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We live in a different world in the 21st century, and much of that difference is technologically mediated. It is not an overstatement to say that many of our theories and concepts are far from up to speed with what these changes mean. This is the case not only with how to understand and analyse the world and different structures and processes within it but also with inevitably how to critique them, identify negative impacts and overcome them. The Internet and digital transformations that have resulted from it, especially since the arrival of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, have heralded a new spatiality in human affairs yet to be fully comprehended in philosophical, and many other, senses. This new spatiality represents a complex approach to the social that incorporates the Internet and its virtual processes as much as more familiar traditional physical settings and activities. The overall aim in this chapter is to locate violence and women’s agency within this complex spatiality to enhance our thinking about forms of gendered oppression and resistance to them. Use of the Internet has expanded the social sphere and identity and relational processes within it, so it is an integral part of considerations of being and empowerment. This discussion draws on the concept of ‘techno-transcendence’ to capture this expansion and to recognize how the Internet has contributed to reducing temporal and spatial constraints.

Introduction Heather Widdows Herjeet Marway PART I. WOMEN AS VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE 1. Rape, women's autonomy, and male complicity Sarah Sorial Jacqui Poltera 2. Women between agency and coercion Elena Alonzo 3. Prostitution and the concept of agency Rhea Jean PART II. WOMEN AS PERPETRATORS OF VIOLENCE 4. Self-harm as violence: when victim and perpetrator are one Hanna Pickard This chapter is available under a CC BY license via palgraveconnect.com 5. Autonomy, value and violence: assessing substantive accounts of autonomy Jules Holroyd 6. Female suicide bombers and autonomy Herjeet Marway 7. Women raping men Iain Law PART III. GOVERNANCE, VIOLENCE AND AGENCY 8. Andrea Dworkin's Pornography: men possessing women - a reassessment Bob Brecher 9. Violence, techno-transcendence and feminism: thinking about agency in the digital age Gillian Youngs 10. 'Not Just Victims...But': Towards a Critical Theory of the Victim Robin May Schott PART IV. THEORISING VIOLENCE AND AGENCY 11. Women's agency and the fallacy of autonomy: the example of rape and sexual consent Paul Reynolds 12. What is violence? Amanda Cawston 13. Ontology, freedom and the body that can birth Alison Assiter

Technology has been too much a missing link in the analysis of GPE. This chapter explores it as one of the conceptual paths to developing our understanding of power, including through the association of production and consumption. It is identified as part of the path toward embodied understanding, particularly in helping to close the production-consumption circle. The chapter explains how technology is usefully integrated into both an historical analysis of developments leading to globalization, and examination of the changing qualities of US hegemony in this context. I argue that technological factors are key to exploring transnational linkages, especially as they are articulated through crossborder corporate networks and the activities of the most powerful transnational corporations (TNCs). I also illustrate how technology is an embedded dimension of discourses of globalization, such as Fukuyama’s (1992) ‘end of history’ thesis, and thus crucial to critical thinking about such discourses (see also Youngs 1996). Drawing in particular on the work of Susan Strange (1994 and 1996), the chapter goes on to discuss technology as an element of structural power in the global economy.

This chapter explores overlapping concerns rooted in my experience of the study of IR in general and IPE more specifically. In my early student days, a naive question haunted me about IR. I would repeatedly, and of course silently, ask myself the following question: where are the people? This was long before I understood the high politics orientation of the field and the implications for its representation of ‘the people’. It took me many years to begin to obtain satisfactory answers to my query, at least to start to explain to myself why there appeared to be no people in this strangely structured world called IR. It remains a pertinent question for newcomers to the discipline whose direct experience of its prime high politics domain will often be limited and who are therefore left with the feeling that they are entering a rather alien world of analysis. Once I became fully familiar with the foci of the discipline, such as foreign policy analysis, international history and international theory, I started to understand that ‘the people’, which from my perspective at that time just meant people in general, were distant but they were there, encapsulated in representative terms such as the state, bureaucracy, interest groups and so on.

The state has been under siege in the study of global relations1 both substantively and theoretically. The strain has increased with time, particularly in the post-1945 period2 with the transnational destructive capacities of nuclear weapons3 the growth of the international market, most recently in ‘invisible’ goods such as services and finance4 and the global reach of sophisticated communications networks.5 The collapse of the binary world division between East and West and the apparent increased fragmentation and instability have left analysts challenged by the need to understand the violent uncertainties now produced6 or anxious to develop comforting theories of a new unified global age of liberal capitalism.7 The bottom line with regard to the state has been the degree to which it can be considered a suitable and concretely appropriate unit of analysis in international, or what I prefer, in the contemporary context, to call global, relations. Also, how does it divide the national domain ‘inside’ from the international domain ‘outside’ and what are the meanings of such divisions?8