“The 21st century is all about surprises, and the spread of technology is the wild card,” said Jared Cohen ’04 during a talk sponsored by Stanford in Government on Wednesday night about how technology is shaping international relations.

Cohen, formerly of the U.S. State Department’s policy planning staff and now the director of Google Ideas, emphasized the role of connections in creating a 21st-century “statecraft” comprised of the state, individuals and technology, or tools.

According to Cohen, public policy is no longer limited to negotiations but is now open to connections. Society must look at how connectivity is shaping international relations in a world where there are fewer physical walls and more firewalls that state apparatuses can infiltrate, he said.

“The connection technology we see today is probably the most powerful tool to empower communities at the grassroots level–for good or for bad–because it eliminates the intermediary in the spread of information,” Cohen said.

Cohen cited Afghanistan, where imprisoned Al Qaeda members have orchestrated suicide bombings from cell phones, as one instance where connective tools were harnessed for hostility as opposed to empowerment.

“A handset can be as powerful a weapon as a tool or a gun,” Cohen said, “because hostiles innovate like crazy.”

Though hostiles may innovate to inflict damage in repressive societies, democratic societies, too, are subject to the dangerous tide of technology, according to Cohen. In a world where individuals have the power and means to “tag” someone and inflict embarrassment, connectivity is not always a positive.

Though “technology isn’t the silver bullet answer,” it has met some success in the past few years, Cohen said.

Mediums such as Facebook and Twitter allow for self-training in civil society activism. In such cases, “social indulgence has political prescriptions,” Cohen said, describing a handful of instances when technology led to broad political results, such as in 2009 after Iran’s presidential election.

Realizing that technology can be used for good or for harm, Cohen explained “technopragmatism” as the desire for a new positive by maximizing influence, not control, over connective tools.

“We all need to think of how we can maximize creativity on the right side,” Cohen said.

In a world where “technology creates space for unlikely leaders that aren’t trained civil-society activists” and where “technology is part of every problem and every solution,” Cohen emphasized the necessity to bridge the gap.

Google Ideas has a deep understanding of technology while also being extremely global, but its international presence makes it impossible for its influence to stay private, he said.

“Rather than a state that forms value systems and builds policies around that, a company does their thing and must now decide on values,” Cohen said.

Valentin Bolotnyy ’11, chair of Stanford in Government, saw Cohen’s background and expertise as a way to bridge the gap between policy-making and technology.

“Cohen is the kind of speaker that we saw taking the science and technology side of campus closer to international relations and political science side of campus,” he said. “Stanford is big on interdisciplinary, but SIG sees a lack of collaboration between two sides of campus.”

Contact Erin Inman at [email protected].