Science Diplomacy: a State of Mind
By Tom C. Wang, Chief International Officer of AAAS and Director of the Center for Science Diplomacy
Welcome to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Center for Science Diplomacy’s new home on Medium. We are celebrating this year (2018) the 10-year anniversary of the Center, and the new presence here strengthens and expands our efforts to foster thoughtful discussions about science diplomacy.
Since its inception, one of the main goals of the Center is to build a science diplomacy community, comprising scientists and engineers, diplomats, policy makers, students, and educators from across the science and international relations communities — with a particular focus on the practice of science diplomacy.
At its heart, science diplomacy is about thinking across boundaries.
Effective, strategic, and positive science diplomacy can only prosper through connections and partnerships between the individuals and institutions across traditional communities.
Former AAAS CEO, Alan Leshner, described science diplomacy as a partnership between scientists and diplomats. We have sought to bring these stakeholders together in a number of ways and across disciplinary and geographic divides. For example, we organize meetings like our annual science diplomacy conference (Science Diplomacy 2018 will take place in Washington, DC, on September 14) and the Neureiter Roundtable series.
In particular, our policy journal Science & Diplomacy — launched in 2012 — seeks to provide:
“A forum for rigorous thought, analysis, and insight to serve stakeholders who develop, implement, or teach all aspects of science and diplomacy… The journal strives to be a resource for foreign policy makers and analysts, scientists and research administrators, and educators and students.”
I have been astounded by the acceptance and growth of the journal, and I believe that it has served a useful role in catalyzing this more thoughtful discussion about science diplomacy. Today, we have over 5,000 monthly visitors reading scholarly articles and insightful essays on topics from U.S.-Russia engagement through medical education and U.S.-Cuba cooperation between scientific institutions to science in European Union trade policy and negotiating international nuclear fusion energy cooperation.
While we will continue to publish and enhance the journal, there are also excellent new ways of sharing and communicating through the written form that have grown since 2012 that can help us catalyze thoughtful discussions — and one of them is Medium.
Our presence on Medium seeks to further build and support the evolving science diplomacy community by making “the thinking” about science diplomacy more representative, accessible — in a more flexible in format — and more timely and sensitive to current events.
After all, the science diplomacy community has evolved over the past ten years.
A decade ago, many of the discussions about science diplomacy involved senior scientists and high-level diplomats focused on foreign policy grand strategies, track II diplomacy, and big science. These deserve continued attention. Yet there has grown also a more diverse set of important topics, individuals, especially those early or not yet started in their careers, who are self-described “science diplomats,” and institutions that describe their work as science diplomacy efforts.
The science diplomacy community has never been a monolithic entity but rather one that is open and fluid. Professional scientists and engineers can be both a part of their individual disciplinary scientific communities as well as the science diplomacy community. In the same vein, professional diplomats can be both a part of their national diplomatic communities as well as the science diplomacy community. Students, educators, business leaders, and international relations professionals should all feel equally at home in the science diplomacy community.
I see the evolution of the science diplomacy community over the past decade as a reflection of how individuals relate to their governments and societies as much as it is about the intellectual recognition and government-centered view of science diplomacy.
Increasingly, science diplomacy can be a state of mind. It is a way to relate one’s actions and beliefs to the wider world. This is different from the more conventional view of science and diplomacy as the specific intersection of two distinct fields. Let me expand on this a bit more.
The original framework for thinking about science diplomacy was articulated by AAAS and the Royal Society (London) in 2010 in terms of “science for diplomacy,” “diplomacy for science,” and “science in diplomacy.” This framework allows one to, for example, describe how a large-scale research infrastructure like CERN in Europe or SESAME, a multi-national synchrotron light source in the Middle East, demonstrates the role of diplomatic processes in advancing the conduct the physical sciences in this case (“diplomacy for science”) and the role of science cooperation in helping build and maintain relationships between (former) adversaries (“science for diplomacy”). It helps describe how contemporary priorities of many foreign ministries, like international agreements to mitigate climate change or nuclear proliferation, require the input of science and scientists (“science in diplomacy”).
This and other analytical frameworks that have been devised since are helpful in seeing the connections between supposedly very different worlds. These constructs have also been useful in categorizing and seeing the diversity and breadth of science diplomacy and providing a common language to discuss science and diplomacy.
Another lens with which to view science diplomacy is not an analytical one but is equally powerful. As I have listened to the newer voices within the science diplomacy community, there is a view of science diplomacy as more than the sum of its parts. That there is in fact no need to bridge the scientific and international relations worlds because they are more and more one.
Science and diplomacy are inextricably linked in how the world is shaped and how our societies interact in the 21st century.
Rather than focusing on the why (why should scientists and diplomats work with each other) and the what (what kinds of issues deserve the attention of both scientists and diplomats), questions about the how (how should scientists and diplomats work more closely) and the when (when do scientific advances begin to affect international relations and vice versa) provide more resonance. For individual scientists and engineers, it is a view that contributing to technical progress and innovation cannot be divorced from considerations of global impact and international relations. For individual diplomats and international relations professionals, it is a view that the myriad interactions between governments and societal actors across national boundaries are defined, shaped, affected by inventions and drivers of 21st century economies. This is what is science diplomacy as a state of mind and what is making science diplomacy more important and more powerful than ever.
How about you?
Science diplomacy as a state of mind demands new structures, activities, and policies that involve a much more diverse set of stakeholders.
We hope that through this Medium platform and the Center’s other efforts we will be able to bring more of these stakeholders (you) to the table. The posts on Medium will complement the Science & Diplomacy journal. As is outlined in our Medium submissions policy, we welcome unsolicited contributions from the community as well as those solicited posts from our network of experts.
Be inspired, be provoked, but mostly please enjoy this new offering from the AAAS Center for Science Diplomacy.
