Yesterday’s discussion about internet fragmentation and digital sovereignty was fantastic. Francesca Musiani and Fernanda Rosa brought really interesting perspectives to the table – one from a European STS scholar, the other from a Latin American anthropologist – and Milton Mueller was an incisive and insightful commentator. (Go read some of their writings, they are all very good!) The event was livestreamed on Youtube and a recording will be made available shortly. During my initial comments, I made the point that I’d much rather talk about digital territory than digital sovereignty. When countered that this carries the risk of imposing physical…
PD Dr. Daniel Lambach
Critical infrastructures (CI) are generally defined as those organisations, institutions, and networks whose functioning is essential to the survival and well-being of a society. They are typically grouped into functional „sectors“ which provide a specific service or good. I am currently thinking about scaling up the concept of CI to the global level – more on that in due course – and an early problem is to decide which sectors of CI I want to look at. You see, there is no globally accepted standard which sectors are considered critical. Instead, every country comes up with its own, slightly different…
I will take part in an online discussion event on the „Politics of (Dis)Connection“ this Wednesday. It was originally scheduled for last November but had to be rescheduled due to technical difficulties. Can the internet, the original network of networks, resist the contemporary strain, or was it built to accommodate these differences? In this talk three expert scholars on this topic, Daniel Lambach, Francesca Musiani and Fernanda Rosa, will give their views on the politics of global connection, its limitations, its future, and its discontent. Their talks will be discussed by one of the founders and prominent researchers of the…
In 2021, Carlo Diehl and I published an article called „The Territorialization of the Global Commons“ in the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, the journal of the IR Section of the German Association for Political Science. The official version is here and an ungated version is over at ResearchGate. We compared governing regimes for five commons: the high seas, the deep seabed, the atmosphere, outer space, and the poles. Our finding was that the two „classical“ modes of governing these spaces beyond national jurisdiction – division into sovereign territory, and internationalization – had been supplanted by what we call „functional territorialization“,…
Last week, I had the pleasure of convening a workshop on space policy at the Schader Foundation in Darmstadt. Marieluna Frank and Arne Sönnichsen have written a brief summary of events over at the SichTRaum Network website. In addition, Heise online features a short article by Hans-Arthur Marsiske, who took part in the discussions. And finally, the WeltraumWagner podcast has just put a two-hour episude about threats to satellite infrastructures featuring some of the discussions at the workshop. The next workshop will focus on ecological approaches to space and how to govern the orbital commons. It is scheduled for 27…
The world is entering a New Space Age. Much like the original Space Age of the 1950s to 1970s, we are poised on the brink of momentous changes – not all of them good. Instead of being a forward-looking symbol of hope, the New Space Age is characterized by ambiguities, conflict, and contingencies. It is in this spirit that I am co-organizing a workshop series at the Schader Foundation (Darmstadt) together with Stefan Selke from the Public Science Lab (Hochschule Furtwangen). The goal of the series is to discuss social science perspectives on space and spaceflight. When compared to technical…
I’m pleased to announce the start of a new research project. Following up on our successful project on digital sovereignty narratives in Germany, Kai Oppermann and I want to extend this line of inquiry. Our initial project was mainly concerned with reconstructing how actors speak of digital sovereignty. We now move to a part of the question why they do it, focusing on the idea that there is some kind of international „tech war“ or innovation race going on. We are very grateful to the German Foundation for Peace Research for funding a one-year pilot project which we will use to collect…
There is the fundamental problem in space of what should count as arms at all. Due to the physical conditions in orbit, where every object moves with enormous kinetic energy, almost all space technology is considered inherently dual-use. This has always complicated arms control discussions, so that in recent years there have been increasing attempts to talk less about weapons and more about certain types of behaviour that are considered threatening (e.g. unannounced approaches), for example in the Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities put forward by the EU in 2008. Arms control discussions have been deadlocked for a…
Globalization is dead but what is taking its place? With current debates around „de-globalization“, „decoupling“, „re-shoring“ etc, it seems pretty clear that globalization as an ideological force is done for, even as the empirical process continues to unfold. For various reasons, I am unconvinced that de-globalization and the like are appropriate descriptors for the present and future of global order. In this two-part article, I want to argue for the notion of „post-globalization“ to capture the new realities. I will do so by contrasting central assumptions of globalization and post-globalization ideologies. In the first part, I focus on globalization. This…
I’m happy to announce that since December 2022 I am an Associate Fellow at the Research Department International Security at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF/HSFK). There, I will mainly contribute my expertise on space security and emerging technologies to expand the Department’s growing profile at the intersection of science/technology and peace/security. A secondary focus will be on Anthropocene security in the global commons, which builds upon my earlier work on territorialization and regime dynamics.