To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
Fiona Cunningham is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She will join the Cyber Security Project at the Belfer Center as a predoctoral fellow in 2017-8. Her dissertation project explains state choices of military strategy in the nuclear, space, and cyber domains, with an empirical focus on China. Her research on China's nuclear strategy has been published quarterly journal, International Security. In 2015-6 she was a dissertation research fellow in the School of International Studies at the Renmin University of China, Beijing. Fiona holds a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and International Relations from the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Sydney, both with first class honors. Before commencing her doctoral studies, she was a research associate in nuclear policy at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney. She speaks Mandarin Chinese and French.