As global politics is evolving away from the “liberal international order” towards a “new bipolarity” or a multipolar world order, we observe a deepening and intensifying competition for technological leadership among major powers. You know the relevant terms – the „AI (Arms) Race“, „technological sovereignty“, the „Chip War“, etc. To be sure, technological competition has always been an element of great power politics – just remember the Space Race. Nonetheless, this competition for technological capabilities in „emerging technologies“ among major actors (the US and China in particular) has clearly intensified over the past decade or so. In select technological fields,…
Schlagwort: Post-Globalization
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…