ABSTRACT
What are digital international relations and how are we to study them? The introductory chapter develops a digital disruption map that is meant to provide researchers, employing different angles, with some guidance on how to put under scrutiny different processes contributing to the transformation to digital international affairs and how they hang together. The map distinguishes technological, agential and ordering processes. When it comes to identifying these processes, the editors cast their net widely in order to arrive at a ‘big picture’ that transcends the usual dividing lines among perspectives, approaches and research foci in International Relations and helps International Relations scholars to engage with debates in other disciplines. They study three major technological sources of digital disruption (datafication, speed and pervasiveness), examine three broad agential mechanisms (forcing, enticing and winning over) and investigate two ordering layers (foreground and background). The digital disruption map links these processes together, placing the agential ones at the centre.
