big data international relations thesis

• DOI: 10.1093/IPS/OLW010
• Corpus ID: 147995743

Big Data: Issues for an International Political Sociology of Data Practices

• A. Madsen , Mikkel Flyverbom , +1 author E. Ruppert
• Published 1 September 2016
• Sociology, Political Science
• International Political Sociology

48 Citations

More than extraction: rethinking data's colonial political economy, big data and food retail: nudging out citizens by creating dependent consumers, epistemic transformation at the margins: resistance to digitalisation and datafication within global human rights advocacy, disclosing and concealing: internet governance, information control and the management of visibility, overlit: digital architectures of visibility, seeing the world, a data-political spectacle: how covid-19 became a source of societal division in denmark, data driven social partnerships exploring an emergent trend in search of research challenges and questions, failing the market, failing deliberative democracy: how scaling up corporate carbon reporting proliferates information asymmetries, the electrified social and its dark alternatives: policing and politics in the computational age, 54 references, what is big data a consensual definition and a review of key research topics, the politics of transparency and the calibration of knowledge in the digital age, big data revisited: a rejoinder, making things valuable, critical questions for big data, big data for development: from information- to knowledge societies, post-political regulation: soft power and post-political visions in global governance, big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization, life beyond big data: governing with little analytics, the twitter of babel: mapping world languages through microblogging platforms, related papers.

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Big Data: Issues for an International Political Sociology of Data Practices

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Anders Koed Madsen, Mikkel Flyverbom, Martin Hilbert, Evelyn Ruppert, Big Data: Issues for an International Political Sociology of Data Practices , International Political Sociology , Volume 10, Issue 3, September 2016, Pages 275–296, https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olw010

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The claim that big data can revolutionize strategy and governance in the context of international relations is increasingly hard to ignore. Scholars of international political sociology have mainly discussed this development through the themes of security and surveillance. The aim of this paper is to outline a research agenda that can be used to raise a broader set of sociological and practice-oriented questions about the increasing datafication of international relations and politics. First, it proposes a way of conceptualizing big data that is broad enough to open fruitful investigations into the emerging use of big data in these contexts. This conceptualization includes the identification of three moments contained in any big data practice. Second, it suggests a research agenda built around a set of subthemes that each deserve dedicated scrutiny when studying the interplay between big data and international relations along these moments. Through a combination of these moments and subthemes, the paper suggests a roadmap for an international political sociology of data practices.

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Article contents

International relations, big data, and artificial intelligence.

• Ehud Udi Eiran Ehud Udi Eiran University of Haifa
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.661
• Published online: 13 December 2023

Scholars and practitioners of international relations (IR) are paying special attention to three significant ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) and big data (BD) are transforming IR, against a background of earlier debates among IR scholars about the effect of technology on the field.

First, AI and BD have emerged as arenas of interstate, mostly great power competition. In this context, scholars suggest, AI and BD are important because an effective use of AI and BD adds significantly to military and economic power. The current competition in these fields, between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, brought scholars to highlight at least four ways in which AI and BD are important: (a) Automating decisions about the use of nuclear force could affect nuclear stability, but scholars still cannot agree in what direction; (b) The central role played by the private sector. This, as opposed to the Cold War era, when the state played the leading role in the development of technology ; (c) the gap between the current two great powers in these technologies is narrow, in contrast to the significant gap in favor of the United States during the Cold War; and (d) the wave of new technologies, including AI, makes weapons systems cheaper and more available for smaller powers and political entities, thus offering a possible curb on the dominance of great powers.

Second, AI and BD are expected to affect national decision-making in the areas of foreign and security policies. Here, scholars highlight three possible transformations: (a) AI will allow states a path for better decision-making on security and foreign policy matters, through the optimization and speeding of existing policy processes; (b) the technology will omit some of the human shortcomings in decision-making, further optimizing the policy process; and (c) AI will be able to offer predictions about policies of other actors in the international system and create effective simulations to help manage crises.

Finally, the inclusion of AI and BD in weapons systems, most notably the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems, brings the promise (or horror) of greater efficiency and lethality but also raises significant ethical questions. AI and BD are also affecting other arenas of interstate conflict including the cyber domain and information warfare.

• great powers
• decision-making
• artificial intelligence
• Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems

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