and manipulate the economy is diminished, thus taking away one of their prime tools for quelling dissent and rewarding support.In regions where the state was inherently weak, many nations have large areas of territory beyond the control of the government. And, as political, economic, and military factors constrain traditional cross border invasion, place turn overer aggression has buy the farm a more attractive strategic option. Regimes unintentional to suffer the sanctions and opprobrium that results from invading ones neighbors find that documentation the enemies of ones neighbors is often overlooked. This is not likely to change in coming decades.Finally, the combination of globalization and the Cold War have fuel the growth of an international arms market at the same time that the international drug traffic and the coalescence o f international criminal networks have provided sources of income for seditiouss, terrorists, and militias. With enough money, anyone can equip a powerful military force. With a willingness to use crime, nearly anyone can generate enough money. Informal war is not only more common than in the past, but also more strategically significant.This is true, in part, because of the rarity of formal war but also because of interconnectedness. What Martin Libicki calls the globalization of perceptionthe ability of people to know what is casualty everywheremeans that obscure conflicts can become headline news. There are no backwaters any more. As suffering is broadcast around the world, calls mount for intervention of one sort or the other. Groups engaged in informal war use personal and technological interconnectedness to strip their cause, building bridges with a web of organizations and institutions.The Zapatista movement in southern Mexico is a model for this process. The Zapatistas, in conjunction with a plethora of left-leaning Latin Americanists and human rights organizations, used of the Internet to build international support with web pages housed on servers at places like the University of California, Swarthmore, and the University of Texas. This electronic coalition-building was so sophisticated that a group of researchers from the RAND Corporation labeled it social netwar. Undoubtedly, more organizations will marry this path, proceeding the expertise of traditional political movements with the cutting-edge advertising and merchandise techniques that the information revolution has spawned. A defining feature of the information revolution is that perception matters as much as tangible things. This will certainly hold for informal warfare. future tense strategists will find that crafting an image appraisal or perception map of a conflict will be a central part of their planning.In pass outed states, informal war may be symmetric as militias, brigand ba nds, and warlord armies fight each other. At other times, it may be asymmetric as state militaries, perchance with outside assistance, fight against insurgents, militias, brigands, or warlord armies. prospective insurgents would need to perform the same functions of defense, support, and the pursuit of victory, but will find new ways to do so. In terms of defense, dispersion is likely to be strategic as well as tactical. There will be few sanctuaries for insurgent headquarters in an era of global linkages, pervasive sensor webs, nd standoff weapons, so astute insurgents will spread their command and control apparatus around the world. Information technology will make this feasible. adjust wing anti-government theorists in the United States have already developed a concept they call leaderless resistance in which disassociated terrorists work toward a common goal and become aware of each others actions through media publicity. The information revolution will provide the opportunit y for virtual leadership of insurgencies which do not choose the anarchical path of leaderless resistance. The top leadership might never be in the same physical location. The organization itself is likely to be super decentralized with specialized nodes for key functions like combat operations, terrorism, fund raising, intelligence, and political warfare. In many cases, insurgent networks will themselves be part of a broader global network unified by opposition to the existing political and economic order. Informal war in the coming decades will not represent a total furcate with its current variants. It will still entail hands on combat, with noncombatants as pawns and victims.Insurgents, militias, and other organizations which use it will seek ways to raise the cost of conflict for state forces. ancient Area War As the Cold War ended defense analysts like Max G. Manwaring noted the insurrection danger from time-worn area phenomena that combined elements of traditional war-fi ghting with those of organized crime. Gray area war is likely to increase in strategic moment in the early decades of the 21st century. To an extent, this is a return to historical normality after the abnormality of the Cold War. Today, gray area threats are increasing in strategic significance.Information technology, with its tendency to disperse information, shift advantages to flexible, networked organizations, and facilitate the creation of alliances or coalitions, has made gray area enemies more sedate than in the past. For small or weak countries, the challenge is curiously dire. non only are their security forces and intelligence communities less proficient, but the potential impact of gray area threats is amplified by the need to attract outside cracking. In this era of globalization and interconnectedness, prosperity and stability within a state are contingent on capital inflows.Except in nations that possess one of the very rare high-payoff natural resources like pet roleum, capital inflows require stability and security. In places like Colombia, South Africa, Central Asia, and the Caucuses, immaterial investment is diminished by criminal activity and the insecurity it spawns. This makes gray area threats a serious security challenge. Gray area war involves an enemy or a network of enemies that seeks primarily