Andrew Dougall

I am a Departmental Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. Prior to joining DPIR, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Digital Cultures and Societies at the University of Queensland. I completed my PhD at the University of Queensland in 2022 under the supervision of Christian Reus-Smit, funded by an Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities doctoral scholarship. Before that, I received an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and an MA Hons from the University of Edinburgh.

The broad focus of my research is on the global politics of media and communication technologies, particularly as it affects international orders (past and present).

My book, Mediatizing the Nation, Ordering the World (Oxford University Press, 2024) examines media's role in nationalist challenges to international order. Comparing Trump’s breakthrough in the 21st century United States with a similar – but unsuccessful – movement in 19th century Britain, I argue that communication media shaped these episodes by differently patterning the constitution and distribution of meaning. Among the book’s core contributions are to explain how media affect vertical challenges to international orders; to reframe IR’s theoretical engagement with media and order; and to situate the internet in a longer history of this relationship, contributing to a more balanced view of its impact.

I am now working on three projects. These explore: 

1. the role of private infrastructure builders in the making of the modern international system [with Andrew Phillips]; 

2. generative AI and the knowledge politics of the liberal international order; and 

3. digital sovereignty practices in the case of UNHCR's refugee identity solution [with Sebastian Kaempf].

Each of these investigations, in different ways, gets to the question of how international orders are transformed as a consequence of media's role within them.