Book Chapter - Interrogating Power and Legitimacy in the Information Age from an Indian Perspective
This is a draft of the chapter titled ‘Interrogating Power and Legitimacy in the Information Age from an Indian Perspective’ by Pranay Kotasthane and Nitin Pai, published in the book Power, Legitimacy, and World Order: Changing Contours of Preconditions and Perspectives, edited by Sanjay Pulipaka, Krishnan Srinivasan, and James Mayall (May 3, 2023, Routledge India).
Introduction
Even as the world has entered the Information Age, many of the formal structures and processes of international politics remain embedded in their Industrial Age origins. This chapter begins with conceptualising the ideas of power and legitimacy for the new Age. It then explores how nation-states and other actors are employing them to promote their interests and how this might shape the politics of the coming decades. Finally, it discusses the relative strengths and weaknesses of liberal democracies and authoritarian states in the Information Age.
In any discussion on geopolitics today, the phrase A Changing World Order almost certainly finds a mention. The narrative arc of the phrase goes something like this: the liberal democratic world order led by the US is facing serious challenges not just from China but also a host of other state and non-state actors. As a result, the narrative predicts, international politics will change dramatically over the next couple of decades.
The discussion about alterations in power and legitimacy is ensconced in this larger conversation about the changing world order. This linkage is not new; every significant global reordering brings forth a fresh discussion on the distribution of power and the nature of just arrangements (legitimacy), as these are two fundamental ingredients of any world order [1]. Several chapters in this book contribute to this debate, primarily focusing on specific nation-states as their unit of analysis. This chapter takes one step back and locates the changing meanings of power and legitimacy in the context of the Information Age.
The Information Age is defined as the period beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century marked by the increased production, transmission, consumption of, and reliance on information[2]. The impact of this Age on human minds, relationships, and communities is a primary area of research in many fields of the arts and sciences today. While this Age began with the euphoria that the increased production, transmission, and consumption of information will make the world more peaceful by 'connecting' people across geographic and sociological boundaries, recent assessments are far more sobering. Several studies have highlighted that certain forms of digital media take advantage of our cognitive vulnerabilities by creating urgency, encouraging constant seeking, recommending sensational content, and isolating us in bubbles[3]. Like other fields, the Information Age calls for a reassessment of the formal structures and processes of international politics, which are embedded in their Industrial Age origins. In fact, terms such as power and legitimacy, which underlie much of the international politics conversations, need to be reconceptualised in the context of the new Age.
This chapter will argue that the Information Age has a profound impact on the accumulation of power and generation of legitimacy in international affairs. We aim to drive home the point that assessments of changing world orders must consider these changes. Seen from the Information Age frame, several questions hit the core of this volume. Does the Information Age enable new ways of accumulating power? How do nation-states gain legitimacy in an age where they are not the only actors setting narratives? Is the Information Age world order set to be dominated by authoritarian states prioritising control over all information? To answer these questions, the chapter is structured as follows. Section 1 looks at how the nature of accumulating power has changed in the Information Age. Section 2 analyses how gaining legitimacy has been transformed. Section 3 assesses the implications of these fundamental shifts and makes some broad recommendations for liberal democracies to confront the challenges thrown up by the new Age.
Reconceptualising Power in the Information Age
The classic definition of power comes from Robert Dahl. Adopting a relational approach, Dahl argued that "A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do[4]". In an international relations context, the notion of power occupies a central role. The distribution of power amongst various actors is a crucial determinant of any international order. However, there is no one way to calculate power. The variables, the methods, and even the definitions of power are an ongoing subject of contestation.
For this chapter, we use the Dahlian notion of power, meaning that if an entity can influence one's will over the others, irrespective of the other's will, it can be said to have power over the other. This definition is important because it emphasises the cognitive aspects of exercising power.
Conceptually, A can exercise power over B in three ways. First, by the direct use of force or the threat of use of force by direct or indirect means, A can get B to comply. A cyber-attack disabling another state's critical infrastructure falls in this category of exercising power. Second, A can exercise power over B at the decision-making level by changing B's desires, choice perceptions, and payoff calculations. Psychological warfare by a state A, which convinces another state B of A's superior power and hence the futility of conflict with A is an archetypical example. Finally, A can exercise power over B by changing B's preferences, morality, and understanding of reality. Successful interference by state A in a democratic state B's election process, for instance, can bring into question the concept of democracy, human agency, and reality itself.
