A Toolkit for Understanding the Role of (Dis)Information Powerful people navigating the turbulence

Since World War II, global politics has been experiencing a tumultuous peri- od that Rosenau (1990) describes as turbulence. It identifies post-international politics as a result of the inadequacy of state-centric politics to encompass and summarize the trends of the contemporary globalized world, which is characterized by profound and continuous transformations. In particular, the actors that participate in the political games have changed. The issue of international politics has become a topic of discussion among politi- cians and citizens, and many different subjects have created connections and relationships.

The breaking points are threefold: 1) the historical and political alterations that caused the complication of the post-war order; 2) the bifurcation of global macro structures that have led to the redesign of “two worlds of glob- al politics”, in which multicentrism challenges state-centered politics; and 3) the micro-level revolutions that have emerged, expanding individual emo- tional and cognitive capacities toward global politics.

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These factors are combined with what Rosenau defined in the Nineties as modern technologies, namely microelectronics. By reducing time and shrinking space, these technologies dematerialize traditional economic pro- cesses and accelerate the transmission of information.

As the word suggests, turbulence is synonymous with uncertainty in in- ternational politics and its evolving structures. Due to this uncertainty, analytical and cognitive tools can prove inadequate for explaining a multi- faceted world that often defies traditional categorization. There is a relevant clue in the increasing number of turns in the IR discipline’s narrative, which we will discuss later.

When new problems emerge, states often cannot provide satisfactory answers. Most solutions require multilevel governance tools that are so- phisticated and unprecedented, as well as confrontations with unexpected actors. Meanwhile, citizens are becoming less likely to blindly accept state-provided solutions and their traditional operative frameworks as a re- sult of the development of individual skills. As individuals’ abilities evolve, issues of competitive information have become central to managing IR’s non-material dimension, escalating in some forms of contemporary disin- formation. Individuals develop analytical skills and the ability to master complex cognitive maps. In evaluating the legitimacy of actors in power, performance is emphasized rather than political loyalty, which is variable and not always focused on the state.

Rosenau prefigures a scenario where active citizens refer to their skills to decode world politics. Media intermediation facilitates citizen participation in single-issue networks constituted by (sometimes) organized but tempo- rary ties. Using technological devices, in this scenario, macro issues (those that pertain to codified formal politics) and micro issues (relating to individ- ual expressions and autonomous positioning in the world) are connected in unprecedented ways:

[…] new technologies have had a profound, if not always desirable, im- pact upon how individuals perceive, comprehend, judge, enter, avoid, or

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otherwise interact with the world beyond their workplace and home.

For example, the new electronic technologies have so greatly collapsed the time in which organizations and movements can be mobilized that the competence of citizens feeds on itself, in the sense that they can virtually ‘see’ their skills and orientations being cumulated into larger aggregates that have consequence for the course of events (Rosenau, 1990, p. 15).

The insights described above suggest that mediating tools, such as online platforms, can enhance individual connections and influence politics, gen- erating unexpected effects, as witnessed during the Arab Spring uprisings (Comunello & Anzera, 2012; Wolfsfed et al., 2013). Technology plays a dual role since it is also a transformative force for elites. Rosenau depicts citizens as powerful people with the right to participate in world politics. The same political elites, however, develop new skills, resulting in practices similar to contemporary astroturfing (Kovic et al., 2018; Keller et al., 2020):

Not only are ‘ordinary’ people often interviewed for their reactions, but in all parts of the world, they are frequently asked to turn out for rallies or protests that are scheduled for live television coverage. Or, if they have spontaneously converged upon a site and formed a leaderless public, leaders are quick to seize the chance to get them on the global stage by calling the attention of the mass media to their presence, there- by transforming them into a participatory aggregation that can serve their shared purposes. Irrespective of the ways in which they may have been stage-managed, however, the participants are likely to experience such occasions as moments when they were actors on the global stage (Rosenau, 1990, p. 344).

As global politics becomes more uncertain, authority and its decisions are questioned, and citizens’ abilities to interpret contemporary phenomena grow, new processes are being cultivated. These processes affect the grip of misinformation on modern society. Due to citizens’ autonomy and inclina- tion to contest power, they tend to distrust the official political system and

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its sources of information. Despite overestimating their analytical skills, cit- izens are always looking for alternative sources. This overestimation could undermine information management capacity in an increasingly complex political environment. Citizens’ autonomous and emotional discernment is the key to transforming them into affective publics (Papacharissi, 2015), and this judgment is sometimes seen as an aggregate that can be modulated based on fluctuating interests. Exaggerated news often targets such audi- ences, playing on their sense of credulity and encouraging oppositional and populist instincts.