Although the competition for artificial intelligence leadership is not an arms race in the classic sense, the narrative of an „AI Arms Race“ has been popular, especially among US defence circles. Other people have thoroughly debunked this notion already, so I will not belabor this any further, except to point out a German-language article by Carlo Diehl and myself from last year. In it, we gave a brief overview and summary of US, Chinese, and EU policies for AI. Carlo also came up with this masterful timeline of key documents and policies from 2016 to early 2021. Given how quickly…
PD Dr. Daniel Lambach
I am co-organizing two panels on the geopolitics of digital infrastructures at the German Geographical Congress (not sure about that translation, though – it’s the Deutscher Kongress für Geographie). I’m doing this together with Georg Glasze and Finn Dammann – two proper geographers who have kindly taken on this boundary-crossing political scientist. Both panels are scheduled for Friday afternoon (22 September). This is possibly not the most attractive time for conference-goers but it allows me to attend the DKG even though it overlaps with the SPS conference in nearby Darmstadt. Here is the panel abstract: For some years now, questions of…
Is there new momentum in space law or the global governance of outer space more broadly? The German government seems to think so – in its recently released National Security Strategy, developing and updating the outer space regime features as one of the major space-related agenda items. Possibly this is just reflexive multilateralism without substance, which would hardly be surprising. (German governments have never seen a multilateral initiative they don’t like.) However, there are some indications of movement in the outer space regime, leading my SichTRaum colleague Maximilian Bertamini to call it „The Most Exciting Field of International Law“ in…
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.
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…