profit, but which has political overtones and a substantially greater capability for strategic planning and the conduct of armed conflict than traditional criminal groups.Like future insurgents, future networked gray area enemies may have nodes that are purely political, some political elements that use informal war, and other components that are purely criminal. This greatly complicates the task of security forces that must deal with them. Because gray area enemies deteriorate in between the realm of national security and law enforcement, the security forces that confront them must also be a gray blend of the military and the police. Li ke the military, security forces must have substantial fire power (both traditional and informational), and the ability to approach problems.But these security forces also must have characteristics of law enforcement, working within legal procedures and respecting legal rights. Even though the objective will be monetary quite than purely political, violence will be goal-oriented. Astrategic gray area war will consist primarily of turf battles between armed gangs or militias. It may be related to refugee movements, ethnic conflict, ecological degradation, or struggles for political power (as in Jamaica in the 1990s, where political parties used street gangs to sum up their influence).When astrategic gray area war is linked to struggles for political power, the armed forces (such as they are) will be serving as mercenaries only partially controlled by their paymasters, rather than armed units under the actual command of political authorities. strategic Information warfare Formal, in formal, and gray area war are all logical extensions of existing types. Technology, though, could force or allow more radical change in the conduct of armed conflict. For instance, information may become an actual weapon rather than simply a tool that supports traditional kinetic weapons.Future war may see attacks via computer viruses, worms, logic bombs, and trojan horses rather than bullets, bombs, and missiles. This is simply the latest version of an idea with recent antecedents in military history. Today strategic information warfare form simply a concept or theory. The technology to wage it does not exist. Even if it did, strategists cannot be certain strategic information warfare would have the intended psychological effect. Would the destruction of a states theme truly cause psychological collapse?Would the failure of banking, commercial, and transportation systems bunk the will of a people or steel it? But until stand warfare is proven ineffective, states and non-state a ctors which have the capacity to attempt it probably will, doing so because it appears potentially effective and less risky than other forms of armed conflict. Future infrastructure war could take two forms. In one version, strategic information attacks would be used to prepare for or support unoriginal military operations to weaken an enemys ability to marshal or deploy force.The second possible form would be stand alone strategic information warfare. This might take the form of a sustained campaign designed for decisive victory or, more likely, as a series of raids designed to punish or coerce an enemy But should cyber-attacks, whether as part of strategic information warfare or as terrorism, become common, the traditional advantage large and rich states hold in armed conflict might erode. Cyber-attacks require much less expensive equipment than traditional ones.The necessary skills exist in the civilian information technology world. One of the things that made nation-states the most effective organizations for waging industrial age war was the expense of troops, equipment and supplies. Conventional industrial-age war was expensive and wasteful. Only organizations that could go around large amounts of money flesh, and material could succeed at it. But if it becomes possible to wage war using a handful of computers with internet connections, a vast array of organizations may choose to join the fray.Non-state organizations could be as effective as states. Private entities might be able to scoff state armed forces. While substantial movement is underway on the defense of national information infrastructure, foul-smelling information warfare is more controversial. Following the 1999 air campaign against Serbia, there were reports that the United States had used offensive information warfare and thus triggered a super-weapon that catapulted the country into a military era that could forever alter the ways of war and the march of history. According to this st ory, the U. S. military targeted Serbias command and control network and telephone system. The Future Battlefield The information revolution is transforming warfare. No longer will big dug-in Armies, armadas and Air Forces fight bloody attritional battles. Instead, small highly busy forces, armed with real time information from satellites and terrestrially deployed battlefield sensors, will strike with lightening speed at unexpected locations.On the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be, located, tracked and targetted almost instantaneously through the use of * Sensors and their fusion with a view to presenting an integrated highly reliable intelligence picture in real time. * Surveillance devices that unceasingly seek and vestige the enemy. * Data-links and computer-generated battle picture, task tables and maps that change scale and overlay differing types of information in response to voice requests. * Automated fire control, with first round kill probabilities appr oaching near certainty. Simulation, visualization and virtually in planning, and testing concepts and weapon effectiveness. This would balance out the need for large forces to overwhelm the opponent physically. cover function will be decentralized and shared at all levels of command. Combat will be in tandem to intelligence gathering. Non-lethal, soft-kill electronic weapons will assume as much importance as highly lethal, hard-kill weapons. Intelligent command posts and paperless headquarters will be the form. A commanding officer will be of a different breed-priding more in his lap-top than his baton. He will be his own staff officer.Changing Perception of War and its implications on poorly governed country The idea that weak states can agree security &8212 most obviously by providing havens for terrorists but also by incubating organized crime, spurring waves of migrants, and undermining global efforts to control environmental threats and disease &8212 is no longer much contes ted. Washington Post, June 9. 