Symposium — Science Diplomacy: Cooperation, Competition and Crisis
Fifteen years after the Royal Society and AAAS first defined science diplomacy (2010), both organisations have returned to the subject to reassess its role amid ongoing geopolitical upheaval. In an era marked by plural worldviews and contested scientific authority, they, alongside actors such as the European Commission, have acknowledged that science diplomacy has too often been framed through an overly optimistic lens that privileges cooperation while downplaying enduring realities of contestation, competition, and crisis. Moments of geopolitical disruption reveal not only the necessity of scientific cooperation but also its fragility, exposing asymmetries of power, divergent national priorities, and tensions embedded within transnational scientific exchange.
This symposium examines how science diplomacy has operated historically across shifting geopolitical landscapes: from the power dynamics and national interests that shaped scientific internationalism in the pre-WWII era (Session 1), to the historic roles and limits of international organisations in mediating scientific cooperation (Session 2), to the diplomatic trajectories of East Asia (Session 3), and finally to historical cases, contemporary challenges and ongoing lessons (Session 4). Together, the panels foreground how diplomatic discourse intersects with national priorities, scientific authority, and global power struggles, illuminating the plural worldviews, perspectives and interests that have shaped scientific engagement.
By combining deep historical perspectives with contemporary conceptual shifts, this four-panel symposium offers a comprehensive reconsideration of science diplomacy as a site of negotiation, competition, and adaptation. It highlights how crises, whether geopolitical, social, or technological, expose the power dynamics embedded in international scientific engagement across more than two centuries.
Science Diplomacy: Cooperation, Competition and Crisis 1
(Tue, July 14, 9:15 to 10:45am, EICC, Floor: Level 3, Fintry Auditorium)
Organisers: Daniel Gamito-Marques, Department of Applied Social Sciences, NOVA-FCT; Lif Lund Jacobsen, Danish Arctic Institute
Chair: Alice Naisbitt, University of Manchester
Daniel Gamito-Marques (NOVA-FCT) and Lif Jacobsen (National History Museum of Denmark), ‘Reframing Science and Diplomacy in Times of Disruption’
In this paper, we critically reassess the ways in which science and diplomacy has been portrayed as fostering international collaborations, by analyzing past tensions between internationalism and nationalism in science. We claim that the idea of science diplomacy, as rooted in the Cold War, although initially useful as a focus for research to open discussions is ill-suited to serve as a reference to framing dynamics between science and diplomacy because of the unique configuration of international relations in that period, which was dominated by the struggle for power between two overarching blocks. We argue that analyses of power dynamics developed by historians of science and imperialism can be used to better characterize projects that required international conversations, bringing to the fore the tensions that significantly shaped them and thus complexifying excessive emphasis on cooperative aspects in most past scholarship. More attention to developments from 1870 to 1940, in particular, seems particularly promising to enrich our understanding of the history of science and diplomacy because these decades were marked by explicit multipolar dynamics, which were more the rule than the exception throughout this history. We believe that such an approach will allow us to go beyond canonical studies on what has been termed “scientific internationalism”. Our historiographical reconsideration will also allow us to revise the scope and limitations of present-day science diplomacy. Non-state actors, power asymmetries and the assertion of geopolitical dominance have acquired renewed importance and force us to reimagine the potential of science diplomacy in international relations.
Mauro Capocci (University of Pisa), ‘Science Diplomacy at the Dawn of Global Public Health: The Conseil Sanitaire Maritime et Quarantinaire (CSMQ) in Alexandria’
My paper will deal with one of the earliest institutions that involved scientific cooperation and diplomacy among empires and European powers: the Conseil Sanitaire Maritime et Quarantinaire (CSMQ) in Alexandria. Founded in 1831, with a twin institution in Constantinople. In the 1880s, the CSMQ became increasingly relevant: within the CSMQ, European powers and the Ottoman Empire regulated the public health measures to be implemented in the Suez Canal, in order to stave off cholera and plague epidemics and protect European population and commercial interest. In the context of the International Health Conventions, in the decades between XIX and XX century, the CSMQ played a pivotal role in the medical policing of Egypt and the Arab Peninsula, especially in regard to the annual Hadji that gathered thousands of pilgrims from the Ottoman Empire, India and South East Asia. The CSMQ was thus central in exporting the Pasteurian revolution and in creating a de facto colonial system within the Ottoman Empire. Science diplomacy – on the basis of the new Pasteurian public health – was thus at work in trading money, power and security among European powers and the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, diplomatic efforts mediated by medical sciences were deployed in order to balance intra-European interests. By using Italian diplomatic Archives, I will address how science became a key instrument in negotiating norms and rules among nations and Empires, affecting the circulation of people and goods. Competition and cooperation among nations surfaced in the search for the human and/or bacteriological culprit of epidemics, in securing jobs for European nationals as public health officers, or in disputes about the value of quarantine in protecting from diseases. The CSMQ was thus a diplomatic space were science and power interacted, creating temporary and moving alliances between knowledge and politics.
