The Global Techno Politics Forum is a new independent organization that strives to be innovative and imaginative. Its mission is to shape the public debate and facilitate global coordination at the intersection of technology and geopolitics. It achieves this mission through:
Convenings – to bring together global thought leaders from public policy, private sector, academia, multilateral organizations, NGOs, and civil society to:
- Engage in open, frank, and constructive dialogue;
- Cultivate cross-ideological, trans-partisan and interdisciplinary networks;
- Build consensus.
Research – to provide both an intellectual foundation and educational opportunities, that facilitate new insights at the local, national, and global levels. Our research seeks to expand the range of options surrounding dialogue and to ground that debate in hard facts and figures, adhering to a high standard of integrity with an internal code of ethics grounded in analytical rigor, policy pragmatism, and independence.
Community – to create a dynamic, collaborative, and global community of knowledge sharing and consensus-building.
The Motivation
The Global TechnoPolitics Forum is a not-for-profit 501C (3) educational institution. It was formed in November 2019 as an innovative, dynamic, and taskforce Forum. The Forum is independent and nonpartisan and is motivated by six key insights:
- Technological advances are reconfiguring our geopolitical landscapes. Technological advances both drive and intensify global and national trends. This interaction is ushering in radical socio-political transformations that are altering geopolitics in ways not well understood — with the potential for irreversible consequences for the existing international configuration and the legitimacy of nation-states in governing.
- The frontiers of these technological advances are envisioned, controlled, and driven by the private sector (especially the tech giants), and entrepreneurial and innovative individuals. Increasingly, these unelected entities are becoming powerful, independent geopolitical actors.
- Nation-states have become restrained actors in managing global challenges. Nation-states are not about to go away, but the global pandemic underscored that cities, states, and regions have emerged as important geopolitical actors, often in transnational groupings.
- The speed, scale, complexity, and nature of these changes are both unprecedented and alarming.
- Our institutions, and mechanisms for dialogue and action are outdated. The current debate is couched in twentieth-century terms and tools, like national regulation, when so many of the relevant actions routinely cross borders. Meanwhile, international institutions remain fragmented, unrepresentative, and outdated, while large think tanks have become bureaucratic. Neither have the capacity to take on the global challenges of the 21st century.
- There is an urgent need for an innovative and coherent global approach, beyond the current competing national conversations.
The task of this innovative Forum is to fill this void and to re-imagine global architecture — for the benefit of key private and public stakeholders.
The Challenge
Rapid technological innovations are transforming every dimension of our lives. These innovations are driving not just economics, but also geopolitics, while challenging our democracies. The current tension is exacerbated by three other, equally epochal, concurrent and interacting changes:
- Rising inequality and social discontent within nation-states;
- Growing multipolarity of geopolitics;
- Increasingly urgent ecological imperatives.
The unprecedented speed, scale, and nature of these profound changes are unsettling, and the COVID-19 disaster heightens the sense that humanity is at a turning point, perhaps an existential one.
Our present global situation is not new. The destruction of World War II led to a process of international reflection, encapsulated in Dumbarton Oaks and Bretton Woods. The architects imagined, then constructed structures of global governance that, despite their imperfections, enabled some degree of global dialogue and cooperation. The result was remarkable progress and, if not lasting peace, at least the absence of major war between states.
The present discourses are divisive. Today, once more the vicious cycle of confrontation is unfolding. Contemporary political discourse panders false dichotomies, such as technology and jobs, free trade and protectionism, economic growth and social equity, and immigration and national identity. The uncoordinated global response to COVID-19 in the face of appalling human cost, economic meltdown, and possible political unrest is a clear illustration of the inability of current institutions to respond. It also demonstrates the urgent necessity of a coherent global response considering the potential environmental and technological challenges that lay ahead.
Fundamental changes are taking place in our societies. These changes are all encompassing and increasingly evident within the context of COVID-19 as we bear witness to the limited reach and efficacy of modern states and debate how to define sovereignty. Power and influence but also violence and oppression are also shifting as cyberwar makes conflict and conquest virtual. These shifts take place alongside the restructuring of both national and global economies, a move from scarcity to abundance, as well as shifting demographics and negotiations over conceptions of social identity and personhood.
