'Expect Us' focuses on four online communities - Anonymous (4chan.org), The Pirate Bay, World of Warcraft, and the IGN.com posting boards. In all of these members engaged deeply with political issues in a range of ways. However, only two of the communities mobilised politically. If political behaviour occurred on all four communities, why did only two of these sites foster political mobilisation among their participants? Using ethnographic methods, Beyer argues that key structural features about the birthplaces of the four communities shaped the type of political behaviour that emerged from each.
Many of the conversations about international cybersecurity have remained siloed in specific disciplines and professional cultures. As such, there is disagreement among academics and practitioners about how to define basic terms, such as "cybersecurity," and arguments about what should "count" as part of cybersecurity. Because people's perspectives on cybersecurity are often defined by where they "sit" professionally, practitioners and scholars are sometimes unaware that they do not share a conceptual universe. For instance, many separate international internet governance debates from conversations around global cybersecurity norms, although many of the same cleavages and barriers to agreements occur in both domains. Others consider censorship to be unrelated to cybersecurity, although espionage via hacking uses many of the same tools as the domestic surveillance that goes hand in hand with censorship. Still others do or do not incorporate considerations of internet infrastructure into conversations about conflict in spite of concerns about the security of undersea cables to most global powers. The three books under review—James Shires's The Politics of Cybersecurity in the Middle East, Florian Egloff's Semi-State Actors in Cybersecurity, and Kieron O'Hara and Wendy Hall's Four Internets: Data, Geopolitics, and the Governance of Cyberspace—all help us understand how to think about this landscape. Each untangles some of these disconnects by making assumptions transparent, articulating places of overlap, unpacking terminology and categories, and offering paths forward for scholars.
Volume 37 explores the question, what can the emerging discipline of intersectionality studies contribute to our quest to understand and analyze social movements, conflict and change? This collection is part of a continued broadening and deepening of the theoretical contributions of intersectional analysis in understanding social structures and human practices. It lends analytical eye to questions of how race, class, and gender shape strategy and experience in social change processes. It also stretches to include thinking about how analysis of age, religion, or sexual identity can influence the model. The papers contribute to our growing understanding of ways to use the social power analysis unique to the intersectional lens to offer new perspectives on well-researched questions such as group identity development in conflict, coalition organizing, and movement resonance. Through the intersectional lens questions often ignored and populations traditionally marginalized become the heart of the analysis. Additionally, the volume also considers how surveillance and information sharing shape the complex relationship between democratic freedoms and hegemonic governmental systems.
With the end of the Cold War, the neutral countries of Austria, Finland, Ireland and Sweden have grappled with the question of what their neutrality means in relation to membership in the European Union's (EU) Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) Partnership for Peace (PfP). The concept of neutrality has continued to inform the foreign and security policies of these four neutral EU members to varying degrees, but what explains these 'varieties of neutrality' and what does neutrality mean in relation to membership in the EU's CSDP and NATO's PfP? In this article, the primary focus is on neutrality as a norm. Understanding neutrality as a norm helps clarify how neutrality becomes embedded in national identity, what it shows about the interactions between domestic belief systems and international security conditions over time, and how the definition of a norm can be revised to allow for desired policy choices. To this end, the article asserts that there are four interrelated factors key to explaining how and why each state modified its interpretation of neutrality vis-à-vis international military institutions such as NATO, and the CSDP: the reason for and timing of institutionalizing neutrality (coerced or voluntary), the form of institutionalization ( de jure or de facto), political elite opinion and public opinion/belief.