Diego Hurtado-Torres (Universidad San Sebastián), ‘The Birth of Scientific Pan-Americanism: The First Pan-American Scientific Congress of 1908-9’
This paper examines the history of the First Pan-American Scientific Congress, held in Santiago between December 25, 1908, and January 5, 1909, as a contribution to the geographic and temporal expansion of science diplomacy. Over the course of two weeks, the Congress convened a wide range of specialists from across the Americas in the Chilean capital, supported by several national governments that saw in the discussion of scientific problems a real opportunity to imagine continental unity through knowledge and to position science as a vehicle for international cooperation. Yet these transnational conversations were shaped and constrained by national contexts and disciplinary boundaries. Efforts to standardize scientific instruments, practices and nomenclature, including proposals such as the adoption of Esperanto as an auxiliary scientific language, coordinated responses to social ills like alcoholism and prostitution, and even the construction of a transcontinental railway from Chile to Alaska, met with limited success. By analyzing shared political and social concerns among scientists in fields such as public health, engineering, and pedagogy and philosophy, this study argues that Pan-Americanism was not simply an extension of U.S. foreign policy, but rather a complex, bidirectional space of negotiation in which Latin American scientists actively shaped knowledge production and public reform. This paper examines how this international gathering, which featured, for the first time, U.S. intellectuals representing both the federal government and major U.S. universities in dialogue with Latin American peers, marked the onset of a new phase in hemispheric relations. This moment signaled the growing role of academic expertise in diplomatic relations and inaugurated a dual dynamic of collaboration and competition over scientific standards among American states.
Johannes Mattes (Austrian Academy of Sciences), ‘Scientific Internationalism under National Agendas: The German Hindu Kush Expedition (1935) and the Politics of Crop Origins’
This paper examines the 1935 German Hindu Kush Expedition as a case study in the power dynamics of interwar scientific internationalism. Initiated by Theodor Roemer and Wilhelm Troll under the auspices of the German Research Foundation (DFG), the expedition was inspired by Soviet agronomist Nikolai Vavilov’s influential theory of the “centers of origin” of cultivated plants, first articulated at the Fifth International Congress of Genetics in Berlin in 1927. While officially aligned with international studies on plant breeding, the project simultaneously pursued the Third Reich’s goals of agricultural self-sufficiency, racial ideology, and geopolitical influence in the borderlands between British-India and Afghanistan.
Drawing on archival sources from Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, the paper situates the expedition within a broader network of international scientific conferences, associations, and exchanges that linked and divided experts across national boundaries. It argues that the Hindu Kush Expedition illuminates how international cooperation in agronomy, anthropology, and geography often served as an arena for negotiating power, access, and prestige between unequal partners. The expedition’s scientific rhetoric of universality masked deep asymmetries—between Germany, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Afghanistan—and reveals how science operated simultaneously as a diplomatic resource and a tool of competition. By tracing these entanglements, the paper makes a contribution to the rethinking of ‘scientific internationalism’ as a field that was structured by both collaboration and conflict prior to World War II.
