Weaponized Interdependence

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman's concept (2019) describing how structurally asymmetric global economic networks — financial messaging, supply chains, information infrastructure — let states that control the network's central hub nodes exercise coercive power over peripheral participants through two mechanisms: the panopticon effect (informational visibility into network traffic) and the chokepoint effect (the ability to exclude a participant from the network's core). Complicates classical liberal theory's claim that interdependence generally constrains conflict, since asymmetric interdependence can instead be weaponized by the hub-controller at low cost to itself.

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