James Felton Keith – författare

This volume’s relevance may be explained, first and foremost, during a time of unprecedented loss of life around the world each day. The data, which is oftentimes incomplete and misleading, nonetheless reveals the state as deficient as well as negligent in its response to social healthcare needs. This volume attests to the fact that pressing global public health concerns are ever present as subjects of societal discourse and debate in developed and developing states. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic makes the omission of the ethics of personal data collection analysis in the international relations literature even more salient given the rise of contact tracing and increased uses of mobile phone Apps to track citizens by states and firms across the globe, as this volume’s chapters analyzing the responses to COVID-19 in Iran and Taiwan explain. 

In the early twenty-first century, the international relations literature still posits realism as a dominant paradigm in the Western School. This volume introduces alternative frames of reference that address the deficiencies of liberalism with its lack of sufficient attention to ethnic diversity. By drawing on constructivism with its focus on framing, particularly the influence in instrumentalist terms of narratives shaped by the media, this volume explores that influence by analysing case studies in historical context. In 2020, the world’s present, yet unequal, experiences of the triptych, personal data, global pandemic and social protests, lead us to introduce personal data (Image I), the mesh region (Image II) and the distributed ecosystem (Image III) to capture the dynamic, transformative nature of the changing relationship between structure and agency.