Buchprojekt: „The global politics of science and technology: concepts and perspectives“ (Working title)
Edited by:
Maximilian Mayer, Center for Global Studies, Bonn University
Mariana Carpes, German Institute for Global and Area Studies, Hamburg
Ruth Knoblich, Institute for Sociology and Political Science, Bonn University
I. Volume’s Rationale
An increasing number of scholars have started seeing science and technology no longer as “exotic issues” in International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE). They acknowledge the interconnectedness of a shrinking world enacted through technical networks and the ever-increasing importance of research and information for the agenda and practice of IR. The realities of international security, statehood, and global governance are strongly interweaved and permeated with material elements, technical instruments, and technological and scientific practices, which are challenging various existing conceptual approaches. This book aims at bringing the debate about science and technology to the center of International Relations showing how this would translate into novel analytical frameworks, conceptual approaches, and empirical accounts. While several handbooks about innovation and science studies exist, this volume offers a state-of-the-art review of various methodical and theoretical ways in which science and technology matter for the study of international affairs/global governance. Conceptually and empirically, each chapter illustrates the relevance and consequences of the global politics of science and technology.
The authors contemplate a diverse number of issue areas, actors, country cases, and regions while offering theoretical perspectives that overcome technical/social determinism through an alternative ‘triplet’ ontology. To bring the scholarly debate a step forward and to translate the contributions into a coherent volume we suggest a framework in relation to which each chapter has to position itself:
a) Contextualizing debates and importing new perspectives
- Discussion of relevant theoretical debates
- Interdisciplinary insights (especially from geography evolutionary and innovation economics)
b) Conceptual assumptions
- Transcending the dichotomy social vs. technological determinism in IR/IPE through a three fold ontology/analytical distinction consisting of material, discursive, practice dimensions that are interrelated and mutually embedded
c) Central analytical themes include:
- The interplay/interrelation/co-constitution of technologies and global politics
- The repercussions of changes of technologies and science on global politics
- The multiple actors that are/can be connected through technologies in IR
II. Main parts of the book address:
Conceptual debates and theoretical considerations
- Technology, innovation, knowhow as faces/dimensions of global power politics?
- Conceptualizing technology in IR from social and technical determinism and beyond
- How do knowledge and technology as power effect/transform the content, relationships,and interactions in international/transnational politics?
- How do expertise and technology become power in modern/contemporary international?
- What are the effects of different technologies for different actors in global/internationalpolitics?
- Myths and paradoxes of innovation in networks, state policies, and development
- Exploring the global politics of knowledge and technology
- The role of knowledge and technology in global/international power shifts / powerrelations
- Global governance of technologies, IPR, and research
- Innovation in the context of state-company and military-commercialinteractions/relations/competitions
- The co-production of time and space of global knowledge economy in production chains and networks
- Depicting and measuring the power dimensions of global knowledge shifts – The global „skill revolution“, brain drain, and brain gain
- Are technological leaders kicking away the ladder? Exploring shifts in the architecture of economic/political circulation and distribution of knowledge power in the world
- Comparative perspectives on technological power (Case studies and comparisons)
- National innovation and technological policies, strategies and their foreign/domesticdimensions
- Different national perspectives on technological innovation and IPR
- The role of technologies and knowledge in foreign policies and strategies (in emerging and leading technological powers)
- Political implications of long-term shifts in human capital: between brain-drain and brain-gain
- International and transnational dimensions of national innovation systems
- Technological change, development and regional (i.e. East Asian, Latin America,Scandinavia) experiences
- Statesmen’ and elites’ perceptions and states responses to global knowledge shifts
- Negotiating science, expertise and politics in complex governance environments
Zugehörige Veranstaltungen
- Vortrag – M. Mayer – Millennium Annual Conference, London
Zugehörige Publikationen
- Ruth Knoblich. 2017: Die globale Regulierung geistiger Eigentumsrechte. Interessen, Strategien und Einfluss Brasiliens, Chinas und Indiens. Baden-Baden: Springer VS.