What role have technology and communications played in shaping global governance? 

Publication Date: 04/02/2025 - Author: James Mullins-Pressnell

Publication Number: 02025 - Type: Academic Journalism

Editor[s]: James Mullins -Pressnell; Laura Linberga

Introduction

The theory of Global Governance, according to  (Weiss, 2013), is the interaction of states across borders to ease the divides of contemporary cross border operations through “the sum of the informal and formal values, norms, procedures, and institutions” a structure of international organisations both non state and interstate in nature that ensure that a common understanding of unity is required in certain areas of policy (Weiss, 2013).

Information communication technology (ICT) can serve as a vital channel through which global governance can bridge the divides caused by various physical and geographical challenges that states and delineating organizations face today. By leveraging interactive devices such as computers, mobile devices, and networks, ICT facilitates a more interconnected world where “peering, sharing, socialising […] and most of all creating” (Abbot, 2017) become far more accessible to those with the means.

Despite the positive impacts of Information Communication Technology (ICT) on the normative agenda of global governance, significant challenges remain. These include the "elite domination of the media" (S.Herman & Chomsky, 2008) in both social and traditional forms, the persistent and regressive presence of online criminals and organized crime groups (Tropina, 2013), limited access to ICT resources in developing nations, and hostile actions by states, such as "Russian attacks on web pages" (Abdyraeva, 2020). These factors significantly undermine the integrity and stability of global governance and its corresponding institutions, such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), in effectively mediating international trade and law implementation within each state.

Despite its potential for misuse in Authoritarianism, Cyber warfare and education, ICT has ultimately benefited global governance. Its implementation into the global political realm has facilitated a nuanced and refined understanding of interconnection among states. To summarise this specifically, the fact that there is the presence of online crime that affects all states regardless of border controls or media censorship, requires states to adhere to the rules surrounding global governance and its normative ideals through persuasive means, thereby reproducing the concept of Global governance. ICT has enforced a norm of global governance. 

ICT and Media Communications in Global Governance

To begin with, this publication will explain how ICT has impacted the dissemination of media globally and its effects on nations that do not adhere to global governance. Online and social media have transformed how atrocities, achievements, and elections are communicated around the world. With the right ICT, prevalent media figures, also known as ‘influencers’, corporations, and individuals on the ground can distribute information to anyone with a handheld device and an internet connection. This creates an uninterrupted web of information from which the general public can draw to understand their current political situation (Weiss, 2013). This enables repressed individuals in certain states to interact with a wider audience and attract the attention and assistance of politically significant individuals or organizations, non-state actors (NSAs), and even governments. This interaction pattern is commonly known as “the CNN effect” (Eagleburger, et al., 2003) and affects the way in which individuals are exposed to and interpret information over a continuous time span. 

The advent of camera-enabled mobile devices combined with social media has allowed for a targeted form of the CNN effect. Using “special algorithms” (Biały, 2017), individuals with specific interests gain almost continuous access to relevant information, creating information bubbles (Mertens, et al., 2019). For example, NGO workers may see information about atrocities within their targeted bubbles on social media and decide to act. When this is scaled up across devices like smartphones, laptops, IoT devices, and electronic billboards, the response speed to such atrocities increases exponentially. This was evident during the Jasmine and Libyan revolutions in the winter of 2011 (Abbot, 2017), and during the 2016 Ebola crisis, where “social media […] could be effectively, inexpensively and quickly utilized to communicate with a large section of the population” (Walker, et al., 2019). Social media provided repetitive reminders of symptoms and healthcare treatments, which assisted in the containment and reduction in deaths of civilians living in west Africa (Walker, et al., 2019).

