Cyber-Diplomacy: Managing Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century

Cyber-Diplomacy: Managing Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century, Evan H. Potter, ed., Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002, xii, 208.We are repeatedly told that we live in a revolutionary age, a time in which dramatic new developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) will fundamentally transform the ways in which we live and work. Even the collapse of the dot.com bubble in 2000 has not much dampened the spirits of the techno-utopians. Given these often-exaggerated claims, I approached Cyber-Diplomacy with some trepidation, as the editor cites Marshall McLuhan's ‘global village’ in the first line of his introduction, and speaks of an information revolution in his second paragraph. However, as I pressed on in the text I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the editor and authors of this short volume are well aware of the dangers of overstatement in relation to ICTs, and work very hard throughout to avoid techno-utopianism. Instead, the authors attempt to take a fairly sober look at “how diplomacy is adapting to the new global information order” (7).