The Digital Global Condition

This book explores how globalization and ubiquity of digital technology combine to create specific global impacts, challenges and opportunities. Although globalization is already associated with the speeding up of interactions and change, digital globalization is characterized by immediacy. The utter pervasiveness opens new global vulnerabilities at international, national, social and personal levels. The Digital Global Condition examines the nature of digital globalization, enabling us to not only inhabit a digital world, but also to understand it, even to live well in it.

“This important volume underscores the mind-blowing impacts and often unseen and unanticipated ramifications of our digitally entangled and technologically infused lives. Contributions from leading global studies scholars traverse a wide range of digitized spheres, exploring the emergence of new subjects, processes, threats, and opportunities that are transforming how we relate to each other and the wider world. Timely, significant, and immensely relevant to all of us.” – Eve Darian-Smith, Professor of Global & International Studies, University of California Irvine, USA

 

“The Digital Global Condition critically explores the ‘defining global impact’ of technologies that are at once ubiquitous and highly differentially distributed among people, corporations, and states. Whether discussing the insecurity produced by digital security technologies, the growing reach and radicalization of the misogynist ‘manosphere,’ the peril and possibility in new modalities of information and interaction, or the ambiguous promise of digital communications for decolonial organizing and solidarity, the chapters consistently reveal the Janus-faced nature of digitalization. This volume is a crucial resource for anyone struggling to comprehend the new human condition in a digital age.” – Michael Goodhart, Professor of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, USA

 

“If you want to understand the contemporary age of new and emerging technologies, how we got here, and where we are headed, look no further than this tour-de-force collection edited by Elizabeth Kath, Julian Lee, and Aiden Warren. Unlike previous treatments which tend to focus overwhelmingly on the obvious and siloed issues pertaining to aberrant technologies and the digitization revolution, this remarkable edited collection has assembled a diverse range of rising stars and big hitters in their captivating assessments. Here, they deftly contextualize the new digital age by giving equal treatment to the connections relating to indigeneity, gender, culture, and human identity while also providing compelling assessments on great power politics, global security and where we as human beings fit into these transitional and volatile spaces. The Digital Global Condition provides insightful and enlightening reading not only for those who study, research and work in the global studies and international relations domains, but also for those who seek to shape it in the present and future. Kath, Lee and Warren need to be congratulated on their fine efforts.” – Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh, Professor of International Relations, Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA), Sciences Po, France

“This is a cutting-edge collection of essays on what is shaping up to be one of the major challenges facing humanity in the 21^st century: the collision of globalization and digitization. The editors and contributors masterfully dissect the impact of digital technology on global affairs without losing sight of important connections to related global issues such as climate change, great powers competitions, legal frameworks, higher education, and postcolonialism. This timely volume contains the most comprehensive and sophisticated treatments of the global digital condition up to now – highly recommended!” – Manfred B. Steger, Professor of Sociology, University of Hawai'i-Manoa, USA

 

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Elizabeth Kath is a Senior Lecturer in Global Studies at RMIT University, Australia. Thematically, she is interested in how people traverse boundaries of difference in the global era, including theories of migration, intercultural communication, reconciliation, and social inclusion/exclusion. Regionally, she specialises in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is the editor of Australian-Latin American Relations: New Links in A Changing Global Landscape (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Julian C. H. Lee is an Associate Professor in Global Studies at RMIT University, Australia. He is the author and co-author of several books including Monsters of Modernity: Global Icons for our Critical Condition (2019) and editor of several volumes including Narratives of Globalization: Reflections on the Global Condition (2016).

Aiden Warren is Professor in Politics and International Relations at RMIT University, Australia. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of international security, US national security and foreign policy, US politics, great power politics, issues associated with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation, non-proliferation, arms control, and emerging technologies. He is the co-author of US Foreign Policy and China (2021),  Understanding Presidential Doctrines (2022), and editor of Global Security in an Age of Crisis (2023).