International Relations and the challenges of global communication

We live in an interconnected, hyper-mediated world. A plethora of communications surrounds our everyday lives and polities, whilst new media and technologies have brought forth possibilities for, and ways of, communicating across space and time. Long-distance communication and travelling, the accelerated flow of information, ideas, images and sounds across national and other frontiers, the construction of multinational urban centres and global media corporations, the live broadcasting and commercialisation of major events and crises, the expansion of global advertising, spin and political marketing, and the advent of the Internet, have modified and complicated the reality of national, international and transnational relationships. This very collection of essays was made possible via the Internet to connect the Editors, based in different locations and while they were travelling. This is now the norm. Slightly more unusually, yet underlining the growing potential of this area, a workshop held at the University of St Andrews in November 2006 brought some of the contributors together both physically and virtually through the medium of Skype. Physical presence has long not been necessary in order to communicate, influence, or indeed, coerce.