ABSTRACT
With International Relations becoming increasingly digitalised, we need to reflect about how a ‘digital turn’ in IR, which is already underway, is to change our discipline. This chapter makes a case for moving from IR to Digital International Relations (DIR)? Putting it into metaphorical language borrowed from informational technology, the chapter identifies three signposts that may help us to orient ourselves: upgrading, augmenting and rewiring. Upgrading is akin to adding new software to the existing hardware of IR. If we stayed with upgrading, it would suffice to add digital aspects to existing approaches in the discipline. Augmenting is about more fundamental changes to studying world politics. It is, to stay with the metaphor, about both new hardware and software. In the same way that digital augmentation transforms perceptions of reality by rendering data into real-world objects, DIR augmentation alters and expands the field of view by which to study international politics. Finally, rewiring engages with the ethical ramifications that digital technologies extend to processes of global ordering. The ‘digital turn’ is thus bound to lay bare the sites, issues and forms of normative contestation that digital disruption has activated in global politics and to stimulate novel ethical reflections about the conditions that can mitigate and possibly dissolve some of the emerging normative tensions and conflicts.
