ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to study the impact of the ‘digital revolution’ on the power structures of the international political economy (IPE). To do so, it applies Susan Strange’s (1994) quintessential IPE ‘structural power’ framework developed in States and Markets. After analysing how digital technologies have impacted the four power structures (security, production, finance and knowledge) of the international political economy, the picture that emerges is the following. The digital age has distributed a new set of cards and this has generated new winners and losers. From the perspective of non-state actors, power has shifted from the financial sector concentrated in New York to the tech giants in Silicon Valley in the West and in China, from industrial workers in the West to the new middle classes in (East) Asia and from the unskilled to high-skilled all over the world. From a geopolitical and state-centric perspective China has become the biggest winner, the United States is in relative decline but still dominant, while the European Union is falling behind, although it retains some relative strengths in the industrial realm. Datafication, speed and pervasiveness have transformed both agential and ordering process in the global economy.
