Conflict Networks: Collapsing the Global into the Local

Recent decades have seen a dual and simultaneous shift in conflict trends. With the end of the Cold War and superpower support, conflicts have become increasingly intrastate and increasingly localized, dependent for their sustenance upon local assistance and national resources. Yet this localization of conflict has coincided with the increasingly international aspect of conflicts, with humanitarian intervention and UN peacekeeping becoming ever more prevalent. The aim of this paper is to provide a framework for understanding these shifting relations between the global and the local. This is accomplished through an analysis of actor-network theory and its rejoinders to reductionist understandings of conflict. Rather than reducing the eruption of violence down to greed, grievance, or ancient hatred, actor-network theory aims to examine conflict networks and their specific composition of local, material, and global actors. Three aspects of these networks are highlighted in particular: the personal networks of local individuals, the material actors, and theconflict network as a system. With these clarified the final section turns to an analysis of some of the primary modalities through which global actors relate and embed themselves within local networks

LSE Lit Fest 2017: platform capitalism by Nick Srnicek

What unites the emergence of diverse terms such as ‘gig economy’, ‘sharing economy’ and ‘attention economy’? In Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek argues that these divergent phenomena can be united around the extent to which they are centred on extracting and using data utilising the business model of the platform. In this short essay, he outlines two key facets of the shift towards these digital infrastructures, including the future challenges this poses

Representing complexity: the material construction of world politics

This thesis weaves together the themes of complexity, technology, and power. It does so by examining how actors in world politics gain leverage over complex systems through the use of specialised ‘representational technologies’ that make these systems intelligible and amenable to manipulation. In response to the increasing complexity of regional and global systems, political actors are expanding their use of these representational technologies in order to augment limited individual and institutional means for cognition. A first conclusion from this research is that through these technologies, power is being expanded in novel and unique ways. Building upon an insight from actor-network theory (ANT), power is examined here as something that must be constructed via material technologies. Yet unlike previous research which has focused primarily on infrastructural technology, this thesis examines the unique role of representational technologies in constructing power. Following constructivism, this thesis accords a significant role to knowledge, discourse, and representations in how world politics are presented and acted upon. However, a second conclusion of this thesis is that the standard idealist accounts in constructivism must be expanded by examining the increasingly material means through which such ideational representations are constructed. Thirdly, this thesis aims to illuminate a neglected type of technology within International Relations (IR) scholarship - by moving away from the standard analyses of military and communication technology, and instead showing how representational technology contributes to the practices of world politics. Lastly, in emphasising the materiality of power and knowledge, this thesis also aims to revive a moderate version of technological determinism by arguing that technology is a platform which shapes both possible political behaviours and pathways for technological development

Valor, Renda e Capitalismo de Plataforma

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar várias perspectivas sobre valor na economia digital, destacando inconsistências e mal-entendidos quando necessário, bem como extrair mecanismos e conceitos úteis sempre que possível. Em particular, este artigo critica a abordagem atualmente dominante sobre valor dos dados: a tese do trabalho gratuito, que argumenta que nossas atividades online são produtoras de mais-valia. Embora essa explicação de como o valor é produzido, circulado e capturado ofereça análises intuitivas (e às vezes reconfortantes), argumento que, no entanto, ela se baseia em suposições e inferências equivocadas. Em seu lugar, oferecerei um relato que se concentra na renda e na apropriação de valor, em vez de na criação de valor. Essa abordagem se baseará em uma análise marxista da economia por sua utilidade na compreensão da dinâmica econômica além do fluxo superficial de preços, bem como sua ênfase nas tendências de médio e longo prazo dentro de um modo de produção histórico. O objetivo final aqui é, em um alto nível de abstração, estabelecer onde e como as plataformas estão situadas dentro dos circuitos teóricos de valor do capitalismo contemporâne

Anticipations: on the state of the planning imagination

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work

Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed

At close quarters: combatting Facebook design, features and temporalities in social research

As researchers we often find ourselves grappling with social media platforms and data ‘at close quarters’. Although social media platforms were created for purposes other than academic research – which are apparent in their architecture and temporalities – they offer opportunities for researchers to repurpose them for the collection, generation and analysis of rich datasets. At the same time, this repurposing raises an evolving range of practical and methodological challenges at the small and large scale. We draw on our experiences and empirical data from two research projects, one using Facebook Community Pages and the other repurposing Facebook Activity Logs. This article reflects critically on the specific challenges we faced using these platform features, on their common roots, and the tactics we adopted in response. De Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactics provides a useful framework for exploring these struggles as located in the practice of doing social research – which often ends up being tactical. This article argues that we have to collectively discuss, demystify and devise tactics to mitigate the strategies and temporalities deeply embedded in platforms, corresponding as far as possible to the temporalities and the aims of our research. Although combat at close quarters is inevitable in social media research, dialogue between researchers is more than ever needed to tip the scales in our favour

Seeing the smart city on Twitter: Colour and the affective territories of becoming smart

This paper pays attention to the immense and febrile field of digital image files which picture the smart city as they circulate on the social media platform Twitter. The paper considers tweeted images as an affective field in which flow and colour are especially generative. This luminescent field is territorialised into different, emergent forms of becoming ‘smart’. The paper identifies these territorialisations in two ways: firstly, by using the data visualisation software ImagePlot to create a visualisation of 9030 tweeted images related to smart cities; and secondly, by responding to the affective pushes of the image files thus visualised. It identifies two colours and three ways of affectively becoming smart: participating in smart, learning about smart, and anticipating smart, which are enacted with different distributions of mostly orange and blue images. The paper thus argues that debates about the power relations embedded in the smart city should consider the particular affective enactment of being smart that happens via social media. More generally, the paper concludes that geographers must pay more attention to the diverse and productive vitalities of social media platforms in urban life and that this will require experiment with methods that are responsive to specific digital qualities

Taking Blockchain Seriously

In the present techno-political moment it is clear that ignoring or dismissing the hype surrounding blockchain is unwise, and certainly for regulatory authorities and governments who must keep a grip on the technology and those promoting it, in order to ensure democratic accountability and regulatory legitimacy within the blockchain ecosystem and beyond. Blockchain is telling (and showing) us something very important about the evolution of capital and neoliberal economic reason, and the likely impact in the near future on forms and patterns of work, social organization, and, crucially, on communities and individuals who lack influence over the technologies and data that increasingly shape and control their lives. In this short essay I introduce some of the problems in the regulation of blockchain and offer counter-narratives aimed at cutting through the hype fuelling the ascendency of this most contemporary of technologies