The Information Age has impacted all three ways of exercising power in varying degrees. In the initial years, the focus and expectation were that the Information Age would significantly alter power dynamics in the first of the three ways by enabling new channels for disrupting another state's force-wielding capabilities. Ronfeldt and Arquilla termed this kind of show of power as a cyber-war[5]. Nation-states were deploying and concerned about, new weapons of the Information Age that could directly attack critical infrastructure, debilitate military decision-making or attack another country's information assets such as networks. The Stuxnet came to be hailed as the world's first digital weapon, and its deployment in derailing Iran's nuclear programme became a reference point of the power of cyberweapons. Over time though, the shine of such weapons has faded. While it is still true that cyberweapons can be used to attack another state's critical infrastructure, it is understood that this method of exercising power does not alter the global distribution of power significantly. At best, it has some effect on bilateral conflict dyads.
The big break from the past is about using power in the latter two ways, which focus on attacking the human mind rather than military or critical infrastructure.
As far back as 1988, Susan Strange wrote that "whoever is able to develop or acquire and to deny the access of others to a kind of knowledge respected and sought by others; and whoever can control the channels by which it is communicated to those given access to it, will exercise a very special kind of structural power"[6]. Hart & Kim argued that the Information Age makes the intangible sources of power more critical as "control over knowledge, beliefs and ideas is increasingly regarded as a complement to control over tangible resources such as military forces, raw materials, and economic productive capability"[7].
Even though these scholars foresaw the avenues that the Information Age presents for cognitive control, the on-ground deployment of these methods became common knowledge only in the 2010s. Russia's interference in the 2016 US Presidential elections showed how information weapons could achieve disproportional results by "hacking" minds rather than attacking critical or military infrastructure. That event also laid bare an asymmetry: even as liberal democracies were reaping the economic benefits of the Information Age, authoritarian regimes, concerned about sanitising the information that reaches their domestic audiences, had become better at deploying information power. Having gained expertise in deploying power on their domestic audiences, they were deploying them in the geopolitical arena.
Three crucial implications result from the deployment of information weapons to attack human minds at the global level.
First, the path to accumulating power has changed. Route to gain power in international relations has become more accessible in the Information Age. Theorists of power might debate the weightage of specific constituents of national power. However, they all agree that the accumulation of economic power and military might is necessary to increase the power of nation-states. Historians such as Paul Kennedy wrote about a spiral mode of accumulating national strength, where military power is used to acquire economic power and economic power, in turn, is used to produce more military power[8]. A corollary to these ideas is that gaining power was a process that took years, if not decades. Strength was built over time by first gaining economic strength and then converting it into military might. In the Industrial Age, gaining access to nuclear weapons also became an essential element of military power, a phenomenon that's still limited to a handful of countries. Information weapons, by contrast, are easier to attain. The route to gaining power is no longer sequential. Using information weapons, it is possible to influence an adversary's cognitive and decision-making systems directly.
Second, even though the monopoly over the use of force is likely to remain with states, the importance of violence to achieve geopolitical aims itself will decrease in the Information Age. Nation-states that can directly attack the cognitive 'layer' of competing states will have an asymmetric source of power. To be sure, this source of power cannot negate the military or economic power of the adversary altogether but has the potential to blunt the advantages that superior material resources allow.
Third, since information control is itself a weapon, entities other than nation-states can wield this power. Twitter banning the account of a former US President illustrates how internet entities can exercise power in the Information Age. The monopoly over the legitimate use of force is not a precondition for exercising information power. Hence, many private internet entities become vital players in the geopolitical arena regardless of their intended goals or business models. The crackdown on internet companies in China should be seen in this context: private entities gaining significant information control is likely to pose an existential threat to the Chinese authoritarian party-state.
India has witnessed the playing out of Information Age politics over the past decade. Popular movements drawing hundreds of thousands of citizens protesting against corruption, sexual harassment and unpopular legislation have been constructed with relatively low dependency on local leaders. Political entrepreneurs use social media as a key platform to rise within party hierarchies, create personal brands and acquire electoral advantage. Political violence is sometimes employed towards the acquisition of narrative power. State authorities and political parties have engaged in a number of different strategies – from the commercial to the coercive – towards social media platforms in a bid to preserve their narrative dominance. Even so, private individuals and civil society groups have demonstrated that information power can be used to check state power.
