Global IR and Revisionist histories have challenged IR’s conception of the international. Early twentieth century liberal internationalism has been recoded as a liberal imperialism that can be located in shifts in British imperial policy where a ‘new liberalism’ saw the British empire modelled on the Greek instead of Roman empires. New disciplinary histories locate the origins of IR here, in this liberal imperial internationalism. Key protagonists of interwar liberal internationalism saw “world citizenship” and “international understanding” as central planks in the platform of building a ‘new world order’. As this liberal international order unravels, a new cohort of non-state actors are mobilising under the concept ‘global citizenship’ to campaign for the eradication of poverty and offer development brokerage between the private sector, policy makers and multilateral organisations. This paper offers a Virtual Ethnography of Global Citizen, a self-styled anti-poverty and humanitarian campaigning organisation that uses Information Communications Technology to campaign for anti-poverty solutions that favour its big tech corporate partners. This paper will locate Virtual Ethnography within interpretivist methods and demonstrate what can be achieved methodologically with a technology-in-use approach to study of elite organisations.
