Preview
Technology as a Global Political Challenge
IB DP Global Politics — HL extension: Global political challenges | HL | Technology
📋 What You Will Learn
- Define key concepts including digital sovereignty, surveillance capitalism, cyber warfare, and algorithmic governance
- Explain how technology reshapes the distribution and exercise of power among states, corporations, and individuals
- Analyse how technology intersects with rights, justice, development, sustainability, peace and conflict
- Compare how different theoretical perspectives (realism, liberalism, critical theories) interpret technology as a political challenge
- Evaluate the claim that technology is a democratising force versus a tool of control and inequality
- Recommend evidence-based courses of action to address technology-related global political challenges
🔍 Guiding Question Does the global spread of digital technology empower citizens and states equally, or does it concentrate power in the hands of a few — and who gets to decide the rules of the digital world?
🌍 Why This Matters In 2023, the United States, European Union, and China each introduced sweeping legislation to regulate artificial intelligence and digital platforms — yet their frameworks reflect fundamentally different visions of who should control technology and why. Meanwhile, in Myanmar, military authorities used Facebook's algorithm to amplify hate speech that contributed to the Rohingya genocide, while pro-democracy activists in Iran and Belarus used encrypted messaging apps to organise resistance. Technology is not neutral: it is a political arena.
🔑 Key Concept Link Technology most directly engages power — it transforms who can act, surveil, communicate, and coerce. But it is inseparable from sovereignty (who controls digital infrastructure and data within a territory), legitimacy (whether algorithmic decisions and surveillance are accepted as just), and interdependence (global supply chains, cross-border data flows, and shared vulnerabilities to cyberattack). Return to all four concepts throughout this topic.
1. Technology and Power: The Core Political Question
Technology has always shaped political power — from the printing press to nuclear weapons. What distinguishes the digital age is the speed, scale, and diffusion of technological change, and the fact that the most consequential technologies (AI, data infrastructure, social media platforms) are largely controlled by private corporations rather than states.
📖 Definition — Digital Power Digital power refers to the capacity of actors — states, corporations, or individuals — to shape outcomes, behaviours, and norms through the ownership, control, or use of digital technologies, data, and infrastructure.
Who holds digital power?
- States: use technology for surveillance, military capability (cyber and drone warfare), economic competitiveness, and controlling information flows within their borders.
- Transnational technology corporations (Big Tech): companies such as Alphabet (Google), Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Tencent control platforms, data, and cloud infrastructure that billions depend on — giving them structural power that rivals or exceeds many states.
- Civil society and social movements: use digital tools to organise, communicate, and challenge authority — but are also subject to surveillance and platform censorship.
- Individuals: gain access to information and voice, but also become data subjects whose behaviour is profiled, predicted, and manipulated.
- Non-state armed groups: use encrypted communications, social media recruitment, and cyberattacks to project power beyond their physical territory.
📖 Definition — Surveillance Capitalism A term