So I got the 2022 Best Article Prize from Review of International Studies (and I’m still stoked about it). BISA – the British International Studies Association who runs RIS – is promoting its prizes and prizewinners across the entire social media landscape. Part of this is a brief interview-slash-discussion I did with Martin Coward, the RIS editor, about my article. If you’d like a 12 minute explainer why space should matter for IR and how to „do space“, give it a listen.
Monat: Juni 2023
At this year’s Science Peace Security conference, I will do two things: give a talk on our Tech War project and present a poster on my Global Critical Infrastructures mega-project. Here’s the extended abstract for the latter: Critical infrastructure (CRITIS) is “an asset or system which is essential for the maintenance of vital societal functions”. In other words, CRITIS are essential for the supply of populations, but the concept is only ever applied to the national scale. But what are the critical infrastructures of humanity as a whole? In the face of accelerating environmental change, this contributions asks whether humanity’s…
Two weeks ago, the German government published its first proper National Security Strategy. Among other things, it contained a substantial number of references to outer space – its strategic importance, the vulnerability of space assets, and the importance of international rules for this emerging domain. I’ve done a quick analysis of the ways that outer space is discussed in the National Security Strategy for the Blog of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF). It’s in German so here is the executive executive summary in English: The political relevance of outer space is growing – this is not limited to the…
How do actors claim political agency and under which circumstances are these claims likely to be recognized? These are the questions that Matthias Hofferberth and I tackle in a paper that has now been published in Historical Social Research. It is part of a Special Issue edited by Thomas Gehring and Johannes Marx on „The Emergence and Effects of Non-hierarchical Collective Agency„. I’ve written about the genesis of the paper here so this is just an update post. The full citation of the paper is: Hofferberth, Matthias; Lambach, Daniel (2023): Claims and Recognition: A Relational Approach to Agency in World…
I am overjoyed to announce that my article „Space, Scale and Global Politics: Towards a critical approach to space in international relations“ was awarded the 2022 Best Article Prize in Review of International Studies. Given the excellent articles in RIS, this is an immense honor and you can imagine my excitement when the email came. I’ve had to sit on this for a month because of an embargo until today, when the awards are given out at the BISA conference. I unfortunately was not able to attend the conference in Glasgow to accept the award in person but I look…
While at the IR Section conference, I ran across a copy of our book in the wild. Have a portrait of the author as a proud man!
Everything is Geopolitics. Is Everything Geopolitics? As I was preparing for the IR Section Conference, I got to read a lot of working papers written by my colleagues. They ran the gamut from space infrastructures, geoeconomics, and digital currencies to internet fragmentation and weaponized interdependence. My impression from these papers has reinforced a hunch that has developed over the past year or so: Geopolitics is suddenly permeating everything. Almost every issue, even those far outside the field of traditional foreign and security policy, now has a geopolitical dimension. In 2022, Mark Galeotti published a book called the „The Weaponisation of…
Last year Kai Oppermann and I published a paper called „Narratives of Digital Sovereignty in Germany“ in the journal Governance. (It’s open access and it’s free – download it here.) The paper is probably the most popular I’ve ever written, at least when it comes to circulation across audiences. I got interviewed in Deutschlandfunk Kultur (23 April 2022), the paper is referenced in Wikipedia Germany and a Tagesspiegel Background article (24 June 2022), and numerous people have reached out and told me that they liked the piece. The paper, which was hitherto only available as Early View, has now been assigned…
I’ll be at the 2023 Conference of the International Relations Section of the German Association for Political Research which is held this week in scenic Friedrichshafen, barring any Deutsche Bahn shenanigans. My schedule has become quite the thing: On Wednesday I’m a discussant on Panel A4 „Transnational Infrastructures and Global Order“, commenting on papers by Alke Jenss and Benjamin Schuetze, Jana Hönke, Marieluna Frank, as well as Joscha Abels and Leo Bieling. After that, I’ll be on Panel B2 „High Tech Politics: Technologie zwischen Global Governance und Großmachtkonkurrenz“, which I have co-organized alongside Maximilian Mayer. Kai Oppermann and I will…
The 2023 edition of the Peace Report (Friedensgutachten) was published on Monday. The Peace Report is an annual joint publication by four major German peace research institutes – the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC), the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF/HSFK), the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy Hamburg (IFSH) and the Institute for Development and Peace (INEF). I had the pleasure of contributing to the disarmament chapter alongside a team of PRIF researchers. My contribution was to summarize recent developments in arms control in outer space (which I’ve blogged about here) and on the various „balloon incidents“…