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…
Schlagwort: Territory
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.
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…
Last November I participated in the DVPW „Zeitenwende“ conference. As expected, the focus was less on understanding the Russian invasion of Ukraine but rather what this invasion meant for German IR. Anyway, I contributed a short paper on how to analyze the war through a spatial lens – download here and a blogpost here. The DVPW has also put up a recording of the panel „The (New) Materialities of War“ – which also featured some really interesting presentations besides mine – on Youtube.
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…
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“,…
My very smart colleague Thorsten Thiel and I have been talking and writing back-and-forth about what we call the „Middle Age of Digitalization“. We haven’t quite worked out the details of that but the basic idea is that the digital transformation, as a technical, social, economic process, is moving from its early, disruptive phase towards a middle age of normalization and routinization. The Dark Side of Utopia As part of this, I’ve been reading and listening to other people for inspiration. Most recently, it was an episode of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast with Douglas Rushkoff. Rushkoff, along with…
I have an enduring fascination with territory, space, and land and how we think about them. And while there is a lot to be said about that (and I have written multiple articles about it), I want to use this post mainly for something that I find both intriguing and hilarious. It’s about the German cadastral system and its concepts of Geringstland and Unland. This blog probably does not get more nerdy than that… Geringstland and Unland In the cadastral system, there are different ways of classifying land. James Scott tells us that this kind of „making nature legible“ is…
This is my introductory statement for tonight’s panel discussion on the „Politics of (Dis)Connection“. [EDIT: The event had to be cancelled. I will let you know once a new date has been scheduled.] [EDIT: The discussion has been rescheduled for 8 February 2023.] In this input I want to talk about digital sovereignty, a very popular term, particularly from a European perspective. I want to make three points in this statement: 1) Digital sovereignty is useful for politics but bad for policy, 2) the EU and member states‘ governments use digital sovereignty to articulate a position vis-à-vis a threatening digitalisation,…
Next week, 23 November 2022, I will participate in an online panel discussion on the „Politics of (Dis)Connection“ organized by Niels ten Oever for the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies. The precis for the event is as follows: The possible establishment of a sovereign internet in Russia, European initiatives on ‘Digital Sovereignty’, and the conflict between China and the United States over Huawei equipment are rekindling the discussion on splinternets and the limits to global interconnectivity. Can the internet, the original network of networks, resist the contemporary strain, or was it built to accommodate these differences? That’s a big question…