Cyber technology has transformed every aspect of our lives. By nature, it circumvents national boundaries and demands a global response. Its frontier is envisioned and controlled by an unelected private sector that drives innovation and defines human progress. At the same time, cyber citizens are highly engaged, informed, empowered, and connected global forces. Our world is now highly globalized and dynamic. Every minute, massive amounts of money, data, goods, people, and ideas flow across borders. These trends not only are destabilizing, but also creating new structures of power and governance.
The current global system is in crisis. The norms, values, institutions, and practices that have long shaped the global system are losing their power and very legitimacy. Over the last decade, concerns about the crisis of the current world system have spawned suggestions from different political angles; restructure ( Kissinger ), reimagine and reinforce ( Hilary Clinton ), recreate ( Anne-Marie Slaughter ), invigorate U.S. leadership ( Robert Kagan ), justify the cost to Americans ( Eliot Cohen ). Others have gone as far as dismissing the system as based on wrong premises and fundamentally flawed (from the left – Noam Chomsky, from the right – Donald Trump and Steve Bannon ). Under attack from within and beyond, with no clear leadership, unfit, and unresponsive to the realities of its time, the old system is fraying in front of our eyes.
Global systems of power can collapse and be replaced by new ideologies with alarming speed. Notice that the Soviet Union collapsed only a decade after Ronald Reagan had labelled it an “evil empire.” The current absence of clear order among major global powers sees global exchange through a transactional lens, where alliances and trust are discounted, and there is no overarching set of rules or principles to navigate geopolitical dangers. The trajectory of our fate depends in large measure on how well the global system is constructed and able to influence governance across multiple contexts and scales to adapt to realities of our time. Once again we find ourselves at a turning point that demands a global reflection to reimagine global architecture, its institutions and operating framework to fit the multipolar and multi-ideology context of the 21st century, and thus to pave the way for a peaceful human progress.
Without insights into the nature of these fundamental global shifts in power structures, the work of governing institutions will be condemned to short-term and ultimately failed policies. In the United States, traditional independent think tanks will continue to serve as an alternative source of policy analysis and intellectual foundation and will remain central to the U.S. policy-making ecosystem. Yet, too often they are conventional, attuned to the current system, unfocused, and predictably partisan. Considering the daunting new challenges of our time, there is a need for a new kind of initiative — innovative, flexible, focused, and independent — to complement and expand upon global structures of cooperation and current well-established networks of thought leadership. The Global TechnoPolitics Forum is a new initiative that aims to fill this void.
The Vision
Over the last century, leaders worldwide have sought to establish an architecture of international governance in pursuit of peace and order. This pursuit is not new, but gained momentum in the 20th century that saw two destructive world wars and ironically ended in a globalized world. From Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations to FDR and Churchill’s leadership in the establishment of the United Nations, to Gandhi’s concept of a “world federation” based upon non-violence, and Kwame Nkrumah’s vision of pan-Africanism and the founding of the Organization of African Unity — this pursuit of trans-national governance was a global vision. While versions of this vision varied and not all were equitable, there existed a yearning for a form of peace, order, and stability in international affairs; a desire to guide the collective international future towards a more peaceful destination.
The twenty-first century has expanded globalization beyond trade and governance to flows of digits, data, ideas, and innovations that are both transcending and circumventing national borders. The shifting boundaries has given rise to popular movements, often turbulent and contradictory — a rise in ethno-nationalist, a fundamental questioning of capitalist notions of progress, and a growing conviction for environmental sustainability and living in harmony with nature. Within these movements a growing chorus of voices with a wide range of values and lifestyles are rising in celebration of multiculturalism, diversity and inclusivity, global peace and commitment to non-violence, and cooperation, coordination, and collaboration towards global alliances and agreements.
It is these notions that form the intellectual architecture of this Forum in its pursuit of global architecture. We do not seek to create a grand design with a blueprint that is static, immobile and timeless. The actual world is dynamic, complex, ever-changing, and unpredictable. This Forum sees its quest as “a social product” and “collective achievement,” to use the words of H.G. Wells or in John Bew’s words “ a work of abstract art never complete.”
This Forum seeks to provide a collective lens to comprehend the extraordinarily complex and often crosscutting, contradictory relations at the intersection of technology and geopolitics that are shaping our world. We will focus on the most critical and least understood points of divergence and convergence in these interactions. The Forum’s objective is to turn its findings into concrete and tangible strategies and policy choices that are grounded in the complex, ever-shifting realities of our time, and to indicate how they could be translated into action — by governments at all levels and by the private sectors, both for-profit and nonprofit.