Maximilian Mayer

The Global Governance of Large Technical Systems

The importance of technology in global affairs is visible to the naked and uninitiated eye. Yet International Relations (IR) still lacks a more systematic and critical attention to the role of technological infrastructures in contemporary global governance dynamics. Here, we seek to prompt IR scholars to move ‘large technical systems’ (LTSs) from the contours of IR narratives to a centre stage, as they hold the potential to respond to pressing challenges for IR scholarship. Employing LTSs to respond to recent publications on the challenge that ‘global governance’ poses to IR, we highlight that an STS-IR encounter can, first, revitalise ‘grand questions’ at the heart of IR and, second, help coping with the complexity of global governance. While this encounter does not offer a ready-tailored panacea for the troubles of IR, a more systematic inquiry into LTSs is a powerful step beyond theoretical and methodological impasses, towards greater inter-disciplinary collaboration.

The Global Politics of Science and Technology: An Introduction

The reality of international politics has rapidly grown in complexity. This complexity has been pressuring the discipline of International Relations (IR) to engage with new phenomena, concerns, and issue areas, and to translate them into innovative theorizations. Science and technology is one of these issues. Contemporary human life is tied to and thoroughly permeated by artifacts, technical systems and infrastructures, making it hard to imagine any international or global issue that does not have technological or scientific aspects. However, this condition remains fundamentally challenging for many approaches within IR, in which instead science and technology have been largely treated as exogenous. Although an increasing number of IR scholars is exploring the roles scientific practices and technological systems play in international affairs and global politics, the subject matter deserves much more systematic scrutiny. The following chapter articulates the conceptual, intellectual and academic contexts of this two-volume collection on the Global Politics of Science and Technology. After pointing out general normative challenges and briefly problematizing global technological transformations, we recapitulate the evolving IR scholarship on the topic. We argue that, although most IR theories do not grant science and technology a genuine conceptual place, there is enough research to document and reconstruct the breadth and depth of the vivid, yet unrecognized subfield of IR. While the further development of this subfield would greatly benefit from interdisciplinary conversations, we propose the notion of techno-politics to indicate how the discipline might rearticulate existing analytical frameworks, establish innovative conceptualizations, and advance new concerns for research.

Exploring China’s Rise as Knowledge Power

The rise of China is a dominant theme in international politics. While factors such as demographics, geography or the skyrocketing Chinese Gross Domestic Product (GDP) have received persistent attention from researchers, this article points to a different and neglected aspect of China’s ascent: knowledge und technology. I argue that a truly comprehensive understanding of how China could (again) become a hub of world politics requires an historical exploration of the Chinese position within the global political economy of knowledge. Few authors have emphasized China’s blossoming technical and scientific capacities as a critical source of its growing influence (but see Lampton 2008). Their arguments strongly resonate with quantitative indices, which demonstrate the accelerating strengthening of China’s output of publications, basic research capacities, and scientific networks (Royal Society 2011). Recent research also points to the possibility that a number of emerging economies, including China, are transforming into genuine commercial innovation hubs (Altenburg et al. 2008; Ernst 2011; CGS-Forschungsgruppe Wissensmacht 2011). Already, the concern with “the race to the top” in research and technology permeates policy discourses all around the world. Due to the advent of the global “knowledge economy” (OECD 2010; cf. Moldaschl and Stehr 2010), the importance of innovativeness is poised to increase only further.

A Toolbox for Studying the Global Politics of Science and Technology

The growing preeminence of science and technology in today’s world no longer fits into most existing analytical frameworks. Material elements, technical instruments, and scientific practices are intertwined with basically every aspect of global politics. Nevertheless, the discipline of International Relations (IR) as a whole tends to conceptualize this topic as an exogenous phenomenon. By adopting the notion of techno-politics, we argue that it is neither sufficient to treat sciences and technologies as external to “social” relations, nor as dominating human behavior and determining political outcomes. We propose rather to open up a middle zone in order to study the intersection of science and technology with international and global affairs. Conceptually, the notion of techno-politics involves two broad sets of approaches: interaction and co-production. This introductory chapter presents the chapters of the volume as examples of how the global politics of science and technology might be studied. As a toolbox of methodological insights, the contributions also point towards pathways for future research that enhances the global politics of science and technology as subfield of IR.

Gaia Theory, Ecovillages, and IR Taking Material Limits Seriously: An Interview with Karen Litfin

Karen Litfin argues that IR needs to seriously engage with the idea of limited energy resources and the essential embeddedness of human society in the earth system. Stressing the multiple purposes and often unexpected applications of technology, Litfin talks about interdisciplinary research as an important way of overcoming a mechanistic worldview and the example of ecovillages as a sustainable form of living

Nuclear Ontologies, Technopolitics in Postcolonial Spaces, and the Cold War as Transnational History: An interview with Gabrielle Hecht

Gabrielle Hecht argues that nuclear exceptionalism is a form of technopolitical claims-making. Tracing the historical process by which something comes to count as a “nuclear” thing not only reveals the ontological insecurity of the nuclear, but also shifts the research focus from high politics to the (post)colonial spaces that play a key role in nuclear weapons programs. The study of the diversity of global technopolitics requires a close collaboration between science and technology studies and IR