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Which functions do social media fill for non-state armed groups in countries with internal armed conflict? Building on conflict data, interviews and media monitoring, we have reviewed the use of social media by Myanmar's nine most powerful armed groups. The first finding is that they act like states, using social media primarily to communicate with their constituents. Second, they also use social media as a tool of armed struggle, for command and control, intelligence, denunciation of traitors, and attacks against adversaries. Third, social media serves for national and international outreach. Like Myanmar's national army, the armed groups have combined prudent official pages with an underworld of more reckless profiles and closed groups that often breach Facebook's official community standards. In February 2019, when Facebook excluded four groups from its platform, they lost much of their ability to reach out and act like states. Yet they kept a capacity to communicate with their constituents through closed groups, individual profiles and sophisticated use of links and shares. Finally, the article affirms that the Facebook company, in the years 2018-2020,took upon itself a role as an arbiter within Myanmar's internal conflicts, deciding what information was allowed and disallowed.

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On 4 November 2002, China and ASEAN signed a Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (ASEAN, 2002). Incidents related to occupation of islands, ‘illegal’ fishing and oil exploration had been major irritants in the relationship between China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam during the 1990s. The declaration on a code of conduct reflects the complexity of the South China Sea dispute: it is a multilateral agreement between one major power and an association of ten states. However, China remains adamant that it will resolve the South China Sea dispute only through bilateral negotiations. For this policy to produce results, bilateral talks with Vietnam will be essential. On 25 December 2000, China and Vietnam signed bilateral agreements on maritime delimitation and fishery cooperation in the Gulf of Tonkin, and experts from the two countries also discussed the larger disputes in the South China Sea. However, two years later, the bilateral agreements had still not entered into force and negotiations over supplementary protocols had stalled. This article describes the Sino-Vietnamese rapprochement in the 1990s, analyses the South China Sea ‘irritant’, presents the Gulf of Tonkin agreements and discusses the prospects for a Sino-Vietnamese initiative to resolve the South China Sea dispute.

Globalisation has ambiguous effects on states. On the one hand, it favours national states since citizens' identification with their state provides for political and social stability. On the other hand, globalisation makes it difficult for states to be national because the scope of sovereign decision-making is reduced, and many citizens prioritise trans-national networks over national ones. Hence well-established national states, which are sufficiently resilient to maintain a national culture while also engaging with the wider world, enjoy a comparative advantage over such states who either fail to maintain national cohesion or seek to protect it by rejecting foreign influence. The present article revisits the most common typologies of nations and national states, and discusses how four main types of nations (ethnic, civic, plural and class) cope with globalisation. The article builds on the assumption that the 'foreign policy' field, notably the capacity of states to shape popular global policies, must be included in discussions of the future of the national state. The challenge of globalisationGlobalisation is understood here in a broad sense of rapidly expanding trade, investments, financial flows, travel, information and other forms of worldwide communication. These trends received a boost from the demise of real socialism during the 1980s-90s, when formerly secluded continents were opened up to penetration to global economic and cultural forces. Within the globalised world, the role of the state is changing. The distinction between internal and external policies is being increasingly blurred. It becomes more and more important for states to influence not only the regional but the global environment, and more and more impossible to determine developments inside one's borders without engaging in supra-national decision making. Foreign ministries and diplomatic services are being transformed. While they mainly used to manage bilateral diplomatic relations with other states, they now seek to promote and co-ordinate all kinds of trans-national interaction, and must spend considerable time on preparing and advocating their own policies in multilateral forums. Every government finds it increasingly problematic to define the division of labour between its Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the other ministries. Politics is often hampered by the fact that its subject matter is trans-or international whereas the electorate, its consciousness and concerns remain focussed on so-called domestic affairs.