However, despite the normative effects of social media and its use in combating social issues, it can also be used for nefarious and damaging purposes. Social media creates unique information bubbles for its users (Miranda, et al., 2016), relaying traditional media targeted towards individuals' political and social agendas. This can shift individuals' understanding of their own political and social views. In this vein, ICT devices such as smartphones allow continuous access to conflicting political discourse, anytime and anywhere, fuelling emotional and ideological hatred, crime, terrorism, and geopolitical changes through calculated and targeted distribution. This can result in political unrest, seen most prominently in Donald Trump's presidential campaign and his use of social media platforms like Twitter (Fuchs, 2018). Trump used social media as “a major part of his communications strategy” (Ouyang & Waterman, 2020), transforming his supporters from “no longer merely passive” (Abbot, 2017) into reactive and emotional followers. This culminated in the 2022 Capitol Hill uprising (BBC, 2022) and reproduced ideas of a faltering America, which incarnated and reinforced a new supporter base that bolstered Trump's re-election in 2024. The ideas being based on the principles of American exceptionalism and the return to isolationist policies not too dissimilar from the Hoover and FDR interwar years (Kampmark & Kurečić, 2021). This displays the power and effect of ICT that facilitates it, such as smart phones. 

However despite the damage of social media, and the physical devices that facilitate its access, may cause to global governance and its continued value within global political arenas, its overall ability to be utilised for good by stopping, alerting, sharing, generating and distributing knowledge to individuals through portable technology inadvertently upholds the structure of international conversation and arbitration and therefore reproduces  core tenets of global governance, those being the access to information to produce a safer more stable world in which individuals are able to express themselves and their viewpoints in a more malleable way and without imposition from authoritarian governments. 

ICT and Cyber Warfare in Global Governance

Information communication technology also has an important impact in the way in which states interact with each other, both in partnership and conflict. Cyberwarfare and its battlefields within the realm of “cyberspace” (Abdyraeva, 2020) allow for international information attacks to take place without facilitating a conventional conflict, this can be seen most clearly with the post Crimea annexation by Russia in 2014. Russian “Cyber-attacks” on critical infrastructure and institutions (Abdyraeva, 2020) as well as  NATO and NATO Allies attacks against their geopolitical rivals infrastructure and institutions, for example the STUXNET virus (Lachow, 2011). These attacks are facilitated by the advancement of ICT and the physical links between differing ICT systems, otherwise known as networks. 

These networks are connected together by physical cables and use protocols to send, receive and in turn exchange and secure packages of information known as packets. These packets contain information stored as ‘Bits’, a 1 or a 0, that can be read and written (stored) by computers and other internet capable devices such as servers, smart phones and IOT devices to form what is known as a network. These networks can be Local, National, and international in scope as well as wired or wireless in ability and comprise differing security risks at each level. 

To this end, the international realm of cyber space develops and enhances the system of Global Governance by allowing the transfer of data between an international and statewide level in a very short amount of time, magnitudes quicker and more advanced than traditional data transfer systems. This allows for generic and sensitive information to be shared between Governments and NGOs to assist in the elimination and spread of disease, hunger and inequality as well as being used to organise and interconnect “Cars, airplanes, medical devices, financial transactions, and electricity systems” (Wolf, 2021), of which, constitute the elements of the mass mobilisation and continuation of global trade and development. 

Therefore with the development of more advanced computing systems such as “supercomputing” (Végh, 2020) and super computers as well as “Quantum computing” and quantum computers, which due to its capabilities and ability to be simultaneously a 1 and a 0  through a principle known as superposition, will be the “next disruptive technology” (Rietsche, et al., 2022) with which states will be able to harness both the constructive and destructive capabilities of ICT to further Global governance and strengthen the institutions that uphold it through a process of adaptation.

To this end, institutions that will enable this adaptation, National security agencies (NSA’s), play a crucial role in the way in which global governance can operate through ICT and the ends to which individuals can promote their views with these devices and over the aforementioned networks. They do this by monitoring and distributing the secure exchange of information between security allies, such as the United States and the United Kingdom. This can be seen in the project echelon program, which revealed non-military information to the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States and its defence partners in the United Kingdom. They focused on keywords in private telephone and Wide Area Network (WAN) connections to Local Area Network (LAN) conversations such as fax or email, filtering through this data for specific identifiers which were then identified and sent to international partners for decryption. (Donohue, 2006).

