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.

https://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9783642550065-c1.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-1473604-p176697681

The Global Politics of Science and Technology: An Introduction

The theories of complexity comprise a system of great breadth. But what is included under this umbrella? Here we attempt a portrait of complexity theory, seen through the lens of complexity theory itself. That is, we portray the subject as an evolving complex dynamical system, or social network, with bifurcations, emergent properties, and so on. This is a capsule history covering the twentieth century. Extensive background data may be seen at www.visual-chaos.org/complexity.

/pdf/the-genesis-of-complexity-2pgf5vx7yy.pdf

The Genesis of Complexity

Institutional entrepreneurship is important for creating and transforming institutions, yet little is known about the individuals who conceive, initiate, and champion institutional projects. Extant...

On the Nature of Institutional Entrepreneurs: Insights From the Life of Rachel Carson

Islands are usually thought of as being territorial-like continents, but on a smaller scale. Yet, they differ from continents in one fundamental regard: their relationship to water. Islands must be understood as ecotones, a concept of increasing importance to the environmental sciences in recent years, but not well known to island studies scholars. An ecotone is a place where two ecosystems connect and create a unique environment different from both. It therefore illuminates aspects of island life that are obscured when we treat islands as bounded territorial units constituting a singular ecosystem. Continents may contain one or more ecotones; but islands, especially smaller ones, are dominated by the ecotone where land meets sea. The littoral ecotone helps explain many of the distinctive qualities of island economies and the adaptability, dynamism, and resilience of island societies. It adds to the extensive revisionist literature that has already challenged the myth of island isolation, boundedness, and remoteness.

Not continents in miniature: islands as ecotones

https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/d504rm099

Marla Cone

Papers

Rachel Carson’s