Borders between countries are losing their national significance, although they continue their geographical function. They have become sieves through which there is extensive leakage.

Modernists in the 1970s saw telecommunications and jet travel as creating a “global village,” and believed that the territorial state, which had been dominant in world politics for the four centuries since feudal times ended, was being eclipsed by nonterritorial actors such as multinationals, transnational social movements and international organizations. Interdependence is not new. What is new is the virtual erasing of the costs of distance as a result of the information revolution - sometimes called globalisation.

No longer is it sufficient to analyse flows of raw materials, goods and capital across borders, or to understand how states construct territorial boundaries on the high seas. Traditionally, political activity focused first at the local level, only extending to national and international spheres as the activity regulated escaped jurisdictional boundaries. The contemporary information revolution, however, is global, since “cyberplace” is divided on a non-geographical basis.

Information is power, Francis Bacon wrote 400 years ago. Undoubtedly, the information revolution has political implications. As traditionalist realists maintain, much will be the same: states will play important roles; vulnerability will lead to bargaining weakness and lack of vulnerability to power; actors will seek to manipulate cyberspace, as they manipulate flows across borders to enhance their power. Yet, as modernists insist, the information revolution is not “deja vu all over again”: cyberspace is truly global; it is harder to stop or even monitor the flow of information-carrying electrons than for raw materials or goods; and dramatic reductions in the cost of information transmission make other resources relatively scarce.

This revolution occurred not merely within a pre-existing political context, but within one characterized by continuing military tensions and conflicts. Although the end of the Cold War removed one set of military-related tensions, it left some in place and created situations of state-breaking and state-making in which violence was used to attain political ends. The new conventional wisdom is that the information revolution has a decentralising and levelling effect. As it reduces costs, economies of scale and entry barriers to markets, it should reduce the power of large states and enhance that of small ones and non-state actors. But international relations are more complex than the technological determinism of the new conventional wisdom suggests.

From a business standpoint, the information revolution has increased the marketability and value of commercial information, by reducing transmission costs and the transaction costs of charging information users. Politically, the most important shift concerns free information. The ability to disseminate free information increases the potential for persuasion in world politics - as long as credibility can be attained and maintained. NGOs and other states can more readily influence the beliefs of people within other jurisdictions.

Credibility becomes a key power resource both for governments and NGOs, giving more open, transparent organisations an advantage with respect to free information. In short, geographically-based states will continue to structure politics in an information age, but the processes of world politics within that structure are undergoing profound change.