2004 A majority of states in the present-day(a) security environment can be classified as weak. These states depict a limited ability to control their own territories because, in part, they do not have a monopoly on the use of force within their borders.They also struggle to provide security or deliver major services to large segments of their peoples. These vulnerabilities generate security predicaments that propel weak regimesboth democratic and authoritarianto act in opportunistic ways. Because they lack conventional capabilities, out of necessity, weak states will have to be opportunistic in their use of the limited instruments they have available for security and survival. The threat of information warfare should be understood within a broad view of global power that is based on an up-dated version of Mao Zedongs theory of the Three Worlds.Just as Mao believed that the world was split up into common chord tiers of states, with the superpowers at the top, the developed states in the middle and the developing states at the bottom, in the information age is also supposed to be three types of state. At the top of the tamp down is the information hegemony state, asserting its control by dominating the telecommunications infrastructure, software development, and by reaping profits from the use of information and the Internet.After this comes the information sovereign state, exemplified by those European states that have accumulated sufficient know-how to exert independent control over their information resources and derive profits from them, and to protect themselves from information hegemony. At the bottom of the pile are the information colonial and semi-colonial states, which have no choice but to accept the information that is forced on them by other states. They are thus left vulnerable to exploitation because they lack the means to protect themselves from hegemonic power. In recent years, the spirit of conflict has ch anged.Through asymmetric warfare radical groups and weak state actors are using unexpected means to deal stunning blows to more powerful opponents in the West. From terrorism to information warfare, the Wests air power, sea power and land power are open to attack from clever, but much weaker, enemies. The significance of asymmetric warfare, in both civilian and military realms become such an important subject for exact to provide answers to key questions, such as how weaker opponents apply asymmetric techniques against the Western world, and shows how the West military superiority can be seriously undermined by asymmetric threats.Conclusion It is said that nothing is permanent except change. This is particularly true in the information age. It is important to understand the nature of the new world information order in order to be effective in foreign policy initiatives and to conduct the international relations. The information revolution throws up various contradictory phenomena. It includes the strengthening of the forces of anarchy and control. The revolution empowers individuals and elites. It breaks down hierarchies and creates new power structures.It offers more choices and too many choices, greater perspicacity and more fog. It reduces the risk to soldiers in warfare and vastly increases the cost of conflict. It can lead to supremacy of the possessors of information technologies while it leads to vulnerabilities to the same possessors from weaker nations. It cedes some state authority to markets, to transnational entities and to non-state actors and as a result produces political forces handicraft for the strengthening of the state.However, a mere look at some of the manifestations of the stretch of information technology in international relations, clearly brings out how the nature and exercise of power have been permanently altered. Benjamin Barber describes a world that is both coming together and falling apart in his book Jihad Against McWorld. He describes a world where the nation state is losing its influence and where the world is returning to tribalism, regionalism, and the ethnocentric warfare that characterized much of the preceding human history.This problem is most apparent in the developing world where we continue to see the spread of disease, continuing humanitarian crisis, political and economic instability, and ethnic, tribal, civil, and drug related war. There are several themes that are undifferentiated across these global futures. The first is conflict. The negative effects of globalization will continue to promote regionalism, tribalism, and conflict in the developing world. Secondly, nations with uncontrollable population growth, a scarcity of natural resources, and poor government systems will fail to benefit from globalization regardless of its effects on the rest of the world.Thirdly, technology will continue to be exploited to benefit developed nations and extramarital criminal/terrorist networks, a nd will have little affect on the developing world. In all scenarios the power of the state will weaken and the power of the non-state networked actor will continue to expand with the help of the tools of globalization. References Paul D. Williams. (2008). War. In Paul D. Williams Security Studies An Introduction. New York Routledge. p151-p171. Akshay Joshi. (2010). The Information Revolution and National formerPolitical Aspects-II.Available www. idsa. org. Last accessed 13rd November 2011. Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War Survival at the pass over of the 21st Century, Boston Little, Brown and Company, 1993. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. 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