Harvard Referencing More than 10with 10% tolerance Essential Reading: T. Davies, ‘Governing Communications’, in D Williams and S Harman Governing the World?, pp XXXXXXXXXX. M. Zacher with B. Sutton,...

HOW IMPORTANT HAVE TECHNOLOGY AND COMMUNICATIONS BEEN IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE?
Executive Summary
Technology has played a significant impact on the emergence of global governance. With the development of institutions during the capitalist movement in the early 1850s, their responsibilities changed to other relevant aspects of the geo-political governance. This was further followed by developments of telecommunication technologies such as telegraph, internet, social media platforms, which shaped the global governance by relaxed governmental controls. The recent past has seen emergence of technologies such as cryptocurrency and Blockchain, which are gradually finding their applications in the global governance as well as other business scenarios. The concept of cyber weapons are the latest and most eminent threat to the global governance models with immediate need to regulate the menace. Experts identify certain technologies, which are believed to have a positive impact such as availability of clean energy, big data and predictive analysis, whereas some technologies are identified as posing a negative impact on the future such as autonomous robots and genetic modification.
Table of Contents
Introduction    4
Importance of Technology and Communications in Development of Global Governance    4
Conclusion    9
References    10
Introduction
Disruptive technologies have always had a hard-hitting impact of the evolution of the human race. Cues taken from the development of Estonia as one of the most digitized country in the past 20 years reveal three key pillars naming development of interoperability systems, adapting a digital ecosystem and embracing the digital wave of change. With the potential offered by big data and the influx of emerging technologies such as Blockchain and data visualization, societies have moved far from the traditional methods of geo-political governance. Information Technology has surely changed the way people communicate and operate in a global regime with the need of the hour to recognize the role of technology as an assisting force in shaping global economy and governance.
Importance of Technology and Communications in Development of Global Governance
The concept of global governance finds its roots back in the 1850s when the privileged nations enjoying their dominance on the world capitalist economic order. As stated by Haniffa and Cooke (2002), some of them being so radical that they tend to challenge the very building blocks of life and in this case geo-political governance, artificial intelligence and machine learning being the latest among them. From here up until the First World War, there was a rise in supranational institutions, which facilitated standards for smooth communication and transport during the industrial revolution, but also gave rise to economic competition for share of resources. This was followed by a decline during the inter war period when these institutions failed to establish themselves as the pioneers of global governance. As mentioned by Weiss and Wilkinson (2014), the post-world war period saw a shift in the responsibilities of these institutions from traditional exchange enabling agencies to activities such as peacekeeping and public finance. The sub sequential period after this saw several global economic crisis, which brought new challenges to this newly established regime of global governance.
Varied types of international regimes have played an important role in the development of global governance because of the shared interests of these participating states. There exists two commonly accepted theories with the first being that the states engage in global governance only when they have shared interest. Contrary to this, as criticized by Bhuiyan (2014), the other theory states that material interests are secondary and states eventually benefit from the cooperation emerging from the concept of global governance. Global shipping industry has seen much of the technological developments such are large sized vessels and containerization in the vessels. The air transport industry, which was limited to a little amount of mail and few passengers in to late 1940s, is not responsible for transportation of billions of passengers and loads of freight when time is on importance (Glen, 2014). The global telecommunication industry, which was started by telegraph, followed by telephone, radio, fiber optic cables and satellites, email and data transfer have caused drastic changes in the operation of global economy.
As noted by Reinalda (2009), the early roots of global governance can be traced back to 1840s when the United States and Britain signed the Alabama Treaty or the treaty of Washington in 1871, which was quickly followed by the formation of two institutions for international law, naming The Institute of international Law and The International Law Association. The previous body attaining a more scientist role whereas the latter one working on commonly accepted public and governmental opinions. The peace movement internationally during the 1870s was not religiously inspired with the first Peace Conference being held in Hague in 1889 (Kremer and Muller, 2013). The conference saw participation of several NGOs and exert their influence upon the delegated from various countries, following which the Permanent Court of Arbitration was set up in 1900. This era also saw the starting of Nobel prizes in different fields to the eminent contributors globally.
The post-World war period saw an insurgence in the number of refugees migrating to other countries with their homes and livelihoods destroyed due to war. As stated by Zacher and Sutton (1996), this period saw a couple of organizations being set up naming the International Refugee Organization and the International Organization for Migration with the United Nations gradually taking a pivotal and respectable position for ensuring peace-keeping all round the globe. Certain events such as the Cold War between the East and West along with the Korean War reshaped the dynamics of the global governance. As mentioned by Hutten and Thiemann (2017), this led to several regional alliances and treaties being formulated such as Treaty of Brussels and the North Atlantic treaty followed by formation of NATO in 1952. The same period also saw strengthening of the European Union as a powerful civic body and a global voicing for nuclear standards in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The late 1990s saw a tussle between the International telecommunications Union and the various Regional Standards organizations due to the rising wave of globalization. As informed by Marsden and Brown (2011), this was an era of post globalization nascent stage where denationalization of activities took place and the concept of global governance bloomed. As supported by DeNardis (2014), this stage also saw an upfront need of standardization of frameworks for the global operation of the governance infrastructure with several international forums being set up...