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Exploring how changes in advanced technology deeply affect international politics, this book theoretically engages with the overriding relevance of investments in technological research, and the ways in which they directly foster a country's economic and military standing. Scholars and practitioners present important insights on the technical and social issues at the core of technology competition. Technology and International Relations emphasizes the importance of leadership styles, domestic political agendas and the relative weight of technologically driven countries in global affairs. It highlights the now widely shared belief among both developed and developing countries that technology will be the defining factor in international politics. The book also unpacks the complexity of real-life cases of key technological advances, including artificial intelligence, UAVs, satellites and the responses of governments and the private sector to rising technological challenges.

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.