The preceding discussion on power suggests that more entities other than nation-states will compete for power in the Information Age. The international order is likely to be a flux over the next decade due to the information dimension.
Reconceptualising Legitimacy in the Information Age
Even the most powerful nation-states require another essential element to transform themselves into hegemons: an exercise of power that is deemed legitimate by other actors in the system. In other words, great power status is the quest for authority — an exercise of power that is not perceived as being coercion but as legitimate. Striking a balance between legitimacy and power between legitimacy and power is vital for any world ordering project. Henry Kissinger writes that an exercise of power deemed illegitimate "will turn every disagreement into a test of strength; ambition will know no resting place; countries will be propelled into unsustainable tours de force of elusive calculations regarding the shifting configuration of power"[9]. Others, such as Reus-Smit, have argued that legitimacy is one of the vital sources of power itself. While more resourceful actors can use material inducement to change other actors' behaviour, such an approach is costlier than "voluntary compliance legitimacy"[10].
Essentially, legitimacy requires conformity to a set of rules. Furthermore, because a single set of rules does not govern the international system, world leaders seek to gain legitimacy by projecting their own set of rules as superior to others and acting as credible upholders to these values[11]. The critical point is not whether such systems are fair objectively but that they are perceived as being fair. For instance, David C Kang writes that the tribute system in East Asia worked because many political units understood the prevalent institutions and norms as legitimate[12]. What therefore interests us is that gaining legitimacy, like power, is a cognitive act. It depends on the perceptions of another actor's promises, practices, and purposes. This is where the politics of the Information Age comes in.
Actors can easily use the weapons of the Information Age to delegitimise the narratives that old powers might have carefully constructed. Given that population-scale influence operations in a target country are now possible, delegitimising another state is a potent weapon in the Information Age in at least two ways.
One, state failures set the agenda making any regime's story of its legitimacy less powerful. Martin Gurri, in his book The Revolt of the Public, discusses how gaining legitimacy is a significant challenge of the Information Age, particularly in open societies where problems such as "police brutality, economic mismanagement, foreign policy failures, botched responses to disasters .. can no longer be concealed or explained away". Instead, he writes, such problems are
"seized on by the newly-empowered public, and placed front-and-center in open discussions… As the regime's story of legitimacy becomes less and less persuasive, Homo informaticus adjusts his story of the world in opposition to that of the regime. He joins the ranks of similarly disaffected members of the public, who are hostile to the status quo, eager to pick fights with authority, and seek the means to broadcast their opinions and turn the tables on their rulers. The means of communication are of course provided by the information sphere"[13].
Two, in the Information Age, all local events are by default global. Local disturbances can be catapulted to the global information sphere using information weapons. In front of a crowded global information environment with global actors, states often find it difficult to adjust their stories of legitimacy. Facing a narrative loss, they respond, to their own detriment, by clamping down excessively on information flows.
The polarisation of public discourse in India in recent years has led to “echo chambers” that are persuaded of the rectitude of their own side’s narratives (regardless of empirical facts) and dismissive of those of their perceived adversaries. Government policies, actions by law enforcement authorities, judicial decisions and media coverage are primarily seen through partisan perspectives, undermining their legitimacy. As is to be expected, given they are cut of the same cloth as the broader citizenry, polarisation and partisanship has affected the language and actions of public officials themselves, strengthening the vicious cycle. In many ways, the Indian republic faces an internal challenge to its legitimacy from its own citizens who have divergent interpretations of the social contract and the purpose of the state.
Thus, one of the defining features of the Information Age will be a decline in the legitimacy of nation-states across the board. A crisis of authority, i.e. the exercise of perceived legitimate power, could well be the dominant narrative of this Age.
Implications of the Information Age on Future International Orders
This section discusses some implications of the changing dynamics of power and legitimacy in the Information Age.
The central question to be addressed is how do information weapons tilt the balance of power, at the margin, between liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes? At the outset, it does appear that information control hands authoritarian regimes an asymmetric advantage. Having honed information weapons against their citizens, they are more likely to, and perhaps more adept at, deploying information power. From a legitimacy perspective, authoritarian regimes can discredit core narratives of liberal democracies while blocking reciprocal operations by censoring content accessed by their people. It is not surprising to see authoritarian regimes on the front foot in the information sphere, while liberal democracies appear to be confused.
