In this episode I speak with David Sloss, a professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law, about his new book Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Chinese and Russian Information Warfare. David argues that autocracies such as China and Russia are exploiting social media to engage in “warfare by other means” to undermine democracies around the world, and that there are strategic and geopolitical implications to allowing autocracies to conduct this kind of information warfare. We discuss how this form of information warfare calls for different law and policy responses than cyber operations, or other forms of interference in the electoral processes or domestic politics of nations, and why in his view the best response is a coordinated transnational regulatory system agreed to by like-minded democracies, which would include the banning of Russian and Chinese state agents from social media platforms. We explore several of the likely objections to his proposal, including its implicit rejection of broader and more universal international law solutions, whether it distracts from several larger threats to democracy posed by social media platforms, the risk of securitizing an essentially non-military problem, and some of the more technical challenges to its implementation. We only scratch the surface of everything the book has to offer, but it provides a lot of food for thought!
Materials:
– Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Chinese and Russian Information Warfare (2022).
Reading Recommendations:
– Yochai Benkler et al., Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (2018);
– Laura Rosenberger, “Making Cyberspace Safe for Democracies,” Foreign Affairs, May/June, 2020.
– Aleksi Knuutila et al., “Global Fears of Disinformation: Perceived Internet and Social Media Harms in 142 Countries,” Oxford Internet Institute (2020).
In this episode I speak with Samuel Moyn, who is a Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University. Sam has written a number of books on issues at the intersection of history and international human rights, but we here discuss his most recent book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. Taking off from an insight of Leo Tolstoy’s, the book provocatively explores how an increasing focus on the humanization of war may have made us more accepting of armed conflict, and thereby undermined the movement to constrain the resort to war. In our discussion we explore some of the historical accounts that form the premises of this argument, including the claim that IHL did little to make war more humane until after the Vietnam war, particularly in the history of Western conflicts with non-white peoples; how armed conflict become far more humanized in the so-called “global war on terror;” and how this increasing focus on humanizing war has resulted in a corresponding decline in efforts to constrain the resort to war. We dig into the nature and implications of this claimed inverse relationship, and what forces and actors he thinks help to explain the phenomenon, and end with the question of what might might be done, and by whom, to address the problem of this declining focus on preventing war – an urgent question in the circumstances.
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In this episode I speak with Yasuyuki Yoshida, Professor of International Law at Takaoka University in Toyama Japan, and former Captain(N) in the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force. We discuss Japan’s posture on various aspects of the jus ad bellum regime, and whether or how its position may have changed as a result of the “reinterpretation” of Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan. Article 9 famously renounces the threat or use of force, and has long been understood to prohibit any collective self-defense or use of force authorized by the UN Security Council, but in 2014 the government purported to “reinterpret” the provision to relax its constraints. We discuss how the new policy relates to the jus ad bellum, and what Japan’s position is on a number of the more controversial elements of the doctrine of self-defense. The discussion includes surprising insights on how Japan would view a Chinese incursion on the Senkaku Islands, whether Japan would help defend Taiwan, and whether the US could invoke collective self-defense of Japan for preemptive strikes on North Korea. Another fascinating conversation!
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