Science Diplomacy: Cooperation, Competition and Crisis 2
(Tue, July 14, 11:00am to 12:30pm, EICC, Floor: Level 3, Fintry Auditorium)
Organisers: Alice Naisbitt, Manchester Institute of Innovation Research – Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester
Chair: Matthew Adamson, McDaniel College Budapest
Barbara Silva (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), ‘Southern Skies, Global Rivalries: Chile, the IGY, and Science Diplomacy in the Cold War’
The International Geophysical Year (1957–1958) marked a milestone in global scientific cooperation at the height of Cold War rivalries. Conceived as a transnational endeavour, the IGY brought together scientists from around the world under the banner of shared inquiry — even as political tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union partially shaped its agendas. Among its fields, satellite research and tracking became both a scientific and diplomatic arena, revealing how cooperation and competition coexisted within the same framework.
Almost simultaneously, international astronomy took root in Chile and became an increasingly active field of science. Chilean narratives have often attributed this emergence to the individual initiative of the director of the National Astronomical Observatory (OAN). However, this paper reconsiders Chile’s participation in the IGY as a case of science diplomacy in times of upheaval. The IGY created the conditions for Chilean scientists to engage directly with both ‘superpowers’, establishing connections that later proved crucial for the country’s development as a hub for international astronomy. Far from being a passive participant, Chile strategically leveraged the geopolitical tensions between the USA and the USSR to advance its own scientific ambitions — positioning itself as an essential partner for astronomical observation in the southern hemisphere.
By revisiting the IGY from a southern perspective, this paper shows how moments of global contestation also enabled cooperation, reshaping the place of peripheral nations within the scientific and diplomatic landscape of the Cold War.
Giacomo Simoncelli (Sapienza University of Rome), ‘A Decade of Health Détente. WHO Influenza Surveillance as a Terrain of Cold War between the Late 1960s and the Late 1970s’
The medical officers who founded the WHO believed that it should be a universalistic institution. The “functionalist” approach, according to which technical collaboration on health issues could overcome political issues, soon clashed with the emerging Cold War. The debate over WHO membership, marked by the exclusion of Franco’s Spain, resulted in membership being regulated by simple majority.
This was a unique situation within the UN agency system. Between the late 1960s and mid-1970s, it became the gateway to recognition for ‘divided’ countries (East Germany, North Korea, and later reunified Vietnam). The admission of the People’s Republic of China to the UN, as well as support from former colonies, paved the way for this process. Influenza surveillance provides an interesting lens through which to analyze it.
It had not encountered any impenetrable ‘Iron Curtains’ in its work. It is therefore useful to observe how the need for cooperation in controlling the pandemic danger of a virus with very high mutation and spread rates was used to promote international recognition, to ease tensions and to resolve crises.
In addition to the cases already mentioned, my paper will examine other paradigmatic events: Cuba’s integration into the WHO’s influenza surveillance in the early 1970s; virological cooperation between London and Moscow after counterespionage ‘Operation FOOT’ in 1971; studies on influenza within the framework of the US-USSR Health Cooperation Agreement.
I will explore the détente of those years by examining sources about influenza surveillance from the WHO, the British National Archives, and the Wellcome Collection.
Ezequiel Sosiuk (CCTS-Maimónides), ‘International Conflicts and Technoscientific Diplomacy: The Role of the US, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Inter-American Development Bank in Argentine Fisheries Research (1974–1982)’
In the 1970s, relations between the United States and Argentina were shaped by geopolitical tensions and disputes over fishing resources. Although Argentina exported fish to the United States and received technological support for its industry, these ties deteriorated significantly following the military coup of 1976. U.S. sanctions against the military regime for human rights violations led to a breakdown in direct cooperation on fisheries research and industrial development.
This article argues that, despite such conflict, U.S. diplomacy indirectly contributed to the technoscientific development of Argentina’s fishing sector by acting through international organisations. To substantiate this claim, the study first examines how U.S. diplomacy promoted techno-commercial campaigns and scientific information networks as tools of intervention in Argentina’s trade relations. Second, it analyses the influence of the United States on the technical and financial assistance provided to Argentina by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Third, it explores the role of Argentina’s technoscientific institutions in developing knowledge that served diplomatic purposes.
Drawing primarily on diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, the analysis demonstrates that the intermediation of these international organisations was crucial in mitigating direct conflicts, thereby enabling progress in fisheries research, industrial development, and trade. This form of support—referred to here as “indirect cooperation”—allowed the United States to exert influence over Argentina’s fisheries development during a period of pronounced political estrangement.
