It’s 2021 – Do We Know What We’re Fighting Over?

Historically, conflict between states has centered on valuable prizes – assets that generated economic rents: land in the agrarian era, trade routes and ports and resources in the industrial mercantile era, intellectual property in the knowledge-based economy era, and now data in the data-driven economy centered on the technology nexus of big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence. In the modern world, land and (most) industrial production join intellectual property in needing protection to capture rents. Yet, even though economic rents are captured in cyberspace, geopolitics continues to be framed with a geographic frame of reference, such as the “Indo-Pacific”. Geopolitics continues to fight the last war. It’s 2021: as bellicose rhetoric rears its ugly head, it is fair to ask whether we know what we are actually fighting over.