Changing Geopolitics of Global Communication examines the rapidly evolving dynamics between global communication and geopolitics.
As an intersection between communication and international relations, it bridges the existing gap in scholarship and highlight the growing importance of digital communication in legitimizing and promoting geopolitical and economic goals of leading powers. One central theme that emerges in the book is the continuity of asymmetries in power-relations that can be traced back to nineteenth-century European imperialism, manifested in its various incarnations from ‘liberal’ to ‘neo-liberal’, to ‘digital’ imperialism. The book includes a discussion of the post-Cold War US-led transformation of the hard and software of global communication and how it has been challenged by the ‘rise of the rest’, especially China. Other key issues covered include the geopolitics of image wars, weaponization of information, and the visibility of discourses emanating from outside the Euro-Atlantic zone.
The ideas and arguments advanced here privilege a reading of geopolitical processes and examples from the perspective of the global South. Written by a leading scholar of global communication, this comprehensive and transdisciplinary study adopts a holistic approach and will be of interest to the global community of scholars, researchers and commentators in communication and international relations, among other fields.
Introduction
1. Communication, globalization and empire: legacies and leverages
Control over cables
Communicating the news
Radio and the geopolitics of propaganda
Propaganda in ‘gentlemanly’ tones
The global ‘voice’ of America during the Cold War
Challenging the Western narrative
Communicating a cultural Cold War
The Cold War battle for ‘hearts and minds’ in the ‘Third World’
2. Globalization of communication – constructing and servicing a neo-liberal world
Infrastructure for the internet: US domination of space and sea
Cabling the world for the internet age
Policy infrastructure: who controls the internet?
Challenges to the US-led communication infrastructure
Epistemic communities: providing the software for the global communication system
Think Tanks: How the Fifth Estate influences the Fourth
Intellectual infrastructure: universities and publishing
3. Digital Democracy vs. Digital Imperialism
Digital capitalism
Digitally-enabled capitalism
Platforms for digital imperialism?
Digital empires and democracy?
The ‘authoritarian’ BATS: digital capitalism with Chinese characteristics
Checking digital imperialism? Cyber sovereignty vs. free data flows
Data as a global public good
The authoritarian challenge
4. Geopolitics of communicating conflict: wars and image wars
Growth in global conflict
Exporting democracy by war and peace
The invasions of Iraq and strategic communication
The chemical attack in the Syrian civil war
Public relations and image wars
Afghanistan: the geopolitics of ‘the forever war’
Africa’s invisible wars
The Russian invasion of Ukraine – covering the ‘white man’s war?
Ukraine’s propaganda blitz
Privatization of conflict management
5. Weaponizing global communication: cyberwars, surveillance and spying
Digital warfare: the weaponization of information in the Ukraine war
Cyberwars
Global covert spying and overt surveillance
China spying
Disinformation dilemmas
Covid-19 as a global ‘infodemic’
Information weaponization on steroids - AI
6. Emerging contours of a new global communication order
Is BRICS building an alternative geopolitical order?
Towards De-globalization?
Sino globalization via the Belt and Road Initiative
Communicating Sino-globalization
Changing geopolitics of ‘digital for development’
The Chinese model of development
An Indian model in the making
Sustainable digitization and development
Decolonizing the study of geopolitics and global communication
Biography
Daya Kishan Thussu is Professor of International Communication at the Hong Kong Baptist University. Author or editor of 20 books, he was Inaugural Disney Chair in Global Media at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University, Beijing. Prior to that, for many years he was Professor of International Communication at the University of Westminster in London. A PhD in International Relations from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, he has been since 2005 the Managing Editor of the journal Global Media and Communication.
‘Extensively researched and cogently argued, this first book-length study of the changing dynamics of global communication and international politics, by a leading scholar in the field, bridges the existing gap between international relations and international communication. A must read’.
- Nancy Snow, author of Propaganda, Inc. and Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech and Opinion Control Since 9-11.
'It is far from easy to bring together two very different academic fields – global communication and international relations. Daya Thussu does it brilliantly with this book. Through his critical approach, historically informed, he explores in depth the many ways in which the rise of large non-Western countries in the international scene has resulted in a series of major changes in the geopolitics of global communication'.
- Tristan Mattelart, professor at Paris-Panthéon-Assas University.
‘Once again, Daya Thussu is leading the field in identifying and making sense of the shifting flows, channels, and structures of global communication, with a discerning eye for the 'rise of the rest' and its accompanying geopolitical challenges?’
- Yu Hong, Professor, Zhejiang University, China.
