Dr Paul White

For almost eight decades, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), along with other international bodies, has played a pivotal role in fostering global market integration and crisis management. However, critics have argued that policies promoted by the Fund have had negative social impacts, including in relation to inequality. In recent times, the IMF has shifted its focus to “macro-social” concerns, including inequality, signaling an apparent departure from its traditional emphasis on fiscal consolidation above all else. This chapter scrutinizes the IMF’s post-2015 “inequality pilots,” assessing policy advice changes in the pilot countries and elsewhere. It is argued that the Fund’s ability to actually make a positive impact on macro-social issues like inequality is hindered by internal constraints and geo-political dynamics.

While the governance of the Internet is often assumed to be merely a technical matter, it is actually a fiercely contested political arena, in which institutional arrangements are still being shaped. This paper aims to demonstrate how, and why, the politics surrounding Internet governance are of significance for international peace and stability. The Internet has great potential as a facilitator of the peacebuilding process, but it can also be used as a tool of oppression, a channel for disinformation and propaganda, and even as a means of waging war. The institutions that are built around Internet governance will determine in whose hands ultimate control of the network will lie, and will ultimately decide whether the Internet is to be a vehicle of human liberation and peacebuilding, or a tool of oppression and conflict. To accomplish the latter, there is a need to move away from traditional state‐based assumptions around global governance and security.

This article will explore challenges posed by the digital communications revolution to some long-standing concepts and assumptions around security, warfare, and peace. It will demonstrate the obsolescence of the traditional state-focused national security paradigm with regards to matters of cybersecurity, as well as the limitations of conventional collective security approaches. It will also outline the Internet's potential as a peacebuilding medium, and the crossroads we currently face between a new era of cyberwarfare or an Internet for “cyberpeace.”