Drone strikes — targeting Armenian and Nagorno-Karabakh soldiers and destroying tanks, artillery and air defense systems — provided a huge advantage for Azerbaijan in the 44-day war and offered the clearest evidence yet of how battlefields are being transformed by unmanned attack drones rolling off assembly lines around the world.
Good history of the US Dollar system and its implications
The way the modern system works is that money has network effects, and the US is a large economy with an extraordinarily well-developed financial sector, so any asset is priced in dollars by default. Bilateral trade between non-dollar, non-Euro countries countries is usually done in dollars, so a 1% increase in the value of the dollar leads to a 0.6-0.8% change in trade between all other countries.
Sovereign states have been mythologized as the natural unit of political order. History shows how new they are—and how we can think beyond them.
Much more is a stake in our talk about international order, then, than quibbles over historical periodization. Misrepresenting the history of the states-system plays into the hands of nationalist strongmen, who depict themselves as saving the world from a descent into stateless anarchy, controlled by globalist corporations who couldn’t care less about national allegiance. More broadly, getting this history right means having the right conversations. Giving power to actors other than states is not always a good idea, but we must resist the false choice between resurgent nationalism on the one hand and the triumph of undemocratic entities on the other.
https://bostonreview.net/politics/claire-vergerio-beyond-nation-state
Nationalism” is rapidly overtaking even “populism” as a foremost political bogeyman. Yet progressives will often still embrace “patriotism.” The elevation of the last term is meant to deflect Trump-style accusations that the left hates the United States and wishes it ill. Liberals often maintain that true love of country means calling the nation to its best self and thus subjecting it to criticism.
Does the concept of sovereignty apply to cyberspace? Is the maintenance of territorial and conceptual boundaries associated with national sovereignty compatible with an interconnected, independent cyberspace? If not, is the default alternative a reinterpretation of the power and authority of nation-states? Must reconstruction or deconstruction of politically sovereign entities occur in order to conform to the inherently “free” nature of a digital era?
Link to a larger pdf discussing the issue of sovereignty in cyberspace.
An IB Global Politics Site 