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…
Schlagwort: Technology
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…
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…
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’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…