Technological Change and the Frontiers of Global Governance

The history of global governance is in many respects the story of international adapation to new technologies. As breakthroughs emerge, sovereign governments have tried to craft common standards and rules to facilitate cooperation and mitigate conflict. Consider the phenomenon known as standard time. We now take for granted the world’s division into twenty-four separate hourly zones, with Greenwich Mean Time as the baseline. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, there were 144 local time zones in the United States alone. It was only with the global spread of railroad lines in the late nineteenth century—and the need to standardized train schedules both nationally and internationally—that major countries convened in Washington and agreed to synchronize time within each zone, rather than continue to allow localities to calculate time according to local meridians or solar time.

More ominously, consider the oddly-named United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCWC). Negotiated in 1980 and entering into force in 1983, this binding multilateral treaty proscribes the use of certain weapons that are (in the formal language of the treaty’s title) “deemed to be excessively injurious or to have indiscriminate effects.” An annex to the Geneva Convention of 1949, the CCWC represents a global effort to come to terms with and regulate the use of destructive technologies—some of which had previously been imagined only in the realms of science fiction. Separate Protocols prohibit the use of several categories of weapons: those that produce non-detectable fragments in the human body; non-detectable mines and other explosive devices; incendiary weapons directed at civilian targets; and laser weapons designed to cause permanent blindness.

As these examples make clear, advances in technology have long driven global rule-making. What is different today is that the furious pace of technological change risks leaving global governance in the dust, as national governments and international institutions scramble to come to terms with—much less regulate—innovations with profound implications for human welfare and global order. This growing gap between what technological advances may permit and what the international system is prepared to regulate is increasingly clear in multiple areas. Two of the most obvious, on which I have already written, are the governance of outer space and of cyberspace. But at least four other global regulatory challenges spring to mind, where international laws and rules are virtually nonexistent. These include the expanding use of drone warfare; advances in synthetic biology; the spread of nanotechnology; and the specter of geoengineering.