Athina Karatzogianni
Dr Athina Karatzogianni has studied international relations, international conflict analysis and her doctoral research was a study of the theoretical significance of the network forms of new technologies, on the phenomenology of social protest and resistance and on the formation of identities and differences. It explores the ways in which new network forms of technology overlap with the new network biopolitics of sociopolitical movements, and how this interacts with the arborescent forms of ethnoreligious identity formation and the formation of master-signifiers and constitutive exclusions in relation to such identities. It combines an appreciation of new theoretical developments such as the work of Deleuze and Guattari and of critical security theorists of conflict who draw on Arquilla and Ronfeldt's view of networked conflicts, with a detailed empirical investigation of the impact of new technologies on social and political communication in a variety of settings (including the Iraq war protests, Chinese cyber-dissidents and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). This was published as a research monograph in the series Routledge Research in Information Technology and Society [The Politics of Cyberconflict 2006].
Research following expanded by attempting to develop a broader appreciation of the theoretical implications of networked forms of communication and organization and the Cyberconflict agenda. It explored the effects of the Internet and of networked organizational forms such as "netwar" for social movements, international relations and theorizing the current situation. Using the theories of Gramsci, Zizek, Deleuze/Guattari, Hardt/Negri and Baudrillard, and developed a theory to account for changes in the nature of war, politics and resistance, with particular reference to foreign policy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Work with Andrew Robinson reinterprets World Systems Theory in line with the research of Foucault and others, reading the world system as an arborescent assemblage and attempting to understand resistance and opposition movements in terms of a combination of networked rhizomes and the assertion of reactive ethnoreligious identities. This work is published by Routledge [Karatzogianni, A and Robinson, A: Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World, Routledge Advanced Series in International Relations and Global Politics, 2009]. Among other publications, Athina edited the volume Cyber Conflict and Global Politics (Routledge Contemporary Security Studies) for which she wrote a paper on cyberconflicts of small and unrecognized states and minorities, and an introduction on new media and the reconfiguration of power in global politics. Also, other research looked at cross-disciplinarity and the difficulties of working in between fields, and issues of conflict and leadership in the open source movement.
Currently Athina is looking at new media and its effects on such notions as nation branding and media representations of nations which are defined as small, unrecognized, failed or states in crisis, as well as theorizing the implications for state identity in general. A second theme explores intercultural conflict in digital migrant networks, violence/war and new media, while other studies are focused on Chinese and Russian hackers, the climategate hack, peer production, and the spectrum and mechanisms of the inbetween space of the physical and virtual.
