#TheWeaponizationOfSocialMedia develops a framework to understand how social network media shapes global politics and contemporary conflicts by examining their role as a platform for conduction intelligence collection, targeting, cyber-operations, psychological warfare and command and control activities. Through these, the weaponization of social media shows both the possibilities and the limitations of social network media in contemporary conflicts and makes a contribution to theorizing and studying contemporary conflicts. Democracies operate as if Information is second to the other elements of national power. In fact it is the aspect from which all power is derived. We fail to understand this at our peril, while our adversaries ‘get it’. In democracies to autocracies, information is a valuable resource that is increasingly difficult to control. That is how it should be. However, the Weaponization of Social Media, as Thomas Nissen adeptly describes it, is simultaneously based on and enabling several dangerous trajectories. These include new marketplaces for loyalty, the ability to opt-in (and out) of identities, perceived transparency across battlefields and diplomacy, and media illiteracy and a commensurate decline in the standards of journalism.

This enlightening book examines the use of online influence operations by foreign actors, and the extent to which these violate international law. It looks at key recent examples such as the 2016 UK EU Referendum, the 2016 American Presidential Election, and the 2017 French Presidential Election. The book analyses the core elements of interventions and sovereignty, and the extent to which these elements were violated in the three central case studies.

A compilation of expertise in Internet law and in ethical considerations concerning social computing in emergencies.

This monograph presents issues related to the armed conflict in Ukraine, which began in 2014 and is still ongoing. It shows the socio-historical background of warfare; the factors determining the distribution of adaptive resources (assigning them meaning, as well as experienced gains and losses of a subjective, state, material and energy nature). It also portrays the relationships between the distribution of adaptive resources and: 1) active, emotional and avoidant strategies for coping with war stress; 2) multidimensional consequences of long-term participation in war circumstances – including use of psychoactive substances, somatic disorders, mental difficulties, symptoms of depression, PTSD syndrome, post-traumatic growth.

This book seeks to critically review and evaluate the changes and consistencies in how warfare is interpreted and represented by academics, mass media outlets and political actors in the 21st century. The authors suggest that it is essential to understand the evolution and transformation of contemporary warfare's conceptualisation and practice in order to make sense of the current global geopolitical transformations that are in process, from a unipolar to multipolar global order. They therefore examine the various key actors in international relations from conceptual, theoretical and empirical perspectives through thematic chapters that demonstrate the increasingly central role played by intangible factors in the representation and management of contemporary armed conflict. The book stresses the need to reflect and rethink the potentially highly problematic trajectory of the global community within the framework of 21st century warfare's political and informational influence and effects.

The SAGE Handbook of Political Science presents a major retrospective and prospective overview of the discipline. Comprising three volumes of contributions from expert authors from around the world, the handbook aims to frame, assess and synthesize research in the field, helping to define and identify its current and future developments. It does so from a truly global and cross-area perspective Chapters cover a broad range of aspects, from providing a general introduction to exploring important subfields within the discipline. Each chapter is designed to provide a state-of-the-art and comprehensive overview of the topic by incorporating cross-cutting global, interdisciplinary, and, where this applies, gender perspectives. The Handbook is arranged over seven core thematic sections: Part 1: Political Theory Part 2: Methods Part 3: Political Sociology Part 4: Comparative Politics Part 5: Public Policies and Administration Part 6: International Relations Part 7: Major Challenges for Politics and Political Science in the 21st Century

This book examines the key dimensions of 21st century war, and shows that orthodox thinking about war, particularly what it is and how it is fought, needs to be updated. Accelerating societal, economic, political and technological change affects how we prepare, equip and organise for war, as well as how we conduct war – both in its low-tech and high-tech forms, and whether it is with high intensity or low intensity. The volume examines changes in warfare by investigating the key features of the conduct of war during the first decades of the 21st century. Conceptually centred around the terms ‘kinetic’, ‘connected’ and ‘synthetic’, the analysis delves into a wide range of topics. The contributions discuss hybrid warfare, cyber and influence activities, machine learning and artificial intelligence, the use of armed drones and air power, the implications of the counterinsurgency experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, as well as the consequences for law(fare) and decision making. This work will be of much interest to students of military and strategic studies, security studies and International Relations. Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 19 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.