Centre Research Affiliate, Robert Gorwa, has published a new article in Information, Communication & Society on the political influence of social media organisations.

Abstract:

While the ‘critical citizens’ literature shows that publics often evaluate democracies negatively, much less is known about ‘critical parties’, especially mainstream ones. This article develops a model to explain empirical variation in parties’ evaluations of democratic institutions, based on two mechanisms: first, that parties’ regime access affects their regime support, which, secondly, is moderated by over-time habituation to democracy.

Does International Humanitarian Law (IHL) impose a duty of care on the attacker? From a moral point of view, should it? This article argues that the legal situation is contestable, and the moral value of a legal duty of care in attack is ambivalent. This is because a duty of care is both a condition for and an obstacle to the ‘individualization of war’. The individualization of war denotes an observable multi-dimensional norm shift in international relations.

Political earthquakes—both real and perceived—are trembling through Britain. In the 2015 general election, the Scottish National party and the UK Independence party mounted successful challenges from the periphery. In the 2016 referendum on EU membership, the Vote Leave campaign captured a surprising number of votes from both sides of the traditional political divide.

Artificial Intelligence and big data promise to help reshape the global order. For decades, most political observers believed that liberal democracy offered the only plausible future pathways for big, industrially sophisticated countries to make their citizens rich.

Lucas Kello's book chapter titled "Private Sector Cyber Weapons: An Adequate Response to the Sovereignty Gap?" has been published in Herbert Lin and Amy Zegart, Bytes, Bombs, and Spies: The Strategic Dimensions of Offensive Cyber Operations (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2019).

In Liberalism's Religion, I analyse the specific conception of religion that liberalism relies upon. I argue that the concept of religion should be disaggregated into its normatively salient features. When deciding whether to avert undue impingements on religious observances, or to avoid any untoward support of such observances, liberal states should not deal with ‘religion’ as such but, rather, with relevant dimensions of religious phenomena. States should avoid religious entanglement when ‘religion’ is epistemically inaccessible, socially divisive and/or comprehensive in scope.