Julia Battistuzzi Penachioni (Institute for Advanced Studies (IEA-USP) University of São Paulo), ‘Science Diplomacy and the United Nations: Governing Knowledge through Crisis and Contestation’
Since the establishment of UNESCO in 1945 and the consolidation of multilateral science initiatives in the 1970s, the United Nations has occupied a central position in shaping the norms, languages, and infrastructures of science diplomacy. From early notions of scientific humanism to the global expansion of science diplomacy across the Cold War and post-colonial periods, the UN has historically functioned not only as a platform for cooperation, but as a site where science became politically meaningful and diplomatically actionable. In an age of entangled global crises (or polycrisis), science has become both a currency of influence and a contested terrain in world affairs. Within this context, the United Nations emerges as a privileged space for observing how science and diplomacy interact under systemic stress. Drawing on a mixed-methods analysis of 364 official records from the UN General Assembly’s Fourth Committee (2010–2024), alongside interviews with diplomats and science experts, the study identifies how science is mobilised as a diplomatic resource during moments of disruption. The analysis interprets the UN as both an institutional infrastructure and an epistemic arena of global governance: a space where evidence circulates not merely as technical input, but as a language of authority through which actors negotiate legitimacy, responsibility, and sovereignty. Particular attention is given to the evolving role of metascience observatories (from early UNESCO initiatives to contemporary data-driven institutes) as entities that generate, quantify, compare, and potentially politicise knowledge itself. By situating current practices within longer-term historical developments, the paper reframes science diplomacy not as a linear instrument of cooperation, but as an adaptive and historically contingent field of contestation in which actors, especially those from the Global South, challenge and navigate epistemic asymmetries.
Science Diplomacy: Cooperation, Competition and Crisis 3
(Tue, July 14, 2:30 to 4:00pm, EICC, Floor: Level 3, Fintry Auditorium)
Organiser: Alice Naisbitt, Manchester Institute of Innovation Research – Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester
Chair: Aya Homei, University of Manchester
Lisa Yoshikawa (Hobart and William Smith Colleges), ‘Navigating the waves of interwar Pacific Rivalry: the Bishop Micronesia Expedition’
From late 1935 into mid-1936, Bernice P. Bishop Museum in the U.S. territory of Hawai’i and the semi-governmental Palau Tropical Biology Station (PTBS) in Japanese League of Nations Micronesia mandate conducted a joint survey of five Micronesian island groups. One American and six Japanese scientists partook in this Bishop Micronesia Expedition, as concurrently the Japanese government was exiting the Wilsonian world order with its January 1936 abrogation of the London Naval Treaty and listing of Great Britain as a potential enemy in their revised June 1936 National Defense Policy. The directors of the two institutions, each with their own goals, planned the Expedition creatively to realize it in politically tense times, with Bishop selecting a Japanese-American scientist as their representative and the PTBS identifying an NGO intermediary to supply Japanese scientists. On the Japanese part, led by a Tōhoku Imperial University Professor and PTBS director Hatai Shinkishi, negotiating with the government was particularly delicate as was strategizing to assist Hatai’s home institution in the domestic competition for prestige and specimens. With critical help of aboriginal and female aids, the six-month expedition resulted in 15,000 botanical, malacological, and entomological specimens and ethnographic data that contributed to studies of Pacific fauna, flora, and peoples with emphasis on their distributions and evolutions. Beyond science, the Expedition made significant social and political impacts. This paper examines the successes and limits of this joint Expedition at a time when the world was recovering out of the Great Depression and as Pacific imperialist rivalry was escalating.
Shigeo Kato (Waseda University), ‘Science Diplomacy, and Empire in East Asia: The Establishment of the Shanghai Science Institute (1931-1945)’
This presentation examines the establishment of the Shanghai Science Institute (1931–1945) in Shanghai, China, as a nominally joint Sino-Japanese research institution created under Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of its “Cultural Work in China,” later renamed the “Oriental Cultural Work.” The Institute pursued the study of pure science through departments of physics, chemistry, biology, geology, pathology (with hygiene added in 1938), pharmacology, and bacteriology.
