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An examination of the ways cyberspace is changing both the theory and the practice of international relations. Cyberspace is widely acknowledged as a fundamental fact of daily life in today's world. Until recently, its political impact was thought to be a matter of low politics—background conditions and routine processes and decisions. Now, however, experts have begun to recognize its effect on high politics—national security, core institutions, and critical decision processes. In this book, Nazli Choucri investigates the implications of this new cyberpolitical reality for international relations theory, policy, and practice. The ubiquity, fluidity, and anonymity of cyberspace have already challenged such concepts as leverage and influence, national security and diplomacy, and borders and boundaries in the traditionally state-centric arena of international relations. Choucri grapples with fundamental questions of how we can take explicit account of cyberspace in the analysis of world politics and how we can integrate the traditional international system with its cyber venues. After establishing the theoretical and empirical terrain, Choucri examines modes of cyber conflict and cyber cooperation in international relations; the potential for the gradual convergence of cyberspace and sustainability, in both substantive and policy terms; and the emergent synergy of cyberspace and international efforts toward sustainable development. Choucri's discussion is theoretically driven and empirically grounded, drawing on recent data and analyzing the dynamics of cyberpolitics at individual, state, international, and global levels.

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This issue of the International Political Science Review is devoted to new challenges and opportunities-as well as attendant problems-created by new information and communication technologies and applications in political science, with special attention to implications for international relations. The challenges are shaped in large part by the convergence of three trends: globalization, world-wide electronic connectivity, and emergent practices in knowledge networking. Increasingly, this convergence is reinforcing the role of knowledge in the global economy and in power politics. While each of these trends, individually, is having an impact on social discourse and modes of interaction, jointly they may be shaping powerful new parameters of politics, both nationally and internationally. They may also affect our ways of generating and managing knowledge, creating new knowledge, and even framing or re-framing the core concepts in political science. Central among these concepts, of course, are power, politics, representation, accountability, conflict, contention, and a host of others. In the context of the broader social sciences, these trends are also transforming traditional knowledge practices, creating new research modes, and accelerating "new knowledge."It would certainly be misleading, if not dangerous, to overestimate the meaning or impact of these developments; it would be also unwise to err in the opposite direction, by underestimating the matters at hand. In the absence of a clear precedent-and established methods for dealing with such uncertainties-the most reasonable course is to sample the nature of these developments, establish baselines to the extent possible, and record some key milestones in both the scholarly and the policy communities as they manage adjustments to these convergent trends. The New SemanticsThe focus of this issue is on CyberPolitics, a concept that reflects realities at the conjunction of two processes (or realities): those pertaining, on the one hand, to