Digital Solidarities, Communication Policy and Multi-stake- holder Global Governance: The Legacy of the World Summit

The modalities and practices of contemporary global governanceare in flux. Rising states and rising institutions (Alexandroff & Cooper, 2010) are bringing a host of previously excluded interests and actors to the top tables of international negotiations. Ongoing discussions about reform of the United Nations (Thakur & Weiss, 2012), as well as the World Trade Organization (Steger, 2009) and the emergence of the G20 as the premier forum for global economic governance (CIGI, 2011), reflect an increasing recognition that traditional forms of diplomacy (Cooper, Heine, & Thakur, in press) and international problem solving must change to reflect awareness of the multi-stakeholder nature of the twenty-first century. Digital Solidarities, Communication Policy and Multi-stakeholder Global Governance: The Legacy of the World Summit on the Information Society brings to light the increas-ingly networked nature of international diplomacy (Heine, 2008) and summitry. Pick-ing up where the book’s earlier companion piece—Civil Society, Communication and Global Governance: Issues from the World Summit on the Information Society (Raboy & Landry, 2005)—left off, Digital Solidarities explores the processes and outcomes of the UN’s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). With respective focuses o