Internet Diplomacy: Shaping the Global Politics of Cyberspace
Résumé
The main research questions that this volume aims to answer are: can we see an emerging Internet Diplomacy as a new diplomatic field? If so, what do we mean for Internet Diplomacy? What are the diplomatic challenges around the governance of the internet? Does Internet Diplomacy develop new models and practices in the context of diplomacy? With this book, we thus approach Internet Diplomacy beyond the instrumental use of digital technologies for diplomatic practices.
The book doesn’t address the use of digital means by diplomats to practice a kind of “Public Diplomacy 2.0”, which is explored by scholars under ‘digital diplomacy’ studies. This volume contributes to both the scholarly conversation and the global policy developments in the field by addressing how global internet governance, including cybersecurity policies, could be framed as an Internet Diplomacy area. As a matter of fact, even beyond its cybersecurity dimension, global internet governance in all its dimensions and areas could be addressed, analyzed and assessed as one of those ‘science diplomacy terrain’ and means of ‘soft power’, where scientific and technical expertise join forces with political influence and diplomatic action to address global challenges. This is particularly true considering the importance of technical experts and technical organizations, recognized as a stakeholder on its own in the multistakeholder regime of global internet governance.
With this book, we have the ambition to unfold the concept of Internet Diplomacy by taking into considerations both the peculiarities of the emerging diplomatic practices in the governance of the internet and their outcomes in terms of normative transformations at the global, regional and national levels. In particular, with the goal to understand and formalize Internet Diplomacy across all its dimensions and from multiple interdisciplinary perspectives, this book includes contributions addressing diplomacy around the international debate on the governance of the internet. A special emphasis is given to the role of the European Union and its member states in a field historically dominated by the US voice in the debate, due to its crucial role in the history of the internet but also because of the leading position of the US internet giants in the global digital market. This book approaches the topic from an interdisciplinary perspective, by including contributions from leading scholars in the field of internet governance, approaching the topics from multiple backgrounds and disciplines, combining complementary novel theoretical approaches and empirically grounded research in the field of the governance of the internet as a diplomacy issue.
This volume is to a large extent an outcome of the first edition of the GIG-ARTS Conference, held in Paris in 2017 with Meryem Marzouki as general chair (GIG-ARTS 2017), or more exactly the unfolding of a - long - conversation started at this occasion. After an introduction analizing how the ‘Global Internet Governance’ field could be explored as a Diplomacy Terrain, and providing elements for a research agenda to help charter it (introductory chapter by Meryem Marzouki and Andrea Calderaro), this volume is composed of ten chapters organized into three sections as follows.
Section One explores how internet governance may constitute a (new) diplomacy issue in its own right, with the first three chapters respectively putting internet governance in the long term perspective of the historical developments of diplomacy (chapter one by Yves Schemeil); analyzing it in relation with the two concepts of global governance and diplomacy, while taking into account specifics of the internet governance field, first and foremost the technology aspect (chapter two by Katharina Höne); and tracing how it has been politically constructed with different definitions, scopes and visions by the various stakeholders participating in the 10 years review process of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (chapter three by Mauro Santaniello and Nicola Palladino).
Section Two more specifically analyses whether and two which extent internet governance could serve as a science diplomacy instrument, exploring its opportunities and pitfalls through the relationships between science and authority, showing how the latter characterizes internet governance arrangements (chapter four by Robin Mansell); The comparative perspective between the US and Europe cases is explored in details, with a focus on public diplomacy (chapter five by Nanette S. Levinson) and on cybersecurity policies (chapter six by Francesco Amoretti and Domenico Fracchiolla).
Section Three presents four case studies allowing to address in deeper detail, through empirical research, how internet governance diplomacy may be a means for the diffusion of values, norms, and policies from some regions of the world to others where internet governance and other digital regulation is less developed, and to which extent this may impact national sovereignty. Provided cases studies cover transatlantic free trade agreements and data flows (chapter seven by Maria Francesca De Tullio and Giuseppe Micciarelli), the liberalization of telecommunication markets and its impact on transnational surveillance (chapter eight by Claire Peters), privacy and the right to be forgotten in Latin America (chapter nine by Jean-Marie Chenou), and international policy diffusion in the fields of copyright and privacy (chapter ten by Krisztina Rozgonyi and Katharine Sarikakis).