Rather than viewing it merely as an instrument of imperial or military expansion, this study situates its conception within Japan’s interwar diplomacy, particularly the intellectual and political legacy of Gotō Shimpei, who as Foreign Minister articulated Japan’s “cultural policy toward China.” Drawing on government documents and writings by bureaucrats and scientists, it reveals how Japan’s rhetoric of international cooperation and non-intervention coexisted with ambitions to shape the sphere of influence and modernity in Asia through science. Gotō’s notion of “civilization as armament” and his proposal to use the Boxer Indemnity for scientific projects anticipated the Institute’s creation. Its emphasis on “pure science” reflected Japan’s desire to demonstrate cultural prestige while asserting symbolic leadership in East Asia. However, the Foreign Ministry’s attempt to ease Sino-Japanese tensions through such a cultural and scientific approach eventually failed, as the Institute could not overcome the growing political frictions between the two nations. The project is interpreted as a form of science diplomacy—an attempt to reconcile cooperation and control, culture and empire, within interwar Japan’s engagement with China.
Amanda DeMarco (UC San Diego) and Gao Lu (Tsinghua University), ‘Biosafety as Political Discourse and Diplomatic Symbol: China’s Encounter with International Genetic Engineering Culture in the 1970s’
Genetic engineering was a burgeoning field in the 1970s, and a unique one in terms of its ethical culture. Geneticists are the only scientists ever to voluntarily call for a discipline-wide stop to their own work. Their 1974 moratorium culminated in the 1975 Asilomar Conference on safety concerns related to recombinant DNA research. The conference and the early history of genetic engineering have been narrated as a Western affair. Based on previously unused Chinese and American archival sources, this presentation offers a new timeline of the internationalization of genetic engineering by integrating the viewpoints of Chinese scientists into the development of its ethical debates and safety regulations from 1974 to 1979. During this period, Chinese geneticists found themselves at the intersection of several remarkable scientific and political trends. Chinese science was recovering from the disaster of the Cultural Revolution. As political restrictions on science waned and China increasingly opened to foreign contact through “people-to-people diplomacy,” its scientists encountered genetic engineering as a cutting-edge field and a site of novel ethical debates—but their political experiences inclined them to view these debates with greater scepticism than their Western counterparts. By 1978, genetic engineering took on enormous significance in Sino-American science diplomacy, and for some US officials, the development of biosafety level guidelines became a symbol of China’s integration into a US-aligned world political order as well as a scientific regulatory mechanism. These trends influenced the attitudes that Chinese scientists held and the opportunities available to them as they worked to develop the field in their country.
Science Diplomacy: Cooperation, Competition and Crisis 4
(Tue, July 14, 4:15 to 5:45pm, EICC, Floor: Level 3, Fintry Auditorium)
Organiser: Alice Naisbitt, Manchester Institute of Innovation Research – Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester
Chair: Lif Lund Jaconbsen, Danish Arctic Institute
Pierre-Bruno Ruffini (University of Le Havre Normandy), ‘Science Diplomacy and the Improvement of the World Order: Does the Promise Hold True? A Discussion Based on Examples of Scientific Cooperation between Rival Countries’
Science diplomacy owes much of its appeal to its alleged ability to transform international relations for the better. The dominant narrative has thrived on the idea that scientific cooperation between rival countries could ease political tensions, contribute to conflict prevention and to peacebuilding. However, evidence supporting these optimistic propositions is rarely produced.
Numerous historical cases show that political rivalries and tensions between countries do not prevent them from cooperating on specific scientific projects. But beyond this basic observation, several questions arise. How important is the diplomatic added value attributed to international scientific cooperation? Can cross-border exchanges between researchers influence the geopolitical order? What role can scientists play in the normalization of political relations and reconciliation? To what extent can science transcend politics?
In order to address these questions in as scientific a way as possible, reflection must be anchored on facts and evidence. The proposed communication aims to engage in this path, based on an in-depth analysis of existing literature on several case studies among which the Pugwash conferences on science and world affairs, the Soviet-American cooperation in poliomyelitis vaccine trials, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the scientific exchanges between the USA and Cuba, the SESAME “synchrotron for science and for peace” and the “volcano diplomacy” with North Korea. At the stage this research has reached to date, examining these different cases leads to the following provisional results: international politics influences international scientific cooperation much more than international scientific cooperation influences international politics; however, keeping channels of dialogue open between opposing countries has a diplomatic utility, and scientific cooperation is one such channel.
