Editorial

Notes on contributors

ARTICLES:

Robert Hassan PhD
Temporalized Democracy and a Future Politics

Laura Kyrke-Smith
Information Intervention and the Case of Kosovo: Realising the Responsibility to Protect

Claudia Magallanes-Blanco PhD and Leandro Rodriguez Medina
A Feminist-Dialogical Analysis of Independent Video-Makers on the Indigenous Zapatista Rebellion

Alberto Masetti-Zannini
Web 2.0 and International Development NGOs

OPINION:

Fred Flagg
The Academic Library and the Commons

BOOK REVIEW:

Laura White
Information and Communication Technologies for Development and Poverty Reduction edited by Maximo Torero and Joachim von Braun (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006)






Editorial

Welcome to the first issue of Knowledge Politics Quarterly (KPQ). Like the first editorials of all new journals, I want to explain exactly why this new journal is necessary. There really is ‘a gap in the market’, trust me. Or look at the topics covered in our first issue: democracy, war, reconstruction, rebellions, journalism, international development, civil society, libraries and of course the time-space continuum.

They all have one thing in common: they have been affected, in multiple ways, by the rapid pace of technological change. So while other academic journals will cover these topics, KPQ exists to bring together research and opinion from across several academic disciplines on how technology is affecting the social, political and economic universe.

Some may call our remit ‘the information society’ or ‘the knowledge economy’, etc. This would be fair, but not entirely accurate. The ‘P’ in KPQ is elementary to our broad agenda. This does not mean we are a journal only for ‘capital-P’ Politics or Political Science, the academic discipline. Our aim is to assess the way in which human beings produce and respond to new ways of communicating, working, living, by acting politically – in their everyday lives, in the institutions of government, in warzones, in academia.

These issues in many ways not new.  Human beings have always had to deal with technological and knowledge development – and scholars have always sought to understand how. But in a very important way they are very, very new. It is our belief that the time has come for academics and experts to look across disciplinary borders and provide a concerted focus on the politics of knowledge. For whatever reason, this is not done enough – and as a result we are failing to learn vital insights from other researchers.

It is my hope that KPQ can play a small part in rectifying this. We are not doing anything particularly visionary. Disciplines and their accompanying journals rise and fall to fit the real world they intend to study. When the world changes, the way we produce knowledge about it changes. Inevitably it is the next generation of researchers that will be at the forefront of analysing change, which is one of the main reasons we are explicitly encouraging postgraduate students to submit to KPQ, alongside established scholars and non-academic practitioners. 

I hope all of our readers find KPQ a valuable tool for research and analysis. We welcome all comments, suggestions and criticism.