The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World

"I found this book fascinating. It made me recognize how impoverished our conceptualization of power remains. One of her core arguments is that the predominant theoretical and prescriptive frameworks that we use in foreign policy remain very state-centric. They reflect a Westphalian system where the nation state is the predominant actor and state-to-state interactions are the dominant interactions. She’s certainly not making the argument that we need to discard these frameworks, hence the duality in the title, it’s a chessboard and the web. She’s saying that we need to enrich them and think about the role of non-state actors. In order to understand how power is evolving, you need to look, for example, at the role of philanthropies in shaping priorities. She makes the argument in the book that the Gates Foundation plays an outsize role in global health. If the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation stipulates, in one of its annual letters, that we think that the global health community should be focusing on priorities a to z in the upcoming year, people pay attention. You also look at the role of terrorist organizations. They’re empowered not only with kinetic technologies, but also with social media. Then there’s the role of social media in fomenting unrest and the intrinsically dual use nature of the platforms and the technologies that actors have at their disposal. The very same social media platforms that facilitated the Arab Spring have also, sadly, been co-opted by authoritarian regimes. And so you have this cat-and-mouse game where frustrated populaces are going head-to-head with actors that want to subdue them, but they’re using the same technologies. The chessboard/web metaphor is also helpful in terms of understanding how actors wield influence. Take climate change. If you want to steer the conversation about climate change policy, it just doesn’t suffice to talk with other national-level governments. You still need to do that but increasingly, some of the most exciting, consequential action is taking place at the sub-national level. Particularly in the aftermath of the Trump administration’s decision to abandon the Paris accords, there were governors and mayors in the United States stepping up to say, ‘No, even if the national-level government is choosing to go one way, we’re still going to uphold the provisions of the agreement.’ So there’s a lot of city-to-city diplomacy, for example. “In Afghanistan…if you look at the amount of territory that the Taliban controls today versus the amount of territory it controlled pre-9/11, it’s roughly the same” There’s also a recognition now that for most issues, as clichéd as it may sound, you need to bring in stakeholders from as wide an array of sectors as possible. You need to bring NGOs to the table, you need to bring philanthropists to the table, you need to bring thought leaders to the table. You need to get out of the confines of state-to-state interactions. And if you want to think about how to wield influence, you need to understand how networks form. How does influence get channeled through networks? How do you exercise influence within networks, how do you construct new networks? One of the advantages of networks is that they are far more pliable and can be generated more easily than state-to-state transactions. There is a certain institutional rigidity to the way that diplomacy is conducted. There are certain diplomatic protocols. But it’s difficult to navigate an entrenched bureaucracy like the United Nations . It’s very difficult to innovate within the state-to-state model. You can innovate more easily within networks. In decades to come, I suspect that we’ll look back at The Chessboard and the Web as a foundational text. There are other books that have given a perfunctory nod to non-state actors and concede that they’re becoming more important, but then they tend to revert back to a state-centric discussion. Hers is one of the first books that in a systematic and rich way—not in an exhaustive way certainly, and she acknowledges that—tries to think about how we incorporate non-state actors into our power frameworks, into our influence frameworks. It’s a veritably interdisciplinary book. Her insights into network theory draw on physics, biology, economics. I found the book exciting and stimulating for that reason too. She’s not only challenging our erstwhile conceptions of power but she’s also demonstrating the promise and the imperative of interdisciplinary work. You would not normally put the words ‘international relations’ and ‘physics’ or ‘biology’ in the same sentence, but she does so—not in a contrived way, to be interdisciplinary for its own sake, but because she says that some of the most important conversations you can have about international relations come from engaging other disciplines. If the United States wants to wield influence it’s important that it not only pays attention to the traditional means of statecraft and is mindful of existing networks, but also can build new networks and draw on the full range of actors and stakeholders in the international system. I certainly hope it has an impact. This is a fuller exposition of an essay that she wrote in Foreign Affairs at the beginning of 2009, ‘ America’s Edge .’ She was talking then about the imperative of leveraging networks to advance American influence. At the time, the State Department was quite different. But regardless of whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat or Donald Trump or somebody else, I don’t find her notion of adapting diplomacy to a network age to be a particularly partisan proposition. What I will say—and she acknowledges this sobering recognition in the book—is that there is a very robust confluence of forces working against the openness that she’s advocating. We think about the post-Cold War era as one of globalization, the weakening of the nation state and the erosion of borders. But she looks at the number of physical walls that have been erected since the end of the Cold War, and the data is striking. Then there’s the vigour with which certain countries are pushing to create internet or cybersilos . Then there’s the rhetoric about immigrants, the state, and the salience of the border. There are a number of forces that are pushing against network diplomacy, that are trying to carve up networks and pushing against what she’s saying. So, on the one hand, my hope is that her conception of network diplomacy will prevail and gain wider traction. I wouldn’t call it a Sisyphean task, but it certainly faces an uphill climb. There’s no question. We shouldn’t be overly deterministic in thinking about the course of history. There is no intrinsic motive force to history. There is no law that dictates that history bend in a more open direction. Human beings have to play a role in bringing that about. I certainly took it for granted for a long time that the forces propelling the forces of openness along were more or less inexorable, and I’m realizing that that kind of determinism is very misguided. We’re seeing the consequences of that now."