However, reaching this conclusion ignores two significant effects that could play out over the long term. First, information censorship comes at an enormous opportunity cost. While censorship can perhaps be helpful for regime survival, it can also make information weapons unavailable for use against adversaries. For instance, it is estimated that the Great Firewall employs over 100,000 people to prevent the Chinese people from seeing what the party-state deems objectionable. As the list of objectionable content grows, information weapons and strategies will be locked in for domestic purposes. By contrast, liberal democracies are unburdened by the need to censor domestic content and can thus extract more value from the information weapons at their disposal.
Second, the absence of trusted sources of information for debunking propaganda outside the state apparatus makes authoritarian regimes susceptible to targeted information operations. Terming this as the Authoritarian Information Paradox, Rosenbach and Mansted contend that "even a small chink in the armor of authoritarian states' information control systems may have existential ramifications for those in power"[14]. While authoritarian regimes might appear to have a head start on information power, liberal democracies have their strengths to fall back on.
In contrast to authoritarian setups, liberal democracies rely on social harmony and electoral politics as their information defence mechanisms. Instead of censorship, they rely on the political process to express popular will and on social capital to tide over mal-information campaigns by adversaries. Despite these long-term advantages, some liberal democracies might well be pulled towards adopting the same instruments as the authoritarian regimes in the information sphere due to the latter's short-term gains. Likely, many nation-states will increasingly employ propaganda for offence and censorship for defence. There is a vigorous ongoing debate in India – in parliament and in the public sphere – on the nature of the balance between free speech and its legitimate restriction. An emerging aspect of this debate is the question of protecting citizens’ rights from the information power of their own governments and corporations.
The future of the world order in the Information Age might well be determined by the path liberal democracies choose: will they resist the tendency to copy the same means and tools deployed by authoritarian regimes, or will they strengthen their pluralistic characteristics?
Conclusion
We argued that the Information Age is likely to have changed the accumulation of power and legitimacy, two key variables underlying any international order. Information weapons have an asymmetric advantage in exercising power as they allow state and non-state actors to directly attack the adversary's cognitive layers of decision-making, morality, and reality itself. At the same time, states find it difficult to adjust their stories of authority in a contested, hyperglobal information environment, leading to an eventual loss of legitimacy in international affairs.
Information weapons appear to tilt the balance of power towards authoritarian regimes in the short term. However, over the long term, the opportunity costs of domestic censorship might constrain the use of these weapons for geopolitical purposes. Liberal democracies that strengthen social harmony are better placed over the long term to enhance their power and legitimacy in the information sphere. The question in India – as elsewhere in the world – is how long it will take and how much it would cost before this ancient wisdom is regained.
Endnotes
[1] Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 24.
[2] ‘What is Information Age?’ IGI Global. https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/information-age/14305
[3] ‘Social Media and the Brain: Why is persuasive technology so hard to resist?’, Center for Humane Technology. https://www.humanetech.com/youth/social-media-and-the-brain#question-2.
[4] Robert A. Dahl, ‘The Concept of Power’, Behavioral Science 2 (1957): 201–215.
[5] John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, ‘Cyberwar is Coming!’, Comparative Strategy 12, No. 2 (Spring 1993): 141–165.
[6] Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Printer Publishers, 1988), 30.
[7] Jeffrey A Hart and Sangbae Kim, ‘Power in the Information Age’, in Jose V. Ciprut (ed.), Of Fears and Foes: International Relations in an Evolving Global Political Economy (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2000).
[8] Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).
[9] Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 24.
[10] Christian Reus-Smit, ‘Power, Legitimacy, and Order’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics (2014): 341–359.
[11] Pranay Kotasthane, ‘Ingredients of a World Order’. https://www.thinkpragati.com/opinion/2694/ingredients-new-world-order/
[12] David C. Kang, ‘Authority and Legitimacy in International Relations: Evidence from Korean and Japanese Relations in Pre-Modern East Asia’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics 5, Issue 1 (Spring 2012): 55–71.
[13] Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (California: Stripe Press, 2018).
[14] Eric Rosenbach and Katherine Mansted, ‘Can Democracy Survive in the Information Age?’, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School (2018). https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/can-democracy-survive-information-age
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