This in turn has created somewhat of a paradox within global governance where “the invention of surveillance software” has enabled “Information formerly hidden from all” to be readily available to NSA’s and “Married individuals” (Calman, 2005) alike, causing a sense of distrust among the general population toward each other and fostering discontent over government interference and the imposition of laws regulating Internet and ICT device usage within society (Im, et al., 2014). This perpetuates societal discontent and contributes to the decline of globally connected institutions such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The waning influence of the ITU in telecommunication and digital communication has arisen due to the controversial and perceived inadequacies of the union as states vie for greater control over the unregulated international internet through a process of stakeholder engagement and diplomatic conflict (Thimm & Schaller, 2014). However, despite this the ITU still plays a crucial role in providing security and protection to those in need, ensuring transparency, and resolving conflicts beyond the capabilities of individual states, as media and the access to said media significantly impacts any conflict or disagreement between government and people (Abbasi & Al-Sharqi, 2015).

ICT and Education in Global Governance

In the same way that ICT plays an emancipatory role in political realms it also plays a significant role in lifting millions out of direct educational inequality by supplying the means to connect to and visualise topics that there is potentially no access to in developing states. An example of this is the development of the realm of professional qualification and standards internationally, as (Popova, et al., 2018) discuss the way in which students learn is closely linked to the development of there teachers and educators and so addressing the root of the problem instead of the source, ICT is able to directly impact the way in which students and the education system as a whole progress within their home state, because “teachers who raise student test scores significantly improve students' long-term outcomes” (Popova, et al., 2018) and therefore increase the prospects of the state.  ICT does this by connecting teachers in developing nations to programs such as the united nations TVET system (UNESCO, 2023) via virtual means, here professionally developing teachers can meet with professional teachers from the “25th percentile average…[of] high-income countries” (Popova, et al., 2018) without incurring the costs of a physical arrangement and with “tangible results” (UNESCO, 2023) for students. 

ICT plays a developmental role in enhancing education for individuals living in poverty or in regions with unequal access to educational opportunities by boosting life expectancy and reducing disease transmission through greater awareness of the sources of these problems whilst also fostering a symbiotic relationship between IT, education, and work in developing economies. For instance, ICT empowers the creation of skilled workers by providing students in developing countries with educational pathways that keep pace with rapid global technological advancements (UNESCO, 2023). This ensures that entire populations are not left behind, further driving economic growth and development, and ensuring the reproduction of this education into their economies.

However, ICT and its strong integration into developing educational systems and economies can also lead to a lack of integration with individuals needs within developing states and have forced them to reassess there “digital capacity… [and] their digitalization levels” (Timotheou, et al., 2022) as well as ensuring that this new found educational capacity brought around by ICT was an investment rather than a regressing tool for education, which in developing countries it all too often was (Timotheou, et al., 2022). This can be seen with international aid programs and Transnational Corporations that develop global governance as a theory, such as UNESCO and Google came under serious international flak after failing to produce the outcomes intended with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. This attempt at introducing educators and educated to ICT in developing nations failed due to the constraints that stopped them developing these advancements themselves namely a lack of access to power and the systems and hardware required to uphold an internet connection in the region (Rodriguez-Segura, 2022) and the diversion away from education to fix malpractice and malware and hardware issues with the laptops themselves (Zayed, 2020), this in turn decreases the ability and chance of developing nations adopting ICT as a potent way to fix their educational systems due to wariness of potential side effects and inadvertently contributing to more Electronic waste, which is usually prevalent in developing economies that can subsequently harm “nervous systems (Including the brain)” restricting educational capacity (Fela, 2010).

Author: James Mullins-Pressnell Editor: James Mullins-Pressnell

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