The „Tech War“ project continues apace. While we are busy coding policy documents (first Chinese, now American), we have compiled our theoretical approach, our research design and some initial results for a conference paper that we will present at the 2023 Swiss Network of International Studies Biennial Conference and the Open Conference of the IR Section of the German Association for Political Science next week. Here’s our conclusions so far. The three „technopoles“ (China, the US, the EU) attach a great importance to AI and their own R&D capabilities. This is evidenced not just by a multitude of statements but…
PD Dr. Daniel Lambach
Quick reminder: My talk on space sustainability and the governance of space debris and space traffic at CASSIS Bonn is in two weeks. This will be a nice follow-up to the second Schader workshop from March. I’m not sure if the event will be streamed or recorded but if you’re in Bonn, be sure to say hi. All the details: https://www.cassis.uni-bonn.de/de/veranstaltungen/kommende-veranstaltungen/24-mai-2023.
Back in February, we began work on the „Narratives of the Tech War“ project – we being Kai Oppermann and Jakob Landwehr-Matlé of the Technical University of Chemnitz as well as myself. Funded by the German Foundation for Peace Research, we conduct a pilot study into how narratives of technological leadership in Artificial Intelligence influence and are influenced by great-power relations. We compare policy narratives in China, the US, and the EU to see how these actors construct their narratives, how these narratives shape policy, and how actors react to each other’s narratives. Creating the codebook Narrative research is closely…
I am happy to announce that two contributions have been accepted to the Science Peace Security (SPS) ’23 conference this September in Darmstadt. This is the third SPS conference and the previous ones were absolutely wonderful, so you can imagine how much I am looking forward to it. The first contribution is a paper by Jakob Landwehr-Matlé, Kai Oppermann (both TU Chemnitz) and myself from our „Tech War“ project. Here’s the abstract: In the course of digitalisation, technology leadership has become a central dimension of the increasing geopolitical and geo-economic great power competition in the US-China-EU triangle. The securitisation of…
Last November I participated in the DVPW „Zeitenwende“ conference. As expected, the focus was less on understanding the Russian invasion of Ukraine but rather what this invasion meant for German IR. Anyway, I contributed a short paper on how to analyze the war through a spatial lens – download here and a blogpost here. The DVPW has also put up a recording of the panel „The (New) Materialities of War“ – which also featured some really interesting presentations besides mine – on Youtube.
Following the first workshop in our „The New Space Age“ series at the Schader Foundation in January, we (the SichTRaum network, that is) just had our second workshop, this time on space sustainability, a topic that I myself keep coming back to. And despite a mass transit workers‘ strike, we had the best hybrid workshop I can remember. Over at Heise Online, Hans-Arthur Marsiske has again provided a very nice write-up (in German). Our third and final workshop in October will be on visions and utopias, a topic that has come up repeatedly during the first two events already.
In 2020, me and four other authors (Markus Bayer, Felix Bethke, Matteo Dressler and Véronique Dudouet) published a book called Nonviolent Resistance and Democratic Consolidation. It was the culmination of a four-year research effort into how and why mass nonviolent resistance during transition helps the resulting democracies survive longer and be stronger than democracies that emerged through top-down liberalization or those rare cases where violent resistance actually led to democracy. Last year, the publisher approached us. They were testing AI translation tools (specifically DeepL) and wanted to create a German version of our book. Somewhat sceptically, we agreed. The raw…
The publication of my Flipped Classroom Workbook earlier this week has generated quite a bit of interest. I’ve received several messages expressing gratitude (much appreciated, thanks everyone!) and several suggestions for improvement. So I decided to quickly pick up on these suggestions while the topic is still fresh in my mind. Hence, without further ado, here is V2 of the Flipped Classroom Workbook! Flipped Classroom Workbook V2 (docx) Flipped Classroom Workbook V2 (pdf) The Workbook is released under Creative Commons license so feel free to download, copy, and share it to your heart’s content.
I may not be going to outer space, but I will be going to Bonn to talk about outer space, which is pretty great, too. 24 May, to be specific. CASSIS (the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies) at Bonn University is organizing a lecture series called „Reach for the Stars“ and they’ve invited me to come and give a talk about an environmental perspective on outer space. Here’s the pitch: The problem of space debris has been known to experts and politicians for decades. As early as 1978, the dangers of a collision cascade of satellites and…
The „New Space Age“ series continues! On 27 March 2023, the second workshop takes place at the Schader Foundation in Darmstadt. It’s still possible to sign up (apart from the ESOC visit, where the deadline has passed) at https://www.schader-stiftung.de/veranstaltungen/aktuell/artikel/das-neue-weltraumzeitalter-zweiter-workshop. The focus of this workshop moves from issues of space safety and space security to the no less important challenge of space sustainability. Numerous satellites are placed in orbit by public organisations and private companies. Their remnants later orbit the Earth as space debris and endanger other objects or future space stations. At the same time, moons and asteroids are becoming…