Akash Kumar (Jawaharlal Nehru University), ‘Chip Wars and Strategic Alliances: Historicizing Science Diplomacy in the Semiconductor Age’
The global semiconductor sector exemplifies a profound geopolitical transition from techno-globalism towards acute techno-nationalism, catalysed by intensifying US-China strategic competition and the securitisation of critical technologies. This has precipitated the ‘Chip War’, a pervasive international contest for supremacy in the semiconductor sector. Concurrently, strategic alliances are forming as states cooperate to bolster their collective technological capabilities and security. Within this contested landscape, established paradigms of science diplomacy, emphasising open, universal collaboration, appear increasingly strained and inadequate.
This trajectory marks a departure from the open, voluntary architecture of the post-Cold War Wassenaar Arrangement towards a neo-containment era reminiscent of the Cold War’s Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM). However, this paper argues that a critical historical divergence has occurred: the shift from a strictly state-centric approach to a modern diplomacy defined by ‘corporate statecraft’, where private technology giants such as TSMC, Samsung, Intel, and NVIDIA possess independent geopolitical agency that states must negotiate with rather than simply command.
The intended research seeks to understand how these emerging techno-nationalist alliances in the semiconductor sector reconfigure the practice, principles, and function of science diplomacy. Specifically, it interrogates what the emergence and operational dynamics of frameworks like the EU Chips Act, the CHIP 4 Alliance, and Quad semiconductor initiatives reveal about the evolving nature, scope, and inherent limitations of international scientific cooperation in strategic technologies.
The intended research will employ contemporary case-study methodology, scrutinising the adaptive role of science diplomacy through rigorous analysis of state industrial policies, specific inter-state cooperative agreements, the architecture of new semiconductor alliances, and the proliferation of research security measures. By contrasting the strategic deployment of scientific engagement for national or bloc advantage with normative cooperative ideals, this analysis will elucidate how techno-nationalist imperatives are reshaping transnational scientific interactions. Furthermore, evidence suggests significant impediments to deep technology and knowledge sharing persist even within these strategic alliances due to intellectual property concerns and security vetting. This necessitates a critical reappraisal of science diplomacy, acknowledging its contingent, often competitive, function alongside its cooperative potential in an era of corporate statecraft.
Alice Naisbitt (University of Manchester), ‘The Politics of Big Science: Competition, Consensus-building and Cooperation in the Square Kilometre Array (1980s-2025)’
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) offers a compelling case study for rethinking science diplomacy as a process not only of cooperation but also of competition, negotiation, and institutional adaptation. Emerging from the radio astronomy community (bottom-up) in the late 1980s as a grassroots initiative, the SKA’s evolution over subsequent decades reveals how science diplomacy is entangled with geopolitical interests and national ambitions. Between 2002 and 2012, the contest to host the SKA’s core sites between South Africa and Australia became a protracted episode of competitive diplomacy that, while delaying the project and causing internal tension, also elevated its international profile and secured greater political and financial investment. Later, from 2006 to 2015, a second phase of competition, this time for the project’s HQ (eventually sited in Jodrell Bank, Manchester), exposed tensions within European partners and fuelled perceptions of unequal influence. The US withdrawal from the SKA in 2010, officially due to budgetary and strategic misalignment, further highlights how differing national science cultures and governance structures shape the possibilities and limits of transnational cooperation. By situating the SKA within a longer lineage of large-scale scientific collaborations, from CERN to contemporary “big science” infrastructures, and investigating the relations between Global North and Global South players in big science science diplomacy, this paper argues that moments of disruption and contestation are not exceptions but constitutive features of science diplomacy. The SKA’s history thus illuminates how crises of competition can paradoxically generate new modes of collaboration, funding, and identity within global science. The paper also interrogates the role of international organisations and platforms such as the OECD and European Commission in the transition from bottom-up scientific collaboration to intergovernmental science diplomacy. In doing so, the paper will investigate significant moments of science diplomacy throughout the SKA’s development, drawing